Manufacture hardware for complete innovation picture

A worker at the Numerical Machining Complex in 2011. This agency should be able to produce enough hardware. FILE 

Innovated and inspired in Africa, made in China.” The continent may soon start seeing labels of this kind by local entrepreneurs who have chosen to take the road less travelled to build businesses and provide services based on hardware.

The push to diversify from what has been pure software play for the Silicon Savannah has been met with teething problems. But they should be easy to navigate if we are to truly empower entrepreneurs to have the full development ecosystem domiciled in Kenya, with the key benefits being growth of competence and job creation.

The advantage is that most times the innovations are well thought through.

We are not yet at the level where we can build the smaller components that form the baseline of our innovations and must bring these parts in and add value to them, creating an end product that is more than the sum of its parts.

However, there seems to be a massive disconnect at government agencies such as the Kenya Revenue Authority whose position on value extraction needs a review.

The duty applied on these components almost seems arbitrarily pulled out of thin air and are ridiculous by every measure, juxtaposed against the revenue potential from a tax perspective that the new products or services will bring. In some instances, it is double the value of the “raw materials” being shipped in.

There are two ways around this, with the first and easiest option being that of removing all duty on electrical and such components coming in as “raw materials” to be used in the creation of valuable products or service.

The second is more long-term, requiring both political goodwill and private sector support. It is the scaling cup of the Numerical Machining Complex to get to the level where manufacturing individual components is possible.

Knowledge transfer

This will see us manage and control the entire pipeline resulting in cheaper overall cost of production if sufficient volume, which I believe is possible, is pushed.

My interactions in the academia have convinced me knowledge that exists and a knowledge transfer programme can be initiated where we feel that there are gaps.

There is a domino effect on the seemingly one-off inconvenience on both time and cost that permeates to other facets of running a hardware-based business such as after-sales service.

At the end of it all, we need to build, ship and maintain products but the status quo has put a damper on everything.