Monthly Archives: March 2011

Award Season Part Trois

Following on part II

The Anzisha Prize for young Africans (15-20 yrs) who have solved a problem /challenges in their community (via @kenyanpundit)

The Android App competition. in the X.com dev. challenge participants can win prizes of up to $25,000. D/L is 14 May.

The 2nd eLearning Africa Photo Competition runs through April 21.

Facebook’s first hire in Africa – will be a growth manager in Nigeria (via @bellanaija)

The 2011 Freedom to Create Prize main prize and imprisoned artist prize is open to 15 July (via @Kwani)

Various jobs at Google East Africa .

iHub Mentorship program. D/L is 6 April.

Partial scholarships available to attend the 4th Global Forum on Innovation & Entrepreneurship. D/L is April 1

Kenya Government Science & Technology scholarships (29) to study in China, for undergraduates and postgraduates in engineering, medicine, computer science, and pharmacy. D/L April 7.

Connected Kenya Vision 2030 ICT awards from the Kenya ICT Board.

Maisha Filmlab with free screenwriting directing camera sound and production workshops in East Africa. (via @mkaigwa)

Mass Challenge a $1 million start up competition (via @egm_photo)

Panos Eastern Africa media fellowships. D/ L April 6.

Strathmore University’s Mobile Academy . D/L 31 March

Winners of the Nokia Idea storm will have their ideas developed into phone apps. D/L is April 14.

TEDGlobal 2011 takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland in July 2011. It moves from traditional Oxford this and 75 places available, and D/L is April 4.

Africa Youth Trust Young Women Leaders funded by the UN Women Governance and Gender Programme. D/L April 15.

Modern careers: Someone got hired via twitter

Sports: The Watamu Triathlon takes place April 9 & 10 at the Kenya coast. D/L April 4.


Photo is from a blog tracking a Cairo to Cape 12,000 kilometre bicycle expedition (equivalent to 4 Tour de Frances in 4 months). It’s now complete after a tough stint in Kenya.

Motoring Moment: Thika Road, Commuter Trains

Discovering Thika road: Took a road trip up Thika Road to hang with the Kuweni Serious crew last weekend. Chinese contractors are converting the road into a super highway and the dramatic transformation (follow Thika Road blog ) has plenty of soil hills, deep valleys, closed roads, missing roundabouts etc. It was a fun trip, but as it is said every day, don’t drive on Thika Road if you’re a stranger, or it’s dark, or the road is wet.

The journey is made more dangerous by Matatu’s and some road regulars who make their way anywhere they see fit – by driving in the wrong land, making U-turns in traffic, over-lapping patient motorists etc.

The highway defies belief, and when it’s done it will probably need other roads to be closed off or expanded. e.g Outer Ring Road and a bypass to Mombasa Road. The large volumes of traffic need to enter and exit cleanly and without delay otherwise there will be more situations like the one at Riverside Drive and (current) Museum Hill Roundabout where traffic waiting to enter these smaller roads spills over backwards onto the large highway causing more jams.

The on-going rains make it more difficult and with all the un-drained water, some cars are probably washed daily only to end up covered in red mud. For users of public vehicles, the rains mean added journey times and increased fares on Matauts.

More Commuter Trains: However there is some relief for commuters who live along Thika Road since Rift Valley Railways (RVR) has upped the number of daily consumer trains in Nairobi from 8 to 18 which collectively serve Kahawa, Dandora, Embakasi, Ruiru, Kikuyu, and Kitengela/Athi River

The addition of the early morning trains has slashed some commuters’ fares by almost 2/3 e.g. some Embakasi residents who take the train paying Kshs 30/- per trip compared to the previous Kshs 70 – 100 per trip by Matatu. Also, the train is more dependable, and takes 25 minutes to complete the journey, unlike driving in a car or matatu, which usually takes over an hour in ‘rush hour’.

Ultimately having dependable train travel may lessen the burden on the roads (fewer Vitz card) and while there is talk of having a train to Jomo Kenyatta Airport, it is not a government priority or feasible in the short to medium term.

Commuter trains aside, the reason that the concessionaire, Egypt’s Citadel (operating as Kenya Uganda Railway Holdings) invested was for cargo and the train transport while significantly cheaper than the Kshs 120,000 ($1,500) to transport a container by lorry from Mombasa to Nairobi ($3,600 for Mombasa to Kampala) needs to emphasize this aspect and demonstrate more reliability to business owners. This will relieve the burden on the roads.

Oil Shipment: As the international price of oil is expected to go up owing to instability in the Middle East, in Kenya there is a small dispute between oil companies led by Shell and Kenol pitted against NOCK – National Oil Corporation (NOCK), a Kenya government state agency that imported the latest shipment of diesel on behalf of all the oil companies. After some postponed arrival delays, and tales of missing phantom ships [MT Volga, MT Adden, MT Ratna Sheruti, MT Ratan Namrata], which resulted in a partial cancelation by Shell, a shipment finally arrived on March 1.

However that did not put the matter to rest since NOCK has announced that they would bill the oil companies using the higher March prices instead of the February price. And where is the diesel? NOCK says it has all been sold, but the other oil companies say they have not bought it, and won’t be buying it owing to the higher price being demanded.

