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All Posts By jacob

Lord of the Memes

Posted on 1 min read

The world has changed. I see it in the Instagram. I feel it in Facebook. I smell it on Twitter. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.  

It began with the sharing of pictures, and soon, memes became the fastest way to communicate without writing too much. Out of the memes came the memefied people who have always made our lives happy. We are in meme revolution.

My question; Who is the Memelord of Africa? I bet the answer would be President Uhuru Kenyatta, and this has been documented widely here.

The president who recently quit social media still continues to trend online as his memes dominate. He is not only the president of Kenya, but also president of the meme republic.

Perhaps, men were deceived, and now we have one meme to rule them all!

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Making E-Commerce Work

Posted on 2 min read

I need an Ecommerce website where I can sell my products that I often market via WhatsApp and Instagram.

This is the question I have encountered many times from people who want to sell their products online, and want to set up an ecommerce website. The easiest solution is to design for them a website, train them on how to add products, set up a payment method and get them started. However, this method rarely works.

Setting up a website, integrating payments and training someone on how to use it is an expensive task. Yet, for most starters, they are not looking forward to selling tons of goods for a start, and the labor-intensive work of adding and managing stock is not something they enjoy.

Besides, the biggest hurdle comes to delivery. Getting products delivered to a buyer in Kenya is hard, or extremely expensive. There are few logistics firms that can deliver conveniently and at an affordable cost for small volumes of goods.

A Different Approach

To solve all those problems, a Kenyan startup, Mzizzi, is offering to scratch the itch. With an ecommerce platform that is now being used by over 1000 merchants in Kenya, Mzizzi is offering a platform that comes a ready-made e-commerce website, payment integration and delivery of products. This means that if you sign up on their platform, you only need to send them your catalogue, and they will get the website up and running, manage your stocks, and do the delivery of the products.

With this approach, small merchants can effectively sell online without having to worry about how heir goods will be delivered. They also have someone to respond to queries and monitor stocks so that they can focus more on business development. Mzizi does not charge any set up fee, but they make money from commissions charged on every sale made.

We hope to see the platform transforming e-commerce in Kenya.

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One Person Can Change alter the Course of History

Posted on 2 min read

In the late 90s, South Africa was facing a HIV/AIDS crisis with almost a quarter of all black South Africans living with the virus. The hope for these people was in affordable ARVs which were never close to being affordable as they cost about $1000 per month. Most people could not afford these drugs and relied on the government to subsidize and make them affordable.

The government of South Africa risked bankrupting its health budget, and thus passed a law allowing the minister of health to override patent laws in a health emergency. This would help them to get cheap, generic AIDS drugs to deal with the crisis.

But shortly after, 39 pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against the government of South Africa. They argued that South Arica was trying to violate their patents. The case would have serious implications for the developing world as far as access to affordable healthcare was concerned. To most people, these were greedy global corporations trying to protect their profits as making to harder for the people who needed the drugs most to acquire them.

In 2001, the 39 companies unanimously dropped the lawsuit. The case was closed.

How did this happen?

The answer lies majorly in one man. Dr Tadataka Yamada had just been appointed the chairman of research and development at Glaxo SmithKline, one of the leading pharmaceuticals. When he learnt about the case, he was horrified, and decided to do something about it.

He talked to his staff and realized that many opposed the lawsuit. He talked to the board members and persuaded them to back down. He said Glaxo SmithKline should not make life saving drugs, then prevent people accessing them. 

His action set forth a chain of events that led to the lawsuit being dropped, as well as several other changes that saw Glaxo SmithKline being actively involved in campaigning for global health challenges solutions and dedicating more resources towards diseases ravaging the developing and least developed countries.

One person altered the course of history.

What do you need to change at your workplace?

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Kenyans and Locusts Have Something in Common

Posted on 2 min read

Locusts are just grasshoppers. When left on their own, they live a quiet and peaceful life munching on grass. They are barely visible, save for when you walk on grass where they are and they hop around. They threaten no one and do no harm.

But once they come into contact with a crowd of fellow locusts, a form of ‘herd’ mentality kicks in. They alter both their appearance and character. They develop powerful wings and an insatiable hunger, and group together into swarms that can destroy any vegetation that is on their way. They can fly for a distance of 100 km in a day, creating total destruction on their path.

