gmeltdown

Today I had this nice opportunity to partially attend a PEPFAR partners meeting at the Safari Park Hotel. I shall not assume it is obvious that  PEPFAR  stands for (United States) President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Kenya is said to be one of the countries with the biggest allocation of PEPFAR grants, largely through USAID and CDC . Every year, billions of Kenya Shillings are handled as grants from PEPFAR within the country, so much so that it is almost a sub-economy in itself. PEPFAR, essentially the philanthropy of the American People appears so immense in the health sector that the aid should ideally overflow to the ICT sector through eHealth. For more on related development dynamics see my earlier post on who really are our genuine development partners . Over time, PEPFAR leadership may have discovered that it is not possible to practice philanthropy in the air - it has to be in someone's jurisdiction -  who needs to care that they Americans ...

A couple of days back I wrote my first article on the  the fifth annual OpenMRS implementers meeting . Immediately after posting the article I checked my meeting notes and thought I would need to write on a few more insights that appeared equally profound. Consider this a continuation of the lessons I described in the earlier post . Lesson 4. Open source is great; best with a global community One of the big debates in many developing countries is whether to adopt an Open Source policy for their e-government initiatives. It appears key decision makers have began to appreciate the benefits of such a policy. However there needs to be further understanding that a mere application of open source technologies for development of government software systems is not enough. There is need to embrace the concept of open source from a global community perspective.  A software expert or two can sit with an health care expert and develop an awesome, robust, feature-rich EMR or Pharmacy ...

Last week I had this great opportunity to be a participant at the fifth annual OpenMRS implementers meeting in Cape Town. The meeting brought together implementers, developers and the leadership of OpenMRS. The meeting was of the  'unconference' style and being relatively less experienced with OpenMRS,  I found myself simply following through the intense sessions, soaking up a lot of knowledge and insights. There were many lessons and great experiences including ideas on how to actualize the dream in my earlier post on adopting OpenMRS in Kenya . I shall try and describe three of them in this post - based on my personal synthesis. Lesson 1: Clinical Systems Not Reporting Systems During one of the evening discussions with Dr. Alvin Marcelo and a few others round a dinner table, I had this bulb light somewhere in my mind that ' Really, medical record systems need not be seen as reporting tools '. In fact, to some health care practitioners, that the medical records sys...

This week there was much buzz about the Kenya 2009 census results, the on-going contest among our mobile networks, and other developments in the Kenyan online content space. What may have passed some of us in the midst of the noise is the announcement of one category of winners for the first round of Local Content and Software Applications Grant . As earlier mentioned on this blog, the initial processes of the grant had a number of useful insights if the ICT Board's post-application survey was to go by. Applicants for the grant in the government information portal / firms category were announced on 31st August 2010. In this category, seven proposals were chosen from a list of 166 proposals by firms according to the ICT Board's  press statement . The seven proposals were Octopus Solutions Limited -  HIV and AIDS in the workplace e-Learing Course - To assist implementation of the HIV and AIDS work place policy among civil servants Infotrack Strategic Solutions Ltd -...

Today morning the Kenya ICT Board through its Tandaa Kenya newsletter  shared the results of a survey it administered on its grants application process. The survey was administered to applicants of the Local digital Content Grant a day after the proposal application deadline expired. Some highlights of the results were shared through the newsletter and also mentioned in Moses Kemibaro's blog including the following :- Barely 15% of lead contacts for applicants were female < Affirmative action needed?  77.9% of those who participated were satisfied with the grant application process (more than half of these were  very satisfied ) < Confirmation of sentiments in my earlier post 20% of those who participated had attended a  Tandaa Symposium   < More effort might be required to interest more professionals and entrepreneurs in the Kenya ICT Board activities 369 (55%) of the 667 completed applications were made on the last day. < Explan...

Many Kenyan techies did not have a very normal weekend of 17th to 18th July 2010. For the simple reason that the deadline for submitting applications for the 'tandaa' grants was the Monday following (19th July). They had to do last minute write ups and touch ups on their local content grant proposals. Of course there had been a whole month or so to prepare and submit the proposals comfortably. Needless to say our last minute action culture did not excuse even some of the most organized amongt us. According to the ICT board,   of 1,800 applicants, 667 successfully completed the application process.   Indeed it is likely that many of the 1100 or so proposals that were not completed were merely time barred. Aside from our 'nice' culture, it may not be too early to give the Kenya ICT board a pat on the back for some noticeable milestones they have achieved with the first round of the local digital content grant financed by one of Kenya's many World Bank loa...

M-KESHO, the newly launched financial services product is yet another demonstration of how Safaricom is constantly consolidating its gains in the country while exploring new business frontiers. The financial product appears to be a direct derivative of M-PESA's data warehousing essentials. There is definitely a reason Safaricom and Equity Bank are betting on M-KESHO - that of building on past successes and an understanding of the peculiar Kenyan market place. Despite the welcome innovative moves by the pair, I must say that in my humble estimation the M-KESHO product might succeed but not so much beyond Equity Banks earlier attempt at mobile banking (Eazzy 24/7).  I stand corrected but although M-PESA succedes to foster a culture of saving among the unbanked, it may be too early to stretch it in search of interest revenues through a financial credit service - which apparently is the differentiating feature of the M-KESHO product from other mobile banking products. Th...