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Report Back #2 from HeHe, Ltd., January 1, 2012
“Rwanda is a key telecom market with immense growth potential and will strengthen Bharti Airtel’s footprint in East Africa,” said Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman and Managing Director last December (12.28.11, C-P Africa).
The HeHe, Ltd. team are believers, having launched their mobile application business after attending AITI's Kigali bootcamp in 2010. Clarisse Iribagiza and her team (Richard Mujyambere, Amiri Mugarura and Diane Ukwishaka) have been busy: teaching their own mini-AITI class, presenting lessons they’ve learned to students from across Rwanda, and rolling out new applications -- while keeping up with their classes! They just completed coursework in September and graduate from Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in March, 2012.
Since January 2011, I have been videotaping HeHe and other innovation teams in East Africa, to document their startup adventures. A natural networker, I alerted Clarisse to the Pivot25 conference in Nairobi last June: the team applied and won a place among just 25 slots for pitching their mobile apps in Kenya. It was team member Richard Mujyambere’s first trip out of Rwanda, and jumping into the deep end brought benefits. Last fall he was invited again to Nairobi: to train for three months at iHub’s m:lab incubator there, honing his mobile technology skills.
Before setting off to Nairobi last June, Clarisse presented a talk on teamwork (based on experience as CEO of HeHe, Ltd.) to a nationwide gathering of college students convened by Cambridge University (UK) at an enterprise weekend at KIST.
After launch just 15 months ago, HeHe, Ltd. traveled with five other Rwandan ICT companies to represent Rwanda at the ITU Telecom World 2011 Summit in Geneva. [Three of those teams were born in AITI bootcamps, Clarisse says; she and HeHe team member Amiri were teaching assistants for last July’s class.] The Geneva summit was a vital platform to showcase applications HeHe has developed. While there, Clarisse reports, “Two of our apps caught the eye of Liberia's communications minister,” including a mobile business directory and M-Report Card, a mobile app for accessing university student test results.
The Liberian minister asked HeHe to develop another application offering price and product locations in Liberian food markets. Networking note: Clarisse and Richard of HeHe met the “girl geek” founders of M-Farm in Nairobi at Pivot25 last June. M-Farm’s CTO, Susan Oguya, is also an AITI bootcamp graduate, and they develop farm price apps. The two teams must have cross-pollinated ideas at the Pivot 25 conference!
Despite rough patches during the past year -- technology snafus, losing a team member, juggling college and company demands -- last fall Clarisse started a Do-It-Yourself Incubation Circle in Kigali, with help from a Rwandan leadership team she gathered. Now up to 40 young entrepreneurs meet weekly for peer learning on making technology startups sustainable. A Rwandan ICT agency gives logistical support and plans a formal innovation hub in Rwanda, with help from venture capitalists who are already supporting the group. The DIY incubators even skyped with mentors in New York City in November, for remote learning. From the outset, HeHe has been active in shared learning with peers.
Finally, last fall HeHe began work on a mobile/web project called the Girl Hub. Dubbed Ni Nymapinga (the perfect lady), this media project produces a magazine and a weekly radio show run by young female journalists in training in Rwanda; it’s supported by Nike, which funds The Girl Effect in several countries.
Girl Hub has asked HeHe, Ltd. to design and implement innovative software for interactive public opinion gathering. Girl Hub wants to manage SMS feeback from girls wherever there’s an internet connection, and then respond to girls directly on their mobile phones.
HeHe’s scope and action expand by the month, and the “growth potential” in telecom that Mital predicted for Airtel mentioned above is about far more than revenue. In Rwanda at least, it’s about empowering Rwandan teens, especially girls, in a region where women’s voices are not always heard.
~ Diane Hendrix [Director, YoungWorldInventors.com]
* To see videos documenting the progress of HeHe, Ltd. and two other women owned teams, watch for new stories going up in January on YoungWorldInventors’ YouTube channel. Videos show tips on teamwork troubles, sales strategies, distribution dealers, winning investors and more! More info: dhendrix @mit.edu.
