Kenya's tech investments mean more eyes are on present turmoil

The popular press in the U.S. has given a high volume of coverage to the recent political and ethnic unrest in Kenya (Over 300 dead, 100,000 misplaced, with conflict mostly along ethnic divides)–more coverage than other African conflicts have garnered. And if you consider the level of technology uptake in Kenya, it leads to an interesting conclusion: It’s Kenya’s wide-scale use of mobile phones that brought the country’s plight so much attention.

Partly due to wide-scale news reporting via mobile phones (mobileactive.org did an article eight days before the election), Jendayi Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs flew to Nairobi on Friday night to meet with Kenya’s President Kibaki as well as opposition leader Raila Odinga. Africanews.com has an entire web section dedicated to mobile citizen journalism leading up to the Kenya elections, and Media Focus On Africa has a lot to do with this synergy of citizen journalism with web, mobile and video technology.

One reason Kenya’s had more technology uptake than other African nations is precisely because it hasn’t had the years of instability and unrest that some of its neighbors have.

Other reasons are probably the fact that Kenya’s capital city houses a very large concentration of international organizations and that Kenya has a thriving tourist industry. (When I visited Kenya in the Spring of 2006, I had full access to the internet and mobile coverage and could keep in easy contact with friends and family back in the U.S.)

You could also make the argument that these two industries have created a stable economy, and helped generate a middle class big enough to create significant demand for this technology.

Historically, African governments have been able to suppress reports of violence and unrest and dispute findings made by the UN and other international organizations. The result can be conflicting numbers and unreliable news gathering and reporting processes. In Kenya, however, the government wasn’t able to suppress unrest after the Dec. 30 elections. With local reporters contesting the election results on the Internet, riots broke out within 15 minutes of the results being announced.

I’ve personally seen the affect of Kenya’s technology: The head of a small school I visited in the Kibera slums (a one-mile square shanty town housing a million people that is also one of the major hot spots of unrest in Kenya right now) emailed the group I was with to let us know that he was fine but that the situation was rapidly deteriorating. This kind of immediate interaction just wouldn’t be possible in many African nations.

It’s clearly a vicious cycle, though: For a country to get extensive investment in technology infrastructure, it needs political stability. For political stability, mass communicationis essential. But you need investments in order to build the infrastructure for that communication, so that takes us back to square one.

For now, Kenya remains a country rapidly expanding in mobile technology. According to a Reuters report, mobile phones in Kenya went from 1 million to 8 million in six years thanks to the networks built by Celtel and Safaricom, who built a network that covers 80 percent of Kenyans. And Safaricom Kenya, owned partly by Vodafone, has launched M-Pesa, the first program in the world to provide a mobile banking system.

It’ll be interesting to see how the current disruptions affect the country’s technological development going forward.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”

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