The past several days have been a combination of hectic and relaxing with Friday and Saturday in Nairobi and Sunday and Monday on Safari in Samburu National Reserve. The days previous to those I spent in Nyeri talk to different people about WishVast and the other with the Mashavu team in Githiru at their kiosk.
On Friday a group of us which included members from the Mashavu team and essential design team met with Kamau Gachigi the director of the Fablab at the University of Nairobi. We discussed all of the HESE projects with Dr.Gachigi and he helped put me in touch with two students at the university that had developed projects using USSD and SMS. One of their projects won an MIT competition and was used to help farmers diagnose problems with their plants. The two students were interested in working on the project and we will be meeting with them again when we go back to Nairobi in a few days.
On Saturday I met with Tonee Ndungu from the NaiLab to talk about potential partners and developers of the system. Tonee put us in touch with Tosh from the iHub and we were able to meet with him essentially at the same time as we met with Tonee. After talking with Tosh about the system for about 30 minutes he suggested that we set up a time for developers and people at the iHub sometime in the next week.
The Safari at Samburu National Reserve was a great experience and we got to see a good number of animals including antelope, dik diks, elephants, a leopard, and a ton of monkeys and baboons. Camping out in the middle of nowhere was great and the sky was incredible at night time. Out there in the reserve we were able to see an incredible number of stars and several shooting stars zoom across the sky.
The past two days have been fantastic experiences. With relatively only a tiny idea of what I needed to know and even where to started, I ended the two days having talked with many people in Nyeri about the project.
On Monday I spent a large time walking around the Nyeri area talking with different women about their different groups that they belong to, which are used for anything from merry-go-round lending, to investing, and used as welfare when a member looses a close family member, etc. Most of these groups had great internal trust and that trust results in the ability to loan money to the members. A very interesting point that they expressed was that these groups didn't work with other groups to do investments. These unwillingness stemmed from the fact that they didn't know one another and that they wanted to know them or talk with them face-to-face before they did anything with them.
These conversations were great and helped to elaborate on information I had been told beforehand. The only way to truly understand how these types of informal lending situations happen is to go out there and ask the people who are doing it, so I think opportunity to do that was a worth while one.
Blog Post 2 - Nairobi meetings and greatings
An early morning ride to Nairobi began
one of the more productive days here in Kenya. The day was full of
discussion with the Mashavu team, Solar Dryer team, and myself
championing WishVast. Overall a productive day that was not only
productive, but spurred new questions and ideas for each team.
Our main purpose for traveling to
Nairobi was to meet with Andrew and Wangali who are entrepreneurs and
have been working with the HESE projects for several years at this
point.
My discussion with Andrew and Wangali
started with the basic concept of WishVast and quickly made
tangential connections to other interesting topics like chamas, how
facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn are used, and also thinking how we
create a lifestyle around the WishVast concept.
To cap off the day in Nairobi we ate at
a crazy compound perhaps called the diamond market which had about
ten restaurants and a courtyard with about thirty waiters and menus
at each table. We made the mistake of letting Khanjan order for most
of the people at the table and ended up with some pretty spicy Indian
cuisine that was about three times the amount of food we should have
gotten.
Blog Post 1 - Jambo!
Thursday was our first real work day
and was the first day I was able to begin working with the CYEC
children and staff. This was an intriguing dynamic since the WishVast
project has no clear CYEC student partners and is a slightly
difficult concept to explain to small children.
With a little bit of luck I managed to
find one student and one staff member form the CYEC who were familiar
with the WishVast project. The names of the two were Duncan, the
student, and Chris, CYEC staff member. Speaking with them I was able
to digest better how Kenyans utilize their cellphones and how a
system like this would need to be implemented taking into
consideration that their are several niche products that utilize SMS
and web platforms to transmit information.
A fantastic example of how a WishVast
type system is being utilized already is the Kenyan Agricultural
Information Network. The system allows for farmers to receive
information about current market prices of their commodities and also
connect with buyers and sellers of those goods.
Working with Chris and Duncan to
explore these other systems was extremely helpful and wouldn't really
have been possible without speaking directly to people who us these
types of systems regularly. Even understanding how mobile phones are
utilized was murky and hasn't totally become clear to me.
The big take away items from these
meetings are that I need to think like a Kenyan if I want to fully
understand how I can make a system like WishVast successful. Second,
I need to reassess the model we have and try to simplify it so that
it is similar to other already popular systems.
Planning ahead for the rest of our trip
Melanie, a PhD student, and a few others will be traveling to Nairobi
again to meet with potential partners and hopefully find some local
developers for the WishVast project. Hopefully we can execute the
plan, but it's going to take some time to do the things we've never
done especially in a foreign country with language and cultural
barriers.
