During the last four years ago, from the time I wrote my article as a snapshot of the digital money landscape in Kenya, a lot has changed and yet some things have remained the same.

Recently, Nendo CEO Mark Kaigwa at the UxP Nairobi conference gave the audience some insight into what developers, product managers and company executives should consider when building mobile apps for the emerging markets like Kenya. He talked of one fintech company whose downloads were high but customer retention was low because a significant number of their customers were constantly installing and uninstalling the mobile application…

“30% of the banking jobs will disappear.”

That should not raise eyebrows, if banks have, say, ten more years to adjust to it. But they don’t, not even in Kenya.

I was watching a David Cokker, a lecturer of Finance at the University of Westminster, London as he was being interviewed on Al Jazeera’s Counting the Cost program. David got me thinking.

Banking is the business of taking and securing valuable deposits and offering credit services to those who need “liquidity”. Most other services that banks and bankers make money from are through these two actions. …

Before you get into the flow, you may need to read the other articles in this series, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Let us put the ideas we have discussed previously here to offer context to what we are going to elaborate as a way forward.

We know that technology is the growth in craftsmanship. From history, we know that it is not a preserve of a particular community, nation, continent or any particular geographic region. The major influences to technological innovation are necessity and the environment.

From regional and then global socio-interactions, socio-cultural and socio-economic domination in…

I recently read this article by Lewis Ngugi, an exceptional UX consultant in Kenya. It is about his process and while commenting on it, I thought it would be a good idea to document the process I used in my last 2 projects.

Client Centred Work

Many articles have emphasised that the best case scenario is when a client is involved in a project, every step of the way. My addition to the emphasis is that the work I do for a client is more of a relationship than a task. This creates empathy on the developer side in understanding the client’s pain…

Africa and the Technology Transfer
Africa has a lot of history of different African nations and kingdoms coming into contact with European traders, missionaries and opportunists. For the sake of clarity, we will focus on the outcomes of the contact and the result of these interactions from 10,000 feet above.

If you have not read Part 1 and Part 2, please do so and then come back.

By the mid 20th Century, traditional iron production in Africa had almost completely disappeared due to the arrival of cheaper iron from Europe. The colonised lands became a new market especially within the…

Let us ask the question again? How will Africa develop technology that removes the barriers that hinder social and economic development?

If you have not read Part 1, please do then come back.

Technological development through the ages brought and still brings social advancement. Tools are the one invention of Man that reveals his journey in technology and his dealings with his environment. Anthropologists and historians have divided the World into a number of technological “tools” ages. The Stone age, bronze and iron age.

During these ages, a lot of communicated World history revolves around the Europe, the Mediterranean region…

Preamble
Technology is growth in craftsmanship. It is defined as the acquisition of skills and “technics” of practical subjects that require manufacture.

From the beginning, Man has used technological inventions and innovations to meet the needs of life. These are food, clothing and shelter. Technology is, in itself, a means and an aid to production. Technology leads to surplus in production. We store the surplus or dispose it, hopefully at a “fair” exchange for another commodity or money. There has to be a differential between the disposer and the consumer for the exchange to happen. But if his neighbour has…

Again?!!

Medium app and notification icons had changed. This was August and I was yet to finish my website, afroshok.com. It seems it was just the other day that the “neon 3D” icon had been presented, with a soothing article to calm us opinionated designers down.

I had made the decision to write as much as I could and share some of my writings on Medium, and the rest on my site. I had written before, when I was at the iHub, about “chips”, “clouds” and news around the tech-enabled community then in Kenya. My first serious opinion piece was…