Individuals wishing to benefit from m:lab East Africa’s mobile applications developer training have until 9th January 2012 to submit their applications. The call for applications which was opened early December 2011 is expected to attract young people from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan. Successful applicants will go through a four month intensive training course on mobile applications development and mobile entrepreneurship. The course covers both technology and business aspects of mobile entrepreneurship.

Successful applicants will form the third wave of trainees undergoing this capacity building effort to enhance East Africa’s ability to remain competitive on the mobile innovations front. Actual classroom training for the first wave of trainees ended in August 2011 while classroom training for the second wave of training will end in January 2012. Completing trainees are expected to subsequently pursue their mobile applications projects on a part time or full time basis for a post-training incubation period of 6 months. m:lab East Africa supports past trainees on business development, fundraising and marketing among other business support areas as post-training incubation. Indeed m:lab East Africa trainees are expected present some of the region’s best new efforts in mobile entrepreneurship in 2012.

Mr. Kenneth Marete, who was among students in the first wave of training advices applicants for this course to “be open minded, be ready to be entrepreneurs, and to revisit programming languages such as Java”. Mr. Marete has a BSC in Computer Science from Makerere University. Through the m:lab East Africa training, Mr. Marete came up with more than three mobile applications including a nutrition app - providing personalised nutrition advice, an sms backup app service - for backing up crucial and important SMSes on a remote server, and an Android Applications Programmable Interface (API) to enable users share resources on one click of a button. Mr. Marete also co-founded a company called Glosoft Group with which he intends to actualise his entrepreneurship ambitions.