Hi all,

Paul Kagame won the Lifetime Achievement Award for boosting Rwanda’s ICT sector.

Business Daily: December 7, 2007: Written by Kui Kinyanjui

In what could be seen as a nod to the vibrant nature of the Kenyan ICT scene, the country scooped a record number of major awards at the recent African ICT Achievers Awards  in South Africa.

The country’s bag of five big wins, including the top ICT Business Woman and Man in Africa awards, indicate good things are happening across the ICT spectrum.

Jyoti Mukherjee, winner of the top businesswoman of the year on the continent award, has managed the growth of one of the oldest IT services companies in the country and can rightly boast of having used shrewd business  acumen and smart partnerships as some of the main reasons for her success.  

On his part, Brian Llongwe—the continent’s best ICT Business Man - has been instrumental in the country’s ICT development over the years, being perhaps most famous for pushing for a local Internet exchange point that has seen traffic to local grow exponentially.

Mwende Gatabaki scooped the Top Public sector CIO for her work at KTDA, while Computers for Schools bagged the Top Civil Society/ NGO honours.

 Also recognised were Rebecca Wanjiru of the People newspaper for her insightful journalism and 3 Mice as  runners-up in the best ICT SME category.

For his efforts in propelling his country’s ICT sector into the international arena, President Paul Kagame won the Lifetime Achievement Award.

The awards draw participation from a large proportion of the stakeholders on the continent with entries from Egypt, Tunisia, Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Mauritius, Seychelles, Mozambique, Zambia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Namibia, Malawi, Angola, Burundi, South Africa and

Tomorrow, the Kenyan version of   ICT awards will be held at the Panari Hotel in Nairobi and is hosted by the Computer Society of Kenya.  

While awards traditionally recognize the better known names in the sector, perhaps the time has come for an award ceremony that recognizes the real innovators in the industry; the young Kenyan who developed a full-length interactive computer game, the less publicized, but equally relevant workers in the open source world, to name just a few.