Virtual City

John Waibochi (left) is at the top of the pyramid of tech innovators who are remaking Kenya’s reputation on the global stage. With his company Virtual City, Waibochi helped herald Kenya’s arrival as an innovation hub when he received Nokia’s Growth Economy Innovation Challenge Award along with a $1 million investment last September.

The Challenge posed to Waibochi and others from around the world was to develop an idea that could improve the lives of people in the developing world. Waibochi’s solution was Distributr, a program designed to allow small and medium-sized businesses keep better track of their bottom lines in emerging markets.

“In the future,” explains Waibochi, “success will depend on ability to adapt to technology and embrace mobility. This is one of the avenues that companies can now easily use to ensure real-time access to the entire supply chain.” Kenya is fast becoming a global hub of new technology, riding a wave of innovation being spurred by new mobile and social technologies.

Ironically, it was Kenya’s relatively slow pace of development that made this possible. The glacial pace at which the Kenyan government approached telecommunications infrastructure development through the 1990s allowed the country’s consumers to leapfrog the land-line phase of communications, going straight to mobile technology. This is why Kenyans in the country’s more remote areas can live without electricity but still update their Facebook status via mobile phones.

And as mobile phones and the Internet continue their collision course, Nairobi is fast becoming a nerve centre for mobile and web developers. Nairobi is unique because of its diversity. Here you find innumerable NGOs, endemic corruption, rich culture, extreme wealth, crushing poverty, business and countless social and political forces.

These contradictions have allowed the city’s developers to seek unique solutions to both global and local problems. Kenyan startup Ushahidi has become world famous for developing crowdsourcing tools that have been used to independently monitor elections in Afghanistan and track relief efforts in Haiti after last year’s earthquake.

And then there is iCow - a mobile application developed by Charles Kithika which allows farmers to monitor the fertility cycles of their animals and pinpoint breeding windows. Innovations like Ushahidi and iCow were born of Kenya’s complexities. But for Waiboichi, the answer to Nokia’s challenge was simple: bring the products to the people.

The Virtual City platform allows businesses to complete automated transactions using handheld devices that are synched with a database, which monitors inventory and is capable of producing reports and issuing orders. Combining these functions in a mobile device allows companies with more rigid business models to tap into traditionally underserved markets, particularly in rural areas lacking infrastructure and development.

The database technology will also help businesses react to changes in demand for their products, providing further avenues for saving money and earning profits. Distributr has the potential to open up Kenya’s countryside. And not only for global corporations but for Kenyan business too by allowing Nairobi’s entrepreneurs to discover new customers in their own backyard.

According to Waibochi, Kenya’s vast tea industry is already embracing Distributr, employing it at buying centres across the country. Virtual City’s innovations are not limited only to sales. The company has developed a raft of mobile solutions for developing economies in industries such as shipping, engineering, and farming.

Virtual City’s Agrimanagr platform allows vendors to conduct transactions with farmers across the country and integrate the receipts into a database, which can track deliveries and monitor food supplies at company headquarters. To put it into perspective, the Agrimanagr platform would allow large chains like Nakumatt and Uchumi to buy produce from small-scale, independent farms in rural areas as well as from largescale commercial farms, all with a mobile phone.

Behind feted successes like Waibochi, there are hundreds of tech innovators, experimenting with new apps that they hope will find a market in Kenya’s new reality, and beyond. Waibochi, though, has been doing this since the beginning. The developer saw the potential back in 2000, when he founded Virtual City.

Now, just 10 years later, Kenya’s IT sector is producing revenues estimated in the billions of shillings and cementing its role as global innovator. “The mobile phone is going to do what the Internet did for the western world – that’s what it is going to do for the emerging markets,” says Waibochi.

“It’s going to be the point of sale device, it’s going to be the computer, it’s going to be the Internet device.” Thanks, in part, to Waibochi and Virtual City, Kenya may soon be delivering that message (in 4 or 5G) to the rest of the world.