Why Nairobi is called the Silicon Savannah, and what Konza Technopolis is for.
M-Pesa, mobile phones, iHub and a planned technology city, Konza, helped earn Kenya the nickname Silicon Savannah.
Kenya’s tech nickname, the Silicon Savannah, is often linked to one product: M-Pesa, the mobile money service run by Safaricom. Commentators describe it as one of the foundations of Kenya’s IT boom, with dozens of startups building services on top of it. A 2013 report counted 17 million M-Pesa users out of a population of 41 million.
Phones, cables and a hub
The same coverage points to high mobile-phone ownership, the highest in East Africa at the time, undersea cables that connected Kenya to global data networks, and iHub, the Nairobi innovation space on Ngong Road, as a centre for developers. It also credits a flexible regulatory approach to mobile money. Ushahidi, the crisis-mapping tool, was born in Kenya, and iHub was acquired by Nigeria’s CcHUB in 2019.
Konza, the planned city
Konza Technopolis is also known as Silicon Savannah. It is a large technology hub being built 64 kilometres south of Nairobi, spread across Machakos, Makueni and Kajiado counties, and is a gazetted special economic zone and a flagship of Kenya’s Vision 2030 plan. A master plan for a city of around 2,000 hectares, about 5,000 acres, was prepared with support from the International Finance Corporation.
Most of the sources on the Silicon Savannah date from 2013 to 2016, so readers should check the latest status of Konza and iHub. The core idea, however, holds: mobile money plus developer communities make a market where fintech and software founders can build at scale.