HISTORY
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
The Mombasa Tech Community is a brain child of three people. Ahmed Maawy, Alifiyah Ganijee and Said Fuad. The major objective behind the formation of this community was to bridge the gap that was at Mombasa, and ultimately within the coastal region in Kenya. The region has a massive amount of tech talent, but has no direction or roadmap for this talent. Ultimately the tech talent within the coast faces tons of challenges when it comes to career growth and exposure. The community's objectives seek to link this talent to the global village, and we believe that this talent has to have access to opportunities that arise globally.
The conception of this idea was a vision that Ahmed Maawy constructed when he initially moved to the coast and did the first Ushahidi community meetup, after he had also done a Google Technology User Group (GTUG) meetup earlier that year. Together with two friends Ahmed had, namely Said and Alifiyah, they charted a roadmap on how to create a technology community around the coast.
It had been a challenging journey, one that so many other people had taken and had not managed to gain much traction. So the team had to be unique and innovative in the way they will do it. Having worked with the iHub before Ahmed had seen how communities can be engaged and the value tech could add to the community. Mombasa and the coast are quite unique, what works in Nairobi will not work in Mombasa, it takes local people to understand the local values and cultures to get around getting things done in very innovative ways. And so the team set out to carry out a very challenging task ahead of them.
One year after the conception of the idea, the team has worked with Mozilla, Wikipedia and Google to launch local events and contests within Mombasa, with the help of organizations such as CAMARA. This is only just the beginning of more to come, even though only 4 organizations have helped support the community activities, there is still a lot of work to be done before we create a massive technology innovation center and community, and engage more and more partners. The community envisions greater things to come through collaboration with partners, and the sky shall be the limit.
OBJECTIVES
The objective is to grow and further build the capacity for the community within Mombasa and the Coast and create empowered individuals capable of transforming themselves as well as their society by means of innovation and technology.
GOALS:
- Create a tech ecosystem throughout the Kenyan Coast.
- Empower the various players in the tech arena.
- Foster research and innovation.
- Create opportunities for everyone.
- Contribute to regional development.
