August 2011 - KICTANet

ISOC Meet up 19.08 2011 (11.00 am - 1pm) at the i Hub
by Barrack Otieno 18 Aug '11

18 Aug '11

Dear members, Just a reminder on the above mentioned meeting, remote participation will be available via WEBEX and Skype for those who will not be able to make it physically to the meeting venue. Let us keep time, the agenda will be as follows: 11.00 - 11 .30 : - Introduction by members present 11.30 - 11.40: - Guest Speaker Christine Sägesser Baethge Internet Society Chapter Formations Manager ( Remotely) 11.40 - 12.00 :- Q and A 12.00 - 12: 30 Discussion on the Chapter Formation Process 12:30 - 13:00 Q and A, the way forwad Kind Regards -- Barrack O. Otieno +254721325277 +254-20-2498789 Skype: barrack.otieno

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Nigeria launches two new satellites into space http://aptantech.com/?p=200
by Michael Ouma 18 Aug '11

18 Aug '11

FYI: Nigeria launches two new satellites into space http://aptantech.com/?p=200 Michael Ouma Journalist Kenya Tel:+254-725-537823 "Do not go where the path may lead, but go instead where there is no path and leave a trail," - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Warigia Bowman shared an album with you.
by Warigia Bowman 17 Aug '11

17 Aug '11

My trip to the coast was for pleasure, not business, so I only visited one pasha. It had not yet opened, but had promise. Watamu is generally great, for those who have not been. https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=warigia&target=ALBUM&id=564191…

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ICT Board Pashas and Digital Villages Coast
by Warigia Bowman 17 Aug '11

17 Aug '11

Hi all According to my source documents there are three pashas on the coast. I was on the coast visiting my husband's mother, and also celebrating our 7th wedding anniversary. I managed to visit 1 of the three pashas. I conducted a complete and interesting interview with the pasha owner, and also visited his site, which was actually in Watamu, not Malindi. Photos to follow. Thanks to Kwame Shiroya and Victor Gathara for helping me run down the pashas. I did not visit any tier 2 centers, because I was with my children, and finding the tier 2 centers can be a wild goose chase. Pashas 1.Paul Onyango Owino, Akaloleni nector pasha center, Kilifi, Kaloleni, Kaloleni 2. Walad Ahmed Walaad, Tasah Heel Shopping Center, Kilifi, Malindi, Malindi, (Actually Watamu) (VISITED) 3. Eric wesonga simiyu, No name, Mombasa, Likoni, Mombasa Town Safaricom Tier 1 No centers Safaricom Tier 2 Ngarua Transporters Mombasa, Malindi mombasa, Malindi wel up logistics msa. migadini mombasa, changamwe One thing that I learned is that Kilifi county is HUGE, and very poor. Luckily, there has been enough rain lately, so people are not starving, but they are living in deep rural conditions. If anyone on this list lives on the coast, and wants to take a look at the remaining pashas or DVs, let me know. warigia(a)gmail.com

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Why Social Impact Investing Is A Crock
by Agosta Liko 17 Aug '11

17 Aug '11

http://www.fastcompany.com/1761606/why-social-impact-investing-is-a-crock Why Social Impact Investing Is A Crock By Anya Kamenetz <http://www.fastcompany.com/user/105230> Over the last decade the world of do-gooding has seemingly been taken over by MBAs. Social entrepreneurship, a field encompassing both mission-driven businesses and entrepreneurial nonprofits, professes to bring the efficiency, rigor, and cold, hard metrics of business to the most important causes on the planet. Does it really? Not so much, says Dean Karlan, author of the recent book *More Than Good Intentions*. "The social entrepreneurship world is in a weird spot, to be honest with you. It’s a world full of rhetoric about impact investing, yet I have very rarely seen an investor actually take that seriously. When you look at the actual analysis it lacks rigor." He distinguishes between the type of scientific research done by his lab, *Innovations for Poverty Action * [1], with trials complete with control groups, and the type of data collection done in the vast majority of the nonprofit world, which is nothing more than a "monitoring exercise." "Take microcredit. What they do is they track how many borrowers, what their repayment was, and whether the businesses grew over time. That is not telling you your impact at all because you don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t lend." Though he doesn't single them out by name, Karlan's critique points to behemoths such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest grantmaking institution in the U.S. "A lot of money comes from groups that have used quantitative tools in the dotcom world, and they push toward collecting data that doesn’t necessarily answer the question. Now you’ve burdened your organization with data collection so you can feel rigorous." At the same time, he says, the cost of doing the kind of randomized, controlled impact studies that his organization conducts can often be prohibitive, particularly for social enterprises that are tacking for growth and "sustainability" (meaning profitability). "Put on your investor hat. If you want to put a million dollars into a business, are you going to put 33% of that into an impact study? That blows up your return. As a result, I’ve seen very few businesses that are being pushed forward as social entrepreneurship that undergo simultaneous rigorous evaluation." Still, Karlan does see some bright spots on the horizon as his work and that of Esther Duflo's Poverty Action Lab--which also does scientific assessments of poverty interventions--grows in popular acclaim. "There’s serious excitement and enthusiasm about impact evaulation among the biggies like Gates, Hewlett, Ford, the World Bank. It’s not unanimous--we still get pushback and some are more enthused than others. But many are starting to use impact evaluation to figure out how we should spend the next $100 billion over the next 10 years." *Read more about Esther Duflo's assessment of social impact in this month's Life in Beta column [2]*.

