Opinion and Analysis
People go about their work at the iHub offices in Nairobi. For every
scandal we have, there are at least 10,000 young people who want to make
an honest living. PHOTO | FILE
By CAROL MUSYOKA
In Summary
- Youths fight a system that has conditioned our society into thinking it’s all about passing exam.
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney
Ted came to work in my team as an intern in early 2007. Back
in those days, working in a financial institution such as Barclays was
the alpha and omega of a professional career.
He was a stroppy 22-year-old, with hair that was at
least tree inches too long and shirts whose cuffs were at least three
inches too short of the wrist line.
He was a breath of fresh air in an environment of
monumental performance pressure underpinned by a staid, insipid office
culture.
About a month before the first anniversary of his
employment, he had successfully transitioned into a full time job, he
came to talk to me about taking a few months off to tour the United
States.
“What?” was my incredulous reply. “Yeah, I want to
just go around the States, maybe I’ll go to Mexico as well. I just want
to figure stuff out,” he said nonchalantly.
“But what about your career, I mean, you’ll have
this inexplicable black hole in your CV which can’t be addressed with
the words ‘backpacked through the US for the sake of it’ as a line
item,” I whined.
It didn’t matter. Ted left for the US and threw in a couple of months backpacking through Europe as well.
When he got back, he decided to set up a business
doing websites for companies, as he was now crystal clear that he never
wanted to work for anyone again.
Last week, I spent a morning in the offices of
Kevin, a 26-year-old entrepreneur whose business it is to collect
electronic data from the online community, make sense of it and then
help businesses make strategic decisions by distilling the information
into language that decision makers can understand.
Kevin has travelled around the world in the last
two years providing insight at global conferences as a leading voice on
African social media tactics and tips.
For two straight hours I sat with Kevin and two of
his team members, getting completely blown away by the quality of data
that they are able to collate using people’s Instagram, Facebook and
Twitter feeds as sources of what would look like rubbish data to the
untrained eye, but is actually valuable information on the experience of
products and services by Kenyan consumers.
Kevin only has one permanent employee in his
office. The rest of his team work on contract from wherever in Kenya
that they can link up to a fast Internet connection.
His clients are multinationals and top tier local
corporates who are now starting to understand the benefits of getting
unsolicited real-time customer experiences to improve on their product
offerings.
In a classic serendipitous twist, Kevin’s landlord is Ted, who has now become the consummate entrepreneur.
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