My goodness that went by quickly. It doesn’t matter how many times people say it, feeling it first hand always drives the point home, time really is the most valuable commodity a person has. Our first year whizzed by & we’re already nearly half way through the first quarter of our second. Crazy.

This report is late, not by intention but honestly through the fact that we’ve been so busy. Well at least I have, my co-founder thinks that because he wrote one tiny little itsy bitsy piece about taming some wild west or something somewhere in Zambia now he can take a break. I jest, he wrote something really interesting about our experience in the Zambian music industry. …

I’ve previously written about Net Neutrality in Zambia & my take on the effect a lack of it has. In that piece I wrote about how “free” or “subsidised” access to certain internet services is detrimental to the Zambian internet user and Zambian internet businesses at large. I still stand by my previous thoughts but wish to make a case for the grey area. Well, not grey, just the area that makes sense really.

I believe that in general; access to commercial websites and applications should not be zero rated. This is unless for some compelling reason there is a case for all said commercial applications to be zero rated. The idea being that for fair competition one service should not be allowed to pay their way in a competitive advantage that the competition could never be able to match in terms of access. Imagine being expected to pay a fee in order to enter each store in a shopping mall, of course the one store that has no entrance fee is going to get more foot traffic. …

Apologies, this post is late but it is late with reason. The end of Q2 and start of Q3 was a busy one for us. From putting out fires with downloads not working for some customers because our unique links were timing out too quickly to trying to deal with a sudden influx of artists interested in getting their music into the Mvesesani Store whilst also making sure we got our second artist payout done on time, it’s been a busy few weeks.

So, what’s been going on? I’ll try and unpack that a little.

FYI: There’s a chance that you missed my take on Net Neutrality in Zambia; the post was pretty closely tied into what Mvesesani has been dealing with since Q2 so maybe read that too here. …

Unless you were on an online hiatus at the time you will no doubt have seen the digital protest that was a call for Net Neutrality by some of the largest players in tech across the world.

Net neutrality is a concept that is really not spoken about enough in the African context. Awareness is low & there is a lot of fuzziness around why it is even important.

tldr: Net neutrality is very important. It is actively being eroded in many African countries and the bulk of internet users in those countries don’t even know that it is in fact a thing that is happening let alone something to care about. …

Well, here we are. March came to an end over the weekend & nobody believed our Facebook announcement on April 1st that we were shutting down so I guess we need to keep on trucking. ( That was all my co-founder Jeremy’s doing by the way; I knew you guys wouldn’t fall for that. )

Where We Began

Before we get ahead of ourselves; one has to take into account the fact that some of you reading this may not have heard of us yet, so let’s cover some background. Instead of repeating any marketing speak, you can get an overview of our company here. …

I’m working on full fledged project number two. Number one kinda sorta died a silent death after launch. You see, despite the positive feedback it got; I just couldn’t keep up with working on it alone.

I tried to form a team around it from a pool of friends & previous co-workers which just didn’t work. Fact about entrepreneurship: not everyone will actually directly support your vision, also very few will actually want to take this insane journey with you.

Some things work out though; because of that project, I found my current co-founder & I couldn’t have asked for a better individual to take this journey with me. …

aka: just give the kids a freaking chance

I’m back where I started. I was born here. “Here” is Ndola, a city in Zambia that I left with my parents at age ten for a very scenic journey that became my life through Zimbabwe & South Africa.

As anyone that has travelled will tell you, experiencing different cultures, languages & surrounding is an amazing thing;it teaches a person innumerable invaluable lessons. The fact that I’ve been able to do this on the African continent makes it even better due to the fact that I have been exposed to a pretty diverse cross section of people.

I’ve lived a privileged life. Not just because I have lived in three countries, I mean hey, there are a lot of people that have lived in & visited more anyway. I am talking about something else, about opportunity, experience, exposure, and let me clarify; I’m not talking about money here. …