The trigger for this transformation is usually a drought followed by rapid vegetation growth. This is the secret signal that initiates the mutation and exponential reproduction. When this happens, even human beings get scared.

But this behavior is not all that unique. When I think of the Kenyan voters (and non-Kenyans should not dare point fingers), I realize that we are in the same class with the grasshoppers.

Kenyans are full of wisdom. They know exactly what is wrong with the government. They know who is stealing from them. They know who causes unemployment and all the bad things that exist in the country.

All this wisdom lasts until the year of the general elections, where every community decides who they are going to vote for. All of a sudden, the wisdom fizzles out and a herd mentality kicks in. They throw away wisdom and vote for their fellow tribesman who has exploited them for years. Tribes move together like swarms of locusts that devour every good idea that ever existed.

After the election, they go back to their superior wisdom and can tell exactly what is wrong with the government.

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Can SACCOs Save Kenyans from Predatory Digital Lending Apps?

Posted on 3 min read

Kenya is a first of many, but it is possibly the SACCO movement that stands tallest, although little talked about. In terms of savings, Kenya has the largest SACCO movement in Africa, and SACCOs have been the preferred source of credit for many people. But just like with any thriving industry, disruptions are always around the corner and while SACCOs depended on a good savings history to loan people money, a new form of lending that depends more on the reputation of the borrower more than their saving history has taken a big share of the market. The term for it is digital loans.

Growth of digital Lending in Kenya

With the advent of mobile phones and increased internet penetration, borrowing of money has been shifting from the traditional channels to electronic channels. Financial institutions started digitizing their services and started taking advantage of the digital economy. One of those steps was to make financial transactions faster and lending more efficient. However, it was not until 7 years ago that digital lending became popular with the launch of M-Shwari (a partnership between Safaricom’s Mpesa and Commercial Bank of Africa, CBA). Today, there are over 50 digital lending apps in Kenya that are churning out loans worth millions of shillings every day.

The lending apps exploit social information and apply various artificial intelligence tools to determine creditworthiness. This involves factors such as your mobile phone airtime usage, the amount of money you transact every month, your likes, location, Facebook friends and even how you save people in your phonebook. Algorithms are able to analyze the data and determine how much you are worth with some astounding levels of accuracy. This is possibly why there are less defaulters of mobile money loans than there are for shopkeepers, banks and loans from friends and family as shown in the figure below.

Figure 1:1 Proportion of defaulters by loan type, 2019 (%). Source: Central Bank of Kenya, 2019 FinAccess Household Survey.

Impact of Digital Loans

There has been a lot of talk on financial inclusion afforded by these mobile apps. Many people who could never afford credit are now able to get cash to boost their businesses, pay school fees, or for whatever purpose. Banking on the high penetration of mobile money in Kenya, it is now faster and easier than ever to get a credit facility and have the money sent directly to your phone. The number of people who use these apps keeps growing.

But on the flipside, there is the dark side of the mobile-based loans. While most of these digital platforms do not charge interest, they have what is called set-up fee for every loan. While most of them are very short term in nature, the effective ‘interest’ charged by these apps comes to about 90% p.a for the conservative ones like M-Shwari and KCB-MPESA, and up to 180% p.a for Tala and Branch. These rates make the poor people who need these loans to use the most expensive form of credit that anyone can get. In comparison, SACCO loans charge an average of 12% per year while banks are limited to not more than 4% above Central Bank of Kenya lending rate, which would translate to 13% per year.

How SACCOs can intervene

For ages, SACCOs have occupied a prime spot when it comes to lending. However, they are not the preferred go-to shop when one urgently needs a loan of KES 500, 1000, or 15,000. This is the market that has been left to digital lending apps. Yet, it is the members of these SACCOs who go ahead to borrow from these apps. SACCOs would be better positioned to offer these micro loans, as they already have members’ savings as security, and their interest rates would be more affordable. This would make the credit more affordable, non-predatory and low risk.

