How to keep Kenya’s entrepreneurship spirit alive without compromising quality

As an outsider visiting Kenya, I’m constantly amazed by the informal entrepreneurship of the many people I came across. Whether it is born out of necessity or brilliance, it’s a good and positive feature which has some downsides.

Faltering infrastructure.

Sadly, one of the things that really struck me was the state of infrastructure, and how a majority of people live in a society where the infrastructure is either missing, haphazard, available only for the rich, or simply constantly failing.

The social and economic differences only make this worse.

The poor do not expect things to function, and many have grown so cynical about the situation that they will actively hamper efforts to improve infrastructure.

They believe it cannot ever work, and see only the opportunity to improve their immediate situation by tearing down efforts to build a better infrastructure.

Here are two examples I’ve seen: No-one will care if you take the stones from the cobbled road to build your wall when the road is already falling to pieces, the power blacks out constantly, and there is no faith in government, local or national, to fix anything.

In order to hawk their wares, merchants need people to slow down. Their solution is to place speed bumps in the highway. It fixes their immediate need— to get money to survive. But it does so at the cost of breaking the infrastructure for everybody.

Just as how the poor become cynical about how things won’t work, the rich become cynical about how the poor are ruining possibilities. This means that the rich, the people in power, will only “fix” things locally.

The roads where the governor lives will be paved and working, while the road next over will languish and be barely functional for vehicles.

In the absence of a formal infrastructure, another kind of infrastructure has taken root. Informal, meshed and somewhat disorganised, little clusters of infrastructure are built by people to make things work for them.

The prime examples would be the boda bodas and matatus. These are informally grown infrastructure, without much of either organisation or regulation because people have the need to get to places.

The general shoddiness: When people are badly paid, or exploited there is an expectation of shoddiness. There is no interest to take pride in a job when you are getting exploited, and this mentality is wide spread.

This expectation is then preyed on by outside forces and markets, because there’s no need to deliver quality, as everyone in the “target market” are expecting shoddy things, and won’t be complaining about lacking quality.

In this capitalist mindset, quality is downgraded to fit the African markets expectations. You get relatively expensive products that are designed to be difficult to maintain and repair.

Co-operation: It’s not all bleak and hopeless, but the same behaviour that fuels the ad-hoc infrastructure is also vastly under-serving Kenya on the product side.

This will be the case until the market comes out and demands something different, and so far, it appears happy to buy perishing hardware at a cost that would make the rest of the world scream bloody murder.

Despite all this, there’s a certain sense of optimism, you’ve got a middle class coming up and around, people still live and feel happy.

The expectations that things won’t work and both rich and poor have to make do on their own is not really helping people as a group. There is little cooperation because of it, and cooperation is something you need.

The IT Infrastructure: Kenyan IT infrastructure is an amazing place, a generation of people are coming to market in the era of smartphones and mobile networks.

Sadly, the expectations on IT services and their functionality are the same as for the rest of the Kenyan infrastructure. Mostly lacking, and no one really expects it to work.

And with the make-do mindset, people are willing to work around the issues, to oversee the glaring security problems and move on, because they want to solve a problem at hand.

It is not only that people aren’t aware of the implications of both security and quality in the IT side. It’s that they aren’t given an option.

When the government fails to secure basic web services, and the banks fail to secure their own homepages, people are once more left to their own devices.

Quality is a base requirement for security, and you cannot improve quality without involving people.

The entrepreneurship I’ve seen around has to scale up, beyond the confines of the home. And for that to work, there has to be co-operation and organisation.

People have to be involved enough with their surroundings to have a sense of pride. And I hope to be able to work together with colleagues doing just that.

Ljungmark is a Swedish security expert working for Modio. Modio is based in Nairobi and Sweden.