HeHe is Serious Business!
Young World Inventors Profiles African Startups
Africa’s youth are creating a story of collaborative invention, and Young World Inventors, a media production group based in Boston, documents that story by filming startup companies as they learn to survive and grow in East Africa. Soon YWI will return to produce dozens of stories on African startups, to inspire more invention. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa, and 50% of its people are <25 years old.
How many times have you tried to reach a customer service rep who can to solve your product or service problem, only to be lost on hold or caught in a never-ending loop of automated menus? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send direct feedback via texting?
In January, 2011, the young founders of Rwanda’s HeHe, Ltd. proposed a mobile texting system that does just that. HeHe’s software allows customers to provide feedback to companies and government agencies via text message and have them recorded for review on a dedicated website. As they made their pitch to Rwandatel, a major mobile provider, Young World Inventors founder Diane Hendrix was in the room with her video camera.
It was a big deal for HeHe’s founders, who had launched the company just five months earlier after a six week summer boot camp for mobile programming in Kigali. Their idea was a novel one for Rwanda, where customers often have no opportunity to give companies any feedback at all. The team suggested that using mobile surveys to simplify customer feedback would improve Rwandatel’s response to customer needs. For other reasons, Rwandatel went out of business some months later, leaving HeHe in the lurch without their first major client. But the team soldiered on and YWI’s video, HeHe is Serious Business, gives a brief summary of the fortunes of this spunky startup.
Three years after its launch, HeHe Ltd. (HeHe means “where” in Kinyarwandan; pronounced hay-hay) pushes forward with its vision to bring the ‘Information Age’ to East Africa, passing along what they have learned to enterprising Rwandan youth. In June, HeHe’s CEO Clarisse Iribagiza and her team held an evening workshop for Kigali high schoolers on how to program mobile phones, just as MIT students had taught the team three years before, and they have gone on to give countless IT and entrepreneurship workshops to Rwandan youth.
Since internet access is so limited in Rwanda, HeHe’s software links simple cell phones to the web via SMS. CEO Clarisse Iribagiza says, “Our aim is to be information giants…We want to provide ordinary people with relevant information…[on] services they may need.” So far, Hehe has allowed mobile subscribers to give feedback to Rwandatel, they’ve given university students a way to access their grades remotely, and they’ve created online public opinion surveys for Rwanda’s government ICT agency.
HeHe Ltd. was born of a cross-cultural educational experience. Clarisse Iribagiza, Diane Ukwishaka, Amiri Mugarura, and Richard Mujymabere were students at Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) when they attended the Accelerating Information Technology Innovation program (AITI) of Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The AITI program was the 6 week summer bootcamp that resulted in HeHe’s formation and, subsequently, in the winning of its first two high profile Rwandan clients: Rwandatel and the Nike Foundation. The HeHe team was so grateful for what they had learned that they became AITI-Rwanda and offered a new class to KIST students a few months later.
“The AITI experience literally changed my life,” Iribagiza told her first KIST students, “and I hope this class will be as useful to you.” By the next summer, twice as many students applied for the AITI.mit.edu class, and more MIT students came over to accommodate, while the HeHe team became TAs for the bootcamp that launched them.
After losing their first major client in Rwandatel, Girl Hub (sponsored by NIKE) in Rwanda, asked HeHe for an SMS system to survey teenage girls’ reactions to Ni Nyampinga (“the Perfect Lady”), a media project run by aspiring female journalists. Ni Nyampinga produces a magazine and a weekly radio show, and HeHe’s system allowed girls to voice their reactions directly on their mobile phones. To the surprise of all involved, more than 10,000 texts flooded the network from teenaged girls in villages and farms across Rwanda.
Since 2011 HeHe’s team has given voice to thousands of teenage girls and has become profitable with contracts worth $20M RF (over $30,000 US), much of which they have reinvested to grow the company.
The members of HeHe, Ltd. have become Rwandan “rock stars” for a generation of youth who see cyber entrepreneurship as a route to a hopeful future. This fall, with Kickstarter support, YWI will revisit the trials and triumphs of HeHe, Ltd., as they seek to become unlimited.
Up Next from YWI:
Stay tuned for a piece on Tanzanian Bernard Kiwia, who after being inspired by a Guatemalan inventor, went home and designed a windmill, a drill press, a hacksaw, a cell phone charger and a juice blender, all powered by an ordinary bicycle. And in Kenya, Kenya Stoves founder Payan ole MoiYoi has invented a smokeless stove to save trees and reduce deaths from indoor air pollution. Kenyan mothers and children commonly suffer from lung disease — the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes per day — when living in the smoke of traditional stoves.
Since invention is an engine of prosperity, and since stories empower people to solve problems they can identify in their own communities, YWI is building a robust community of storytellers, mentors, and funders to inspire and support young inventors. The goal is to seed more invention and share ideas and resources globally. See stories on youtube: youngworldinventors | Like us on Facebook: YWI | Connect on twitter: @ynginventors