Unfortunately, most SACCOs in Kenya are small in nature, and lack the financial muscle to deploy systems that can allow them to lend to their members using mobile apps. There already exists systems and mobile apps that can allow for SACCOs to do this, but the adoption of these systems is still low for the majority of the SACCOs. Many also have a high staff turnover rate, and depend on semi trained personnel to run the operations. This makes it even harder for these SACCO to intervene. Perhaps, the government and umbrella bodies should focus on how to get an effective system for the SACCOs which will help them face the Silicon Valley based lenders.

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Procrastination

Posted on 3 min read

I had planned to write this last year but two. I know it is never too late. There is always time to do it in the future.

When I was in school, we knew that the semester was always concluded in three nights; the night before CAT 1, the night before CAT 2, and the night before the main exam. One only needed to spend time lazing around the whole semester, then get into action the last day. The strategy always worked, sometimes.

And that is the life of a procrastinator. They say that there is a lot of time to enjoy wasting. There is always time for anything. Have you found any living person who ran out of time and the clock stopped ticking for them? If you are in Africa, there is a lot of time. When God created time, he made a lot of it!

The procrastinator makes new year resolutions and waits till December to start implementing them.

We are many

There is one of us who was told to come up with a register of all the procrastinators. He is yet to get started. But we are many, very many. We are the people who enjoy the benefits of procrastination.

Benefits

If you can do it in two hours just before the deadline, why do it in six hours one week before? There is nothing that saves tune than procrastination.

Even wisdom is usually a function of age. Better delay doing it until as late as possible, for then you will be older, hence wiser.

Procrastination is natural. Natural is good. Let’s save the planet.

It has saved me a lot if things. I have always procrastinated on taking driving classes for the last 71 years. Now they have come up with self-driving cars, saving me the hairs I would have lost taking those useless classes.

The Perfectionist

There is one class of procrastinators who go through hell on earth.

A procrastinator who is a perfectionist will face death by a thousand cuts. Late to start, and even when they start, they will restart again to meet certain standards. As they suffer from a paralysis of analysis, even the non-perfectionist procrastinator will be a million steps ahead. Time is not good for perfectionists.

The Ugly of Procrastination

While procrastination has its cure in deadlines, where the procrastinator spends sleepless days and nights just before the deadline, there is one thing that all procrastinators live to regret. In absence of deadlines or external factors to motivate them, many of life tasks can be ignored forever.

This is why many tasks are never done. Many degrees are not studied. Businesses are not started. Important self-development goals are ignored. At the end of the decade, one will look back and cry at the missed opportunities, but it will be too late.

When we realize that time is short and the clock is always ticking, we will understand that procrastination is worse than an armed robber.

In the words of Denis Waitley, ‘Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.’

Disclaimer

The only thing a procrastinator will never procrastinate about is on procrastination.

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Are Kenyan Businesses Using .KE Domain Names?

Posted on 3 min read

According to the Communications Authority of Kenya, Kenya has some of the highest internet and mobile phones penetration rates in Africa. This has been touted as one of the factors that have led to growth of the digital economy in Kenya, and widespread growth of tech startups all over the country. The statistics are something to celebrate about as this places Kenya on a favourable spot as vibrant economy. However, there is one key indicator that tells a different story. This is the adoption of Kenya’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) .ke, which is the official domain name used in Kenya.

Domain Names

Domain names refer to names such as .com, .org, .net, .uk, and .de. These are domain names that denote an internet address, or even used in email addresses. The two letter domain names such as .uk, .rw and .ss are reserved for countries, with the mentioned one being for the United Kingdom, Rwanda and South Sudan respectively. These domains are useful since they help identify businesses in the countries where they operate. Using one also helps websites to rank highly in search engine (Google) results, increasing the chances of one finding clients or getting businesses online.

.KE is the domain name for Kenya, which is the online identity that shows some affiliation to Kenya. .KE domain names are offered by KeNIC through various domain registrars, and there are various variations of the same as shown below:

Nigeria and South Africa

In a recent stakeholders forum held in August 2019, KeNIC CEO Mr Joel Karubiu said that their target is to have one million .ke domain names by the year 2030. This number looks astounding, but it is a very small number when you consider that with almost a similar population to Kenya, South Africa already has 1.2 million registered .za domains (the Country code for South Africa). Nigeria follows with about 142,000 .ng domains that were registered by July 2019. As of today, Kenya has about 92,000 registered .ke domain names.

