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Use technology to tap new revenue streams

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By combining new technology with new thinking to earn new revenues by solving old problems. FILE PHOTO | NMG

As our government struggles to balance its budget, still seeking every possible pocket of Treasury fillip, there is one thing we can no longer expect for Kenya, and that is a country rebuilt to middle-income standards by the public sector. For sure, having risked our entire nation’s finances - and banking system too - in its dash for growth, the government’s efforts to give us a leg up have been sincere, and actually huge.

But the investment gap in our nation remains far larger still: and across multiple basics, there just isn’t the public sector traction left to resolve them.To whit, sewage, and rubbish collection.We may have decided that land next to rivers, for some reason never worthy of explanation, is of huge value unbuilt.

But our rivers remain polluted and littered. Our sewage system has never got near to an overhaul in our great leap forwards, and rubbish collection is still a historical memory, and present day Jua Kali sector. Yet the opportunity for a private sector solution is only a step away in imagination and application.

Today, rubbish gets collected by private pick-ups or larger trucks where residents can afford to pay for it to be taken away.But actually, the rubbish itself has value. Elsewhere in the world, power is produced from incinerators that are burning rubbish.

They don’t pollute, fitted with super filters. But they can power a whole estate on simple rubbish burning at high temperatures. Thus, our private sector response in understanding a service gap as a business opportunity remains stunted. We stop at being paid to take refuse away, but we don’t turn the rubbish itself into money.

The same goes in power. Our electricity remains so fearsomely expensive. We see Kenya Power moving into losses paying KenGen more still for its electricity, made in huge plants and then transmitted down mega-expensive transmissions lines. Yet our private sector options grow every day in offering new ways of setting up local generation in homes, manufacturing plants, and communities.

That’s not just with solar panels and batteries, but mini hydro, roof-top wind turbines and even mini-geothermal: options abound.And yet where, truly, is our private sector in this journey, to date? For sure, as with pick-ups collecting rubbish, we have a proliferation of companies selling solar panels.

But bless the power company that actually understands local power generation as a business opportunity, and sets up inside an estate, in any community, or across manufacturing sites, offering the end-user cheaper electricity, and making profits too.

The same goes with all those unbuilt rural roads that disable huge tracts of our arable land from achieving best-in-class earnings. For sure, we can all sit and wait another decade for the Kenya Rural Roads Authority to be granted more, from our strained tax takes. But, why? If my own community, and own self, are the ones getting hurt by that ‘no road’, then let me and mine put in the road. We have seen it.

Communities sharing the cost and the labour, not big contributions, and a fine tarmac road that changes everything. What, truly, are we waiting for that we live without and keep chucking rocks at a government now broke from trying to do too much? Could it actually be the case that our greatest handicap, in fact, is expecting others to solve all our problems and challenges, where, actually, we are, mostly able to solve these issues ourselves. Instead of ‘the government should’, perhaps the real moment when Kenya will begin to gallop towards middle income will be when our private sector adopts a different mantra.

Instead of clamouring for an enabling environment, instead of lobbying for more infrastructure, the day our flag will rise will be the one when our narrative moves onwards. Problems are business opportunities.

And beyond our focus on building apps, and on marketing tradition, beyond our grooves of thinking, and stopping at sales of what we already have, comes another way of doing business. By combining new technology with new thinking to earn new revenues by solving old problems. And, actually, it isn’t the government that’s stopping us from doing that.