This past January the  Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) presented the draft of their National Broadband Strategy for public review. The strategy outlines a comprehensive plan for bringing communications services and ICT business development to all of Kenya. Expected to cost US$ 2.4 billion, 70% is budgeted for national infrastructure while the remainder will be [...]

I participated in a very informative event this week in Washington DC where a researcher was sharing his experience on “Weather-Index based Crop Insurance for Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia”. As I listened to the discussion as an agricultural information specialist, my concern was what is the role of mobile technologies in this? According to the [...]

There is no doubt that the current surge in mobile innovations for agricultural development is defying the normal progressive growth of agricultural technologies over the past decades. For centuries, innovations in agricultural technologies have been progressively slow. The emergent of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their innovative use to support agricultural extension and advisory services [...]

The following is a guest post by Billy Jack from Georgetown University’s Economics Department and Tavneet Suri from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. New data from the fourth round of a survey of Kenyan households confirm what every visitor to this East African nation knows: the spread of mobile technology and its adoption by broad [...]

M-Farm is an award winning mobile solution for agribusinesses and farmers currently being piloted in Kenya. It is an SMS and web-based application focused on improving weaknesses in the value chain. It is a transparency tool for Kenyan farmers to get information pertaining to the retail price of their products, buy their farm inputs directly [...]

Kenya’s mobile service provider Safaricom will double its broadband capacity next week, opening a new battlefront in the data market just after Airtel rolled out its 3G network in February. “The network will run at 42 Mega bits per second (mbps) from the current 21mbs and it will be the fastest network in the whole [...]

Technology giant Google has announced Sh28 million (R2.5-million) in funding for Nairobi’s tech innovation centre, iHub, and the Kenya Education Network (KENET). Google has announced R2.5-million in funding for Nairobi’s tech innovation centre iHub (image: iHub) iHub plans to use the funding from the search giant to expand its infrastructure, while KENET says it will [...]

As written in this blog before, there has been continued innovation in the mobile banking sector in developing countries this year. But, as surmised by CGAP, there is a greater need to find a balance of products that meet the specific needs of those who traditionally have not  had  access to formal financial services. While [...]

A new survey published on Tuesday reveals that as telecom jobs in Africa booms, the continent still lacks skilled workers, calling on universities and governments to do more to boost the output of telecom and IT specialists in Africa. The 2012 Telecommunications Survey, carried out by global Amrop executive search group member, Landelahni Business Leaders, [...]

Kenya’s leading telecom provider Safaricom announced on Tuesday that it was upgrading its mobile money platform M-PESA to a newer version, hoping to make doing financial transactions wirelessly a bit easier. According to the company, the new system “will enable users to make instant payments for corporate services such as insurance. “The migration, to be [...]