Edwin's Corner

The ancient Chinese farmer, medieval Venetian merchant and the conquering Victorian company man had one thing in common. They took insurance. Arguably, our civilization has gone this far because men took risks and knew there was a fallback plan in the face of insurmountable odds. Generally, the insurance industry has grown over several centuries into a hydra of products and services, vastly complex and vaguely understood. However, through all its manifestations, the primary goal of insurance is to hedge against the risk of contingent loss. To this end, it has failed to ignite the African imagination. Historically brought by the white man as he colonized and disenfranchised Africa, Insurance has suffered shame in the hands of a misinformed continent. Only the affluent and middle class seem to grasp its power with penetration rates in the continent below 5% . Insurance agents have also failed to inspire its uptake with a general feeling that they are unreliable, u...

  I remember the first time a computer made an impression. It was in 1993, and I was living in Nanyuki an outpost town in Kenya (at least back then). I was ten, and I had gone to visit a programmer who had been hired by a research team studying Mount Kenya and the ecology around it. Although most details