Wellness & Fitness

Ode to fallen Kenyan tech scene colossus

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A healthcare worker uses a mobile health app. FILE PHOTO | NMG

It’s been five years since the late Idd Salim Kithinji was laid to rest. In that period, a lot has happened in the local tech scene. If you were fortunate or unfortunate to interact with him, his passion for technology and coding was palpable. He spoke, breathed and ate tech.

Salim’s understanding of the local tech ecosystem was unmatched and his vision of a tech-based future is still unfolding though he suffered the tragedy of the visionary living ahead of his time.

Salim’s focus was what the Internet offered for the local tech community and a genuine desire to push for “indigenous” solutions to Kenya’s problems. For this, he saw opportunities across all scenes; from agriculture, finance, entertainment and even healthcare.

His major regret was that as a country with good Internet access growth rates served by about four undersea cables linking us to the world, we used it for pornography, social media and entertainment, with very little revenue generation for local Internet users.

He sought to reverse this through catalysing discussions and lending his hands and time for those with an idea. I was fortunate to be one of these, having collaborated on a digital health challenge on the future of health records generation, transmission and storage.

Always thinking two steps ahead, Salim felt the challenge wouldn’t be digitising the data, but how to handle it safely in an ultra-fast, real-time manner that gave intelligent feedback immediately.

Would the system cope when 40 million Kenyans got onto our digital health insurance era or if five million records came through at once? Would the data architecture and security cope?

Borne out of this, his favourite project worked on jointly with others at a local tech hub was perhaps “The Isiolo Cluster”. This sought to introduce supercomputing and Big Data handling capability in our day to day use.

In our discussions, we shared on a world where tech was applied in healthcare, connecting millions of mobile devices and apps to intelligently transform data analytics for the betterment of our poor health fortunes.

Ever the joker, his philosophy of “coding on a full stomach” sought to address a problem good local coders faced: trying to deliver quality projects while lacking financial backing. This is still arguably a big obstacle towards scale-up of good local ideas.

Last week, a document circulating on social media looking at the Kenya startup ecosystem in terms of revenue ranking showed that fintechs dominated, with the majority being international VC backed and headed: vindicating his concerns.

Salim’s vision of good Kenyan brewed ideas meeting local venture capital backing would create a win-win situation for both.

Though gone, his philosophy, passion, zeal and belief in home-grown home funded solutions inspired many more to continue working towards this future.