Business
Update: Construction of Konza Techno City to transform Kenya into major tech hub
Artistic Impression of the Konza Techno City. IMAGE/File
Kenya gave the world two groundbreaking innovations in technology: M-Pesa, a mobile banking system, and Ushahidi, a platform for crowdsourcing information during disasters. It is now taking its technological talents to new heights.
The east African nation of Kenya has just started construction on a 5,000-acres piece of land in Konza, about 60 km south of Nairobi, to turn the savannah area into “the most modern city in Africa”.
Using the same company that designed Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in New York City, SHoP Architects, Kenyan authorities want to transform Nairobi’s Konza City into Africa’s technology hub, dubbed Silicon Savannah, similar to California’s Silicon Valley.
The designers told the UK’s Financial Times that “the scale of the project compares with creating another Manhattan, central London or inner-city Beijing.”
The Konza techno city project is the brainchild of Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s permanent secretary in the ministry of information and communications.
“Rather than echo a smattering of tech parks and business centers starting up on the continent,” says the Financial Times, “Kenya envisions a broader city-from-scratch to bring research universities, industry and government together, along the lines of Silicon Valley”.
The Wired magazine reported that Konza’s development “plan is extremely ambitious” and is “not just seen as a way of attracting investment from international tech companies and inspiring domestic entrepreneurs, but also as a way of reducing the corruption that has been endemic in the nation for several decades.”