Why are there less than 100,000 .ke domain names yet we see more and more people doing business online? There are several factors that can explain that, but it is evident that Kenya is punching below its weight when it comes to the number of .ke domain names registered. One of the reason for this is that a number of people still prefer to use other domain names such as .com and .org, since it is claimed that they have an international appeal. Kenyan domain names therefore find themselves unfavorably competing with international domain names, resulting in lower adoption.

Cost

On the other hand, the cost of .ke domain names has been said to be prohibitive, especially when it comes to small businesses. At KES 1200 per year (on average), the cost of maintaining a .ke name ends up being higher than a .com domain (average 1000 per year), thus lacking a competitive advantage when it comes to price. This makes the .ke brand lose to other top domain names, and this is a trend that can be reversed by addressing the price.

The other thing that affects the uptake of .ke domain names is the fact that many people and businesses still do not have websites. For many small and micro enterprises, there lacks a value proposition for having websites or branded emails. This could be due to a feeling that a website may not benefit their business, lack of knowledge on how to effectively use a website, or the prohibitive costs associated with initial set up of a website. The fact that many also acquire domain names but do not renew them possible implies that they never find value in the websites they create. This shows that there is a need for creating awareness on how the digital economy works, and offering affordable services that will attract even the smallest of businesses to get online.

Conclusion

For Kenya to thrive as a regional ICT hub, we need to see more and more stakeholders come together to ensure that the barriers to uptake of .ke domains are dealt with. This will involve KeNIC pricing the domain names favorably and creating awareness on the need for the same. Other stakeholder should also ensure that the costs associated with having websites are broken, by offering websites at affordable prices.

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Give Us This Year Our Annual Bread

Posted on 3 min read

Why all this fuss about a New Year? Is it even real?

As Thomas Mann once said, “Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.”

Why then should it matter?

Time is a Measure of Change

Time is real, and seasons too. We cannot ignore a factor that affects every aspect of our lives.

Time is not a social construct, even though nature seems not to react to changes in years or decades. Even nature is subject to time.

Time is a measure of change, and thus a new year is measure of change that represents more than 1% of all your life (unless if you live to be more than 100). Some people imagine time to be a long thread on a reel which spins slowly but consistently, or a winch where we are all attached by an imaginary rope and it is always winding up without our consent. Perhaps, spinning faster for women than for men (G.K Chesterton?).

In real sense, even the winch is subject to time. We are all changing, and we need to ensure that we change for the better. Even though we may be wasting away in our bodies, we must ensure that our active faculties are changing for the better. This requires effort.

Whether we make resolutions or not, a new year will come and go. We had better make good use of the year, as we definitely do not have an infinite number of years here on earth.

The Future

If only we knew what the next season in life holds! This could be reason why we wish for time travel now more than ever!

Prophets, seers, oracles, or even their corporate version, the futurists, will try to tell you of what will happen in future. Nevertheless, no matter whom we consult, we cannot get an accurate prediction of the future, and that is why we make resolutions to guide us in the unknown. We have plans, manifestos and roadmaps to ensure that we are moving in a certain direction.

New Year Goals

The world is diverse by design, and our diversity needs to work for our good. We should be united by our purpose in life and how we make sense of the world around us. As we make plans and goals, the most important thing is to ensure that we uphold values that show concern for every person. One will be hoping to make it to grade one, another one to college, another person to graduate, another one to get a job, another one to get a promotion. All these are equally important, and none is superior to another.

As some people make plans on how to make it to the list of top something under something, others will be thinking of some more basic things.

It is said that a healthy man has 1000 dreams, while a sick man has only one. As you make great resolutions, there is someone who only wants to stay alive in the new year. As you plan for great business expansion, there are businesses whose only hope is to stay afloat next year. As you look forward to a promotion at work, there is that one person whose goal is strength to survive a toxic work place until they find the next job. Our dreams are diverse.