Fuel Relief: Some slight relief for motorists comes from Kenol who have discounted the price of petrol and diesel by 2 shillings on Tuesdays and Fridays – so petrol today costs about Kshs 100 (~$5.30/gallon) under Deal Poa promotion, and for holders of Kenol corporate fuel cards, they enjoy a 2 shilling discount every day, which doubles to Kshs 4 on Tuesday and Friday

In Car Beverage: My current in-car beverage is Nestea iced tea that you can make in a supermarket. How? (i) Buy a Kshs 20 Nestea satchet (ii) Buy a one litre bottled water for Kshs 40 – 60 (any brand) (iii) pour the sachet contents in the bottle & shake (iv) you have a litre of iced tea for less than $1.

Award Season Part Deux

This is a continuation of a series highlighting some open awards, that may be about to close in the next few weeks.

The Acumen Fund East Africa Fellows Program aimed at entrepreneurs or people working on ground breaking programs with social impact in east Africa and will receive training in leadership , and is modeled around an executive MBA. D/L is 15 April for launch in July 2011

The Africagrowth Institute 2011 SMME Awards that recognizes small, medium or micro enterprise (SMME)companies that are growing sustainably and contributing to economic growth. D/L is 30 June

(For Women): The Anita Borg Agent Award for ladies who demonstrate use of technology to change lives. Sponsored by Google, it has prizes of $5,000 in travel reimbursement to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. D/L is May 2

(For Women): The annual Business Daily Top 40 Women Under 40 award series in Kenya that recognizes women achievers in the world of business. D/L is 10 April.

The Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards that recognize outstanding journalists, editors, blogs, and other media that feature coverage of the African businesses scene. D/L is 27 March.

(For Writers): The Golden Baobab Prize for Literature is a Pan-African literary award. Details here.

The Nestle Prize that recognizes projects in the fields of nutrition, clean water, or rural development that create shared value. D/L is 30 June.

The Shuttleworth Foundation for people ready to commit to undertake social change through innovation. They review applications in May 2011 for September intake.

(For Journalists): The United Nations journalism fellows program Dag Hammarskjöld Scholarship Fund program aimed at developing country journalists with an interest in international affairs and winners get to travel to and report on the United Nations from New York. D/L is 6 April.

(For Writers): The World Bank Essay competition open to people aged 18 – 25 to write about youth migration. Details here but the deadline is tomorrow – 17 March.

EDIT: PIVOT 25 competition for developers in June 2011 with prize money of up to $75,000. Deadline is April 15.

The Nairobi Stock Exchange young investors challenge whose registration period is on-going through April.

Any other awards that can be highlighted here?

Cheque Truncation

There’s an ongoing exercise within the Kenyan banking fraternity (KBA) to standardize cheques issued in the country under a process known as cheque truncation – and this will enable transfer of electronic images of customer cheques replacing the current process of physical of exchange of cheques by different banks at a central clearing house

Odd and large size cheque will be withdrawn between March and May 2011 and replaced by standard size cheques that are 7” by 4” inches in size and with enhanced security features by June 1.

The new system may halve the time spent in cheque clearing, which is currently about four (4) working days for most people. This has made cheques uniquely unpopular for small people, not just because of the cost of operating a bank account, but because of the cumbersome week-long time delay in the age of instant money transfers such as M-pesa.

Why are cheques good? They are easy to use, offer verifiable proof, security, and credit. While some buyers wants to stretch payment, and sellers wants immediate payment, both buyers and sellers have been tripped up by the four day cheque clearing cycle, sometimes to the benefit of bank – and a reduction in the cheque cycle could mean more income for them. Of Equity Bank’s income in 2010, Kshs 1.1 billion ($14 million) was from temporary overdrafts/un-cleared effects – which means you wrote a cheque, didn’t have cash in account, but Equity cleared (did not bounce) the cheque and charged a fee for the service.

Going Postal

in a nice way

Spent a couple of days at the post office trying to trace a large parcel for the Kuweni Serious program.

It took several trips to the post office over about two weeks, e-mails to the sender, checking with the US postal service tracking system, and finally after a third visit to the local post office tracking department it was eventually traced in a cage where it had sat for almost a month.

The parcel had been addressed properly with name and physical address of the recipient, but the American sender had not written the Kenyan post office box number – and this omission triggered this long process to locate the package at Posta

Once it was found and tagged, with a (newly printed)ticket stub this paper, the carton and a sample item removed from the carton after it was opened for inspection, were probably handled by about a dozen employees, in the space of a few feet who all inspected & counted the goods, assessed them for taxation, and then signed off on the movement from one station to the next.

It also entailed another trip to a bank down an adjacent street to pay taxes which are arbitrarily calculated – based on the invoice (if enclosed), shipping slip or the estimated insurance value declared on the package by the shipper.

Still the staff were helpful courteous and honest. They are largely older people working in a system that does not seem to appreciate initiative. In another company, there would be a way to knock off lost or suspense items – and if a carton sat in a wrong office for a month, with a physical address on it, someone would use Google, and make a call to try and alert the proper recipient. And the office could probably run with a quarter of the staff

Still the post office has so much potential to move packages from overseas, around the country etc. With computers you can only exchange words, images, sound, picture’s but to get actual goods & equipment, you need physical shipments. The 500 post offices around the country handle about 200,000 parcel items a quarter and moved 31.7 million letters in 2009 (via CCK stats ) – and while there are competitors like DHL, UPS and local variants are faster, but much more expensive.

In short, the Post Office works when it’s open (the international parcels department is closed for lunch at 12:30 to 2 PM) and if your packages are properly addressed in a way they understand. But if you have a mule (not the drug kind, but known passenger able to fly with your goods) have them carry it for you, and pay the extra baggage cost, especially if its a valuable or fragile item.