[kictanet] Connected Summit highly sponsored by International tech giants

[Adam Nelson]

I never really understand this line of critique.

Kenya is only the 32nd largest country in the world, the 84th largest
economy, ranks 121st in ease of doing business and does not facilitate easy
access to work permits for skilled foreigners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/kenya/

Why would one expect Kenyan companies to be able to compete with the
international players with these statistics?

People always talk about how there are local companies that are at this
level, but I don't see any Kenyan ICT companies with thousands of engineers
and multi-billion dollar market caps like the ones in this post.  Who else
is going to do large government contracts at a globally competitive calibre?

Don't get me wrong, I know exactly how wasteful these contracts can be and
New York is no stranger to bloated IT implementations.  Nonetheless, these
big projects can't just be done by a 3 year old 10 person shop either.  The
solution to that problem is to hire better best of breed companies like
ThoughtWorks to train up high quality teams of government employees so that
each department has their own internal capacity, not to simply focus on
building up more of a local contractor base.

-Adam

---
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About Adam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson


On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Rebecca Wanjiku
<rebeccawanjiku at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
>  This week, the talk is about Connected Kenya Summit. There are more than
> 400 private and public sector folks to discuss ways to improve Kenya. The
> summit has cost more than Ksh 50 million.
> The ICT Board may not have raised the whole amount, maybe less than sh 8
> million. The majority of the money is from sponsors. Look at the link on
> sponsors page of Connected Kenya, what do you see?
> These are mostly international companies? How do they make money?
> Read more......
>
>
> http://www.wanjiku.co.ke/2013/05/kenyas-connected-summit-heavily-funded-by-international-tech-giants/
>
>
>
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