With all this diversity, I hope that we shall be considerate of one another. We shall respect both the poor and the rich. We shall work hard to move forward not just as individuals, but as a community and society. Whether we live or die, let it count positively. Whether we have success or failure, let the general outcome be a better society. Let us practice contentment and gratitude, for as long as we have food on our table, clothing on our body, and a shelter on our head, we have more than most people on earth.

Give us this year our annual bread, and forgive us our trespasses.

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The Election

Posted on 2 min read

The election was just a year away. The government had done nothing in the previous four years, just like any other government out there, but they needed the votes. They needed to take care of the upcoming brand of woke politicians who were gaining popularity. It was time to act. The election was to be won by both hook and crook. More crook than hook.

The party had a strategy. It was the same old strategy that is used by parties since the birth of democracy. Manipulate the sheep. The voters were just but sheep who could be manipulated easily. The promising thing was unlike the early days of democracy, now there were ready weapons of mass manipulation.

The strategy was laid down.

The campaign machine was cranked up.

There was no mercy, no restrain, no boundaries, no sacred.

Strategy #1: Outrage

The people were already outraged by the actions and the inactions of the government. There was still a room for more outrage, and the party decided to act. The plan was to create more outrage until people were tired of outrage. It did not matter the source or the object of the outrage, as long as people were made very outraged.

The outrage initially drew people’s attention, but soon they got an outrage fatigue. They no longer got outraged by the things that mattered because their outrage had been depleted. This gave the government more room to steal and make outrageous decisions with no meaningful feedback from the citizens. The country had been immunized.

Strategy #2: Manipulation

This was an easy strategy, for digital disruption has brought forth many weapons of mass manipulation. All that they needed to do was to use them. They hired bloggers and propagandists who would work on specific topics each day to manipulate public opinion and influence news cycles.

They painted the opposition any color they wanted. They made it hard to believe anything because for every truth that was said, they had an alternative truth. Those who were gullible enough, the majority, believed. Those who did not believe got outraged, sending them to strategy #1.

They created fake news which was better than the true news. They had videos and audio recordings from deep fakes, making their opponents to be on the defensive side all the time.

Strategy #3: Controversy

What brings in more media coverage than controversy? And what makes people more popular than being controversial? With this in mind, the government’s foot soldiers went ahead to create controversy. There were controversies on everything. So much were the controversies that nobody got to know what the real issues were.

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The Invention of Insurance

Posted on 2 min read

Many moons ago, there never used to be health insurance. Not that people never fell sick; it’s just that they had other ways of dealing with health problems. They were never guaranteed of getting money for the medical bills, but they still lived happily then.

The System

The secret to their existence lay in a closely-knit society. When one fell sick, the community would come together and contribute money for the medical bill. Fundraising would be made and the bills would be paid by all means.

The more popular you were in the society, the more the people would show up with their pockets when you needed them. This approach forced everyone to be an active member of the community. Evil people lacked this social capital which they could exploit when in need. So did the thieves, witches, outcasts and all the people who were not in good books with their neighbours. Everybody strived to stick to the straight and narrow path because no one knew when disaster would strike.

In general, the society thrived fairly well. There were a few cases where the bills were too high, or the call came during a famine when people had very limited resources.  Those were some unfortunate moments, but they were just an exception, not the norm.

Cheese Moved

But then, things began to change. Urbanization quickly began to take root. People began to live in places where they did not know their neighbours. Social ties were broken and a new system that favoured individualism began to gain acceptance. The old system could not work.

Solution

That is when Mr Mwangi, elsewhere known as Mr Smith, began to analyse the challenges presented by the new development and came up with a solution. Instead of people coming together to contribute money when one person fell ill, he could collect a little amount of money from each person every month, then go ahead and pay any medical bill that showed up. Brilliant idea!

New Social Order

People loved this new approach. No longer would they need to pretend to be good to their neighbour. No longer would one need to attend useless social events to maintain good social credit. Most importantly, they would not have to fear the risk of falling sick during the dry season. That is how insurance was born. Most people of means were happy with the new system. The rest had no option but once the bigwigs jumped ship. The old system died.

Monetizing

But Mr Mwangi/Smith also needed to make money. He realized that he does not have to pay all the claims presented. He came up with terms and conditions to govern the health insurance industry.

Up to date, we are still trying to understand those terms and conditions.

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