Andrea Bohnstedt attended the ICT Board’s Tandaa content conference and was left with a niggling sense of vagueness
The ICT Board recently held the first Kenya content conference, Tandaa 2008, to discuss the creation of local online content. I felt that in several ways, the conference fell short of its potential – and as an industry, ICT has enormous potential to nudge Kenya along in economic diversification and the creation of dynamic new industries. (A caveat first: I only attended the first half of the conference.)
Online, anything goes. The possibilities are endless. But it’s a different trying to make a mark – or, on a commercial level, run an online enterprise. In the conference, 'content' was the all-purpose catchword, but for the rapid developments in the online world and the exponential growth in content of all kinds, this seemed just too vague. The conference structure stopped short of focusing the sessions on categories of content that could then be discussed with their specific challenges, leaving me with a feeling of ‘online anything’.
Obviously the media are amongst the most important creators and distributors of online content, as presentations by Capital Group and the Nation Media Group showed. Those, however, are the big and established groups who have a long track record in offline production. Revenue models, especially for smaller, new and niche publications, would have deserved more analysis. Salim Amin has launched A24 Media a few months ago as an online content sales platform for journalistic content from across the continent that pledges to give more revenues to their contributors. And ironically, media owners’ serious concerns over the ICT Bill, coming from the same ministry that backed the Tandaa conference, did not receive enough attention. Tourism was mentioned frequently, and it would have been useful to discuss e.g. companies like Southern Africa Direct TV who had representatives in Nairobi twice recently looking for digital content to market Kenya and East Africa as a travel destination, and have a platform that can give a genuine boost not just to tourism, but also to media companies and anyone else who creates content. Retail and sales have long used an online presence to transact business, but payment platforms are still an obstacle in Kenya.
The bottomline for me: No, I don’t think that sending un- or underemployed youths through villages collecting proverbs, photographs or any other items will be a solution to Kenya’s youth unemployment rates, nor will it push Kenya’s online content creation to the next level. We already know that everyone and their pet fish can go online – it’s professionalism that’s lacking (and that’s by no means a Kenyan issue – it’s a global concern).It was up to Joseph Mucheru from Google East Africa, several sessions into the morning, to mention the key fact that for a commercially successful venture, you need a business plan, i.e. you need to think about your business first. He touched on different ownership and revenue models, and this could and should have probably been the underlying structure for the conference.
If the conference was focused on budding online entrepreneurs – which was not entirely clear to me, and I think this was one of the problems –, this would have provided a great opening to then hold smaller interactive sessions to teach them about business planning, marketing, revenue generation, the specifics of content best practices in their industry. A website is your showroom, but what goes on behind the scenes?
Of course not every online venture has to be for-profit. Two of the more exciting and popular ventures focusing on information for the public good have been left out: Shortly after the conference, Ushahidi, a ‘crowdsourcing’ platform to collect information in crisis situations, has been featured in Forbes magazine and would have an interesting lesson about how they mobilized their programmers, and how they raised funding. The Mars Group website, a more established organisation, attracts a large number of hits for its information on governance in Kenya.
I also feel that the ICT Board itself could perhaps stop a moment to think about its own content: By their own admission, their official website had been outdated for months. Perhaps confusing for an investor – or anyone who seeks to understand what the ICT Board is trying to do in Kenya – they then added a new website for the Tandaa conference, and another one for doing ICT in Kenya. Isn't there a point about online content creation, management, and brand building here …?
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