Business
Nairobi – the “Silicon Savannah” an African city with a rapidly growing tech industry
In 2014, M-Farm partnered with M-Pesa to process mobile payments on the back end as it sends out pricing information and updates to its users.
It is one of the most developed cities in Africa
Nairobi is a fledgling when compared with urban giants like New York City or Los Angeles, but within Africa alone, it’s one of the fastest-developing cities. In economic terms, Nairobi is Africa’s seventh leading city, according to a recent report in PwC‘s series on “Cities of Opportunity.” And a 2012 study by the EIU, “Hot Spots: Benchmarking Global City Competitiveness,” projected that Nairobi will become one of the 40 fastest-growing urban economies in the world by 2016, due to its highly skilled workforce and comparatively low cost of living.
In fact, Kwamboka and her co-founder Jamila Abass, who studied in Kenya and Morocco, respectively, both hold bachelor’s degrees [Kwamboka in business information technology, and Abass in computer science]. “Really, I do feel supported as a woman in tech in Nairobi,” Kwamboka adds.
Still, to better compete in the global landscape, the city needs to develop its physical infrastructure: Transportation in Nairobi is an infamous headache, for which the city ranked in the bottom 10 out of the total 120 cities surveyed by the EIU.
With digital startups like M-Farm, though – which was recently singled out by U.S. President Barack Obama as inspiring “hope” for the country, during his July trip to Nairobi for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit – Kenya is fast emerging as a business hub within the global marketplace.
An original version of this article was published on Inc.