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Four AITI Rwanda Teams Traveling to Geneva
Four student project groups from Rwanda are competing in the Young Innovators Conference in Geneva. Two teams from AITI Rwanda 2010 and two teams from AITI Rwanda 2011 are participating. We will keep you updated on their progress and status.
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Incredible Buzz for Sri Lanka's Demo Day
Today is the final day for our summer 2011 programs! Today the Sri Lankan program is holding their Demo Day. The team has worked very hard to put together an event that will showcase the student projects to a audience of potential investors and luminaries. The buzz around the demo is huge as evidenced by this front page article in Sri Lanka's Daily FT. Here is an image of the front page of the newspaper. We look forward to more news of the event.
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Welcome to the new (beta) site!
Welcome to AITI's new website. The website is currently in beta, and has not yet replaced our old website infrastructure. In the coming week, we will be transitioning over to this new website. We will migrate all the information from our old site. We look forward to all the content that will be generated on this site over the summer, and we hope that the features of this site will enable our participants to do things otherwise impossible.
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Guest Blog Post: Diane Hendrix on Hehe, Ltd.
AITI is very pleased to post a guest submission to our blog from Diane Hendrix. AITI and Diane are collaborating to better document and disseminate the stories of the innovators that are touched by MIT's international programs. Diane has experience as a lecturer at MIT and Producer for PBS. She recently traveled to East Africa to document young inventors in the region. She met with the Hehe, Ltd team, a company that grew out of AITI's Rwanda 2010 class. These are her impressions:
HeHe, Ltd is a brand new Rwandan company, born of the cross-cultural learning between Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and MIT’s AiTi program. Not only did MIT students inspire KIST students to create new mobile phone apps, one team, HeHe, Ltd., has won two high profile Rwandan clients. Taking their new roles even further, HeHe co-founders graduated their own class of 11 students at KIST, celebrating their course completion on February 4, 2011. They have done all this in six months, since their six-week MIT course in Kigali last summer, 2010.
Staging their own class at KIST was grateful “pay back” for what HeHe founders had learned from MIT students. Since launching last October, HeHe has earned $5000US in consulting fees. The five member team is led by KIST undergraduate Clarisse Iribagiza Karungi, one of three women CEOs I interviewed during my January jaunt to high and low tech companies triggered by MIT programs in East Africa. "The AiTi experience literally changed my life," said CEO Clarisse to her rapt KIST class, eyes shining. “And I hope this class will be as useful to you.”
I traveled to East Africa for a month to track the progress of recently launched business and development teams and spent two days with HeHe's smart, articulate and ambitious team, all still students. The other four team members are Jean Niyotwagira, Richard Mujyambere, Amiri Mugarura and Diane Ukwishaka.
I taped two professional presentations, first to Rwandatel, one of Rwanda’s two largest mobile phone companies; the next day, HeHe presented their crowd sourcing website to the NICI3 secretariat, the national ICT strategy and planning agency for Rwanda. The team scored home runs both times, leveraging contracts and a new office. With a real office they are no longer a “virtual” company, having moved into the professional world on their merits.
For several months the HeHe team had been meeting weekly with their clients to formulate the most useful mobile applications. By the time they presented several proposals for apps that could incorporate crowd sourced surveys from the public via mobile phones, the team persuaded clients of their technology skills and business acumen. Clarisse says, “Our aim is to be information giants locally and regionally. We want to provide ordinary people with relevant information ...[and] related services that they may need.”
HeHe seems to be the first local mobile applications team offering such services in Rwanda. Thus, their timing is as fortunate as mine in meeting them and hearing insider secrets about the challenges of teamwork they've learned in a half year of intense growth. I look forward to documenting next steps in HeHe’s development and telling stories of other African and international innovators in a webisode series devoted to them.
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