Nairobi’s Information and Communication Technology incubation laboratory (Nailab) situated at Bishop Magua Centre on Ngong road recently hosted the third Tandaa Symposium whose main aim was to explore how technology can help Kenya and Africa to address some of its pressing challenges. The theme of the event, ‘Technology for Social Change’ attracted a number of speakers from the government, Health, Finance, and Technology sectors.
Paul Kukubo, CEO, the Kenya ICT Board said: “The Kenya ICT Board is a big believer in technological change with its incubators being small forums and the birth of a new constitution created a social transmission instrument for the future of technology”. He further challenged the audience to be exposed and look at grand technological innovations rather than be money centric.

The Ihub manager, Jessica Colaco, gave a presentation on a regional competition that seeks to harness the power of African Software developers in East Africa and pool together digital technology with the aim of improving the lives of ordinary people. Google’s Bernadette Ndege, a geographic specialist, focused on the need for Non – governmental organizations (NGOs) and the developers to collaborate so that they can build systems which will provide a communication platform.

“An estimated half of all individuals in remote areas of the world will have mobile phones by 2012, which is the greatest technological tool that is used to reach further into the developing countries,  Says Caroline Mbindyo of AMREF. She further explains mobile phone innovation was born out of necessity which pushed AMREF to come up with the mHealth application system. This system aims at educating and creating awareness for example providing Anti- retroviral Treatment guidelines, remote data collection like the Impilo module which provides disease surveillance and monitoring, and the community based health mobile information system (CB-HMIS) which collects information for decision making.

The use of ICT in fundraising all depends on the fundraising organization’s presence on the internet. According to Joseph Wang’endo of Bloodlink Foundation and Kenya Association of Fundraising Professionals, online fundraising cannot exist in a vacuum; it needs an online environment to be successful. Microfinance as a tool that enables the poor to pool themselves, and microfinance businesses can only be profitable if they employ IT and automation to manage the large number of small customers. Kamal Budhabhatti, the CEO of Craft Silicon, providers of Banks, Microfinance and Electronic payment solutions, says that microfinance is moving into nanofinance in the near future.

Director General of Vision 2030 challenged Kenyans to work towards innovating for themselves and not rely on outside innovation. He gave an example of the MKESHO which is truly Kenyan, and ICT is the platform.