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Dot Africa Debate
by Norman Boinett 17 Aug '11

17 Aug '11

A new blog entry has been added to ACP11 ICT Strategy F Hi everyone! Please find the call for comments on the 2nd version of the '.Africa' debate. The debate is being hosted at http://discuss.diplomacy.edu/dotafrica. The full story describing this initiative is available at http://www.diplomacy.edu/ig/newsitem.asp?id=2515. The online debate should be of interest to us, especially those of us in Africa. All inputs and contributors' names will be included in a paper which will be presented during the 6th IGF in Nairobi. Regards, Norman -- *“And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute, more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new order of things; for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies,and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new. This lukewarmness partly stems from fear of their adversaries . . . and partly from the skepticism of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have actually had personal experience of them.” * (From Chapter VI of Niccoló Machiavelli,The Prince. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa,translators. Oxford University Press revised edition, 1984, p. 21.)

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Bitange for President -- Back to the Business of Good Governance..
by S.Murigi Muraya 16 Aug '11

16 Aug '11

Can we continue picking Dr. Ndemo's intelligence & convictions until the end of the month? How can we more promptly use the billions returning (annually) to the Treasury.. to provide social goods and services? If we have a budget of KES 1 Trillion should at least KES 15 Billion (1.5%) not be set apart for ICT? ++++++++++++++++

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Article on time.com on Africas Silcon Savannah and OpenData
by Twahir Mohamed 16 Aug '11

16 Aug '11

Dear Listers , Have an Interesting read and positive ON kenyan ICT industry on the Global online media http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2080702,00.html -- Twahir

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A suspected flaw in MPesa
by robert yawe 15 Aug '11

15 Aug '11

Hi, I had an interesting experience with MPesa on Saturday when I received a payment received notification with a deadline message as would happen with an unregistered recipient yet I am a registered user. My registered account did not register the transaction at all which was interesting. Being a law abiding citizen and client I called customer service, the person I spoke to as usual went off script to ask me all kinds of irrelevant questions such as do I have a dual SIM phone, was I expecting money from the person and when was my last transaction all of which are questions that do not assist in resolving my question. I sometimes wonder why I actual take the trouble yet all I should have done was gone to an mpesa agent and withdrew the money. As in the case of funds wrongly credited to a bank account I would have paid back the amount at my own rate. The error in this case was equivalent to me picking cash from the floor of the supermarket. I noted that the transaction has been reversed this morning still and the message still assumes that I am an unregistered recipient. It is my hope that Safaricom's technical team have identified and sealed the hole as its exploitation will open them up to money laundering charges. Robert Yawe KAY System Technologies Ltd Phoenix House, 6th Floor P O Box 55806 Nairobi, 00200 Kenya Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696

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Re: [kictanet] Bitange for President? Extended due to Public Demand-internet price?
by Walubengo J 15 Aug '11

15 Aug '11

@ Dennis, good question, how low, is low prices? put differently, what is AFFORDABLE internet prices? Shouldn't selling 5MB @ 5/- per day be considered affordable? A better question might be, of what use is 5MB in day - considering that a 5-10paged research paper is typically 2-5MBs gone, a 2minutes youtube clip is probably 20MBs gone and general news reading and searching may require 15-20MB per day. My own monthly bandwidth consumption on mobile internet (tampered down due to price constraints) is about 1,000MB per month - and this is on lower side because i do get "free" internet at work. So assuming a typical mwananchi buying bandwidth daily (ka-dogo economy) @ 5/= per day per 5MB; they would end up paying 1,000Ksh per month (for some not so meaningful access - read chat, fb, but not for research, programming, and other high level tasks that require real bandwidth). So anyway is 1,000Ksh per month affordable? To Bob C, MJ, the PS and possibly everyone on this list - ofcourse it is. But to the average Kenyan (majority) whose income is around Ksh 8,000/= per month? it definitely is not affordable because it represents a huge chunk (1/8) of his salary. ITU defines Affordability as ratio of the monthly BROADBAND internet costs against average national incomes. In Kenya this ratio is prohibitive and needs to be addressed holistically rather than through one-sided marketing tactics. walu. --- On Sat, 8/13/11, Dennis Kioko <dmbuvi(a)gmail.com> wrote: From: Dennis Kioko <dmbuvi(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [kictanet] Bitange for President? Extended due to Public Demand-internet price? To: "Walubengo J" <jwalu(a)yahoo.com> Cc: kictanet(a)lists.kictanet.or.ke Date: Saturday, August 13, 2011, 8:47 PM Hi, From Safaricom, there are daily bundles of 5 MB , 10 MB and 25 MB from at Ksh 5, Ksh 8 and Ksh 20 in addition to the rates shown at this page, http://www.kenyandroid.com/component/k2/item/167-kenyan-data-bundle-price-c… . If this is not low from Mobile data providers, then how else can we define low. As to fixed internet prices, maybe we need to have an idea of how much costs they incur in terms of way leaves, them we can define if their charges are too high. However, the result of the govt lowering the cost of NoFBI is yet to be felt.

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