Is Kenya inching closer to being next Silicon Valley?

It is finally happening.

For the last two years, the Kenya ICT Board has been harping their mission of making the country a top 10 global technology hub, a mission that is not quickly understandable given the history and nature of the sector.

When one thinks of global ICT hubs for instance, the first images that pop up are those of US (Silicon Valley), India (Bangalore), Ireland, Korea and the Multimedia Corridor in Malaysia.

Closer home, Kenya would probably emerge a distant fifth after Mauritius, South Africa, Rwanda and Ghana.

But after last month’s international meetings in Nairobi — the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers (ICANN) 37th meeting and the Nethope CIO meeting immediately after —there is a sense that things seem to be changing and a new pattern is emerging.

At the ICANN meeting for instance, I spoke to quite a few people who have their pulse on the industry.

And all I could hear was statements like; “Kenya is in a unique position to take on the leadership of ICT in the continent,”; Kenya has a good pool of talented people to drive the ICT development in the continent”; “The innovation coming from Kenya is unparallel in the world, especially on mobile devises”.

At the Nethope meeting, talk was on technologies like M-Pesa and its effect on the community and especially the unbanked —banking the unbanked kept on reverberating in the corridors of the meeting; stories of how Ushahidi.org has been used in both Haiti and Chile disasters to inform relief workers on the emergency situation on the ground.

These two meetings were global meetings, with delegates coming from all over the world.

So it would have been even easier to discuss the latest gizmos coming out of Redmond or Bangalore. But guess what? Innovations coming from Kenya dominated the proceedings.

Then I attended the IT Multi-national Corporations breakfast a monthly meeting, bringing all the “big boys” in the sector together to share information and knowledge.

At this meeting, IBM East Africa was sharing their vision of the “smarter planet”.

Again, the same message was echoing; the talent, the tech opportunities and the Kenyan position.

The New York Times published a story titled: Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to track Crisis.

And again, this was a story of how Ushahidi is helping in the humanitarian effort abroad.