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Recently finished Peter Thiel's Zero to One . Found it very useful for examples of massive US-centric growth companies, but not very useful for business growth in Africa.  However, it did highlight for me the problem I've been facing with Lateral Labs - there is a really difficult area in between Day 1 of a Sole Proprietorship and Day X of a Limited Company with investors. That is, growing a company to a level where it can consistently sustain itself (people and everything else) as well as turn a profit.  Not all Sole Proprietorships make money, but even fewer make enough money to stop relying on the founder.

I find many of my clients want to do the same thing that's happening elsewhere in the world on the Internet, but add value with "local content". It makes sense - there are some part of African / East African / Tanzanian / inter-Tanzanian cultures that play into the way we do things, like business, education, behaviour change communication, retail, engineering, etc.  But to what extent? We can't be so different that even best practice is unique.  The "local" in local content only goes as far as language, law of the land and loyalty to certain norms. Outside of these areas, I'm not sure what else makes local content so special. 

Posted on Vijana FM | 30th September 2011 Amil Shivji is currently a 21-year-old Filmmaking student at York University in Canada. As a native of Tanzania, Amil has plans to work with film in East Africa, particularly with films that contain conscious messages. We caught up with him to ask him about his ideas and recommendations... 1. Compared to newspapers and radio, what is about films that interests you? Motion. The movement of images invokes a billion different emotions and allows varied perceptions. And at the same time a frame carries the power of a newspaper and the sound of a radio station. Juxtaposition of shots or certain image sequences tell an entire story and the best part is that it’s very personal. When I watch a film, I feel like I am having a conversation with the filmmaker. The shots are fragments of his/her visualization of the story and I am offered an insight into the filmmaker’s imagination. As opposed to newspaper and radio where I would be reading words or heari...

I found this PDF file listing prices for advertising with the Daily News company in Tanzania. I was suprised to see a full-page color advertisement costing almost TSH 3 million! I was recently told it takes about TSH 1.7 million to produce a music video in the market... just to compare. At what cost are advertisements created? Do they transfer the same value to the onlooker that the company being advertised seeks to transfer?

I found this Al Jazeera article from April 12 , which is a solid overview of socio-political disputes across the Sub-Saharan region of Africa. I thought it was a useful move by Al Jazeera to expose these disputes, considering that many of them would not make international media waves (see previous post ).

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) recently published a report titled The State of African Cities 2010: Governance, Inequality and Urban Land Markets . The report breaks down the following for each African region (Northern, Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern): Social geography of urbanization; Economic geography of cities; Geography of urban markets; Geography of climate change; and Emerging issues. A report such as this one can be used as a reference tool for the creation of socially-conscious business. As major African cities like Lagos, Cairo, and Kinshasa experience acute growth in urban population, how will essential services like shelter, food, education and health be delivered efficiently? Download the PDF (right-click to save as) : English version French version Related links: About UN-HABITAT The State of African Cities 2010: Report page BBC news piece allAfrica.com news piece Posted on Vijana FM on November 24, 2010

Posted at Vijana FM on October 26, 2010 In the last two years, there has been a lot of talk about the SEACOM project , which links the coasts of East and South Africa. The project involved the immersion of undersea fibre optic cables that increase speeds and decrease costs for Internet Service Providers and users. We have discussed the SEACOM project on two occasions; when we mentioned the Nation Media Group's golden jubilee , and when we asked Mbwana Alliy five questions . There has therefore been a lot of excitement about the prospect of starting new goods and services based on the Internet that are especially for certain markets in Africa. Due the growth in the use of mobile phones, this excitement is further channeled into how mobile applications can be built, used, and developed over the Internet. If you are getting ideas about how to run a product or service on the Internet in Africa, it is probably wise to check out Internet World Stats (IWS) . The IWS website provides comp...

So I've been thinking of some ideas that could become spin-offs from Vijana FM . Two such ideas that have consistently been on my mind: 1. A database for unpublished academic working papers, similar to JSTOR , but free to use and contribute to, and targetted towards East African scholars. 2. An open-source curriculum for entrepreneurship education, customized for primary, secondary and tertiary levels, and further developed by respective interest groups. Just had to throw that out there. Still contemplating, but getting the feeling I'm running out of time. Drop me a line if you're willing to help [once again, his pleas on his blog echo against the depths of virtual alleyways created over 4 somewhat quiet years]; I might be doing work on this very very soon. Carpe diem, ak PS: Wallpaper above from Wallpaper Stock .

Just found out from a few friends that an interview me and Mumo had with James Walsh in New York last year was published in an article on this page at the GlobalPost.

I have been meaning to write a post about the Pan-Africa Media Conference held in Kenya on March 18th and 19th 2010 . Host to this conference was the Nation Media Group , an established and experienced media corporation based in Nairobi, Kenya with subsidiares and outlet across the East African region. The conference served to highlight past and present experiences of media in East Africa, and to also anticipate future challenges and goals. As noted in the conference follow-up report , mediums are changing fast; what used to be published only in print yesterday is now being covered on TV channels, radios and blogs. Content is becoming dynamic, ever-changing, and easily transferable. At the same time, the political economy in East Africa is changing . Our governments are talking to eachother about building a basic economic framework by which Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania can trade freely. With this will come improvements in the mobility of people, goods and services in the...

I read this article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and found myself overheating on the bus to school. The article discusses the uprising during the 2007 Kenyan elections due to hardlined support for the oppostion, Raila Odgina, against the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki. While the violence shook Kenya and much of East Africa, the two sides agreed on a power-sharing deal which is still sensitive to either side today. As the WSJ article suggests, "Two years later, however, their coalition government reamains shaky and the country is on edge. The U.S. is increasingly impatient for the government to take steps to punish those responsible for the postelection violence, crack down on corruption and amend the constitution. 'We will not hesitate to give our opinions when we feel that's what needs to be done," Mr. Wycoff* said. "We will take strong actions when we think that's what needs to be done to move the reform process forward.'" I understand the need f...