Mobile Web East Africa (MWEA) kicked off Wednesday morning at Nairobi's Southern Sun Hotel. MWEA is part of the Mobile Web Africa conferences, which are a form of round-table discussions that bring mobile content developers in Africa together.

Paul Kukubo, the CEO of Kenya's ICT Board opened up this years meet up by advocating for some of the projects that the Board is undertaking this year. This includes the planned Chipuka software developer certification program, being carried out in partnership with Carnegie Melon University (CMU). Kukubo said that Kenya was lucky to get CMU into the partnership.  CMU is a highly accredited institution in the global software arena. "We can't doubt Carnegie Melon University, they have written a code that takes  rockets to the moon and that drives electric cars," he says.

However, a section of developers are still not convinced on whether a certification program is needed for developers in the country.

Kukubo said that the country was lucky to have a large number of brilliant developers in the region.  "We have sharp developers in the country, but they aren't a majority. Currently, the developers have been quite good at handling small projects, running the whole software development life cycle, from building the application, to deployment and support." He said, adding that the approach was not going to work with large software. "Large software projects are developed by teams, not by single developers. That's the best practice," he said.

He further added that brilliant developers are not enough to work on the large software projects, hence the need to find a way to identify developers who are good enough for such projects. The Chipuka software certification will solve this.

Kukubo also urged entrepreneurs to fund developers who have been facing a funding short fall in the country. "Developers are doing well, what is required now is the business community to make investments in them," he said. Through Tandaa grants, the ICT Board is currently part of a group of 100 content developers at Strathmore Business School, where 40 of them will later receive content application grants.

The ICT Board also plans to introduce a national incubation centre later this year, where "25 brilliant start ups will be incubated every year.

Kukubo asked entrepreneurs not to short change developers. It has been observed that some entrepreneurs launch competing services after they understand the business processes of the very projects they fund.

Dr Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information and Communication also had his own views on developers in Kenya. Ndemo said that venture capitalists were cautious about investing in developers in the country due to high cases of misappropriation of funds. "The big problem here is lack of values. If I was president, everyone would go for compulsory one year military training," said the PS.

Ndemo argued that compared to countries like Singapore and South Korea, majority of people in the country lack the discipline needed to run businesses. He noted that the country's culture expect people to be corrupt.

To control the situation on how developers were spending venture capitalist funds, Ndemo said that the Government was looking into the possibility of an accounting firm that could do book keeping or start ups, on behalf of the VCs.

The PS also remarked that Kenyans unsavory reputation for copying other's business ideas had also emerged in the IT sector, with lots of financial apps while sectors like commodities exchange, transport and infrastructure were barely exploited. He challenged local software development houses to come up with scalable apps for other sectors, which would be replicable all round Africa. This would help drive the growth of the ICT sector in the country, which currently contributes to 25 per cent of the economic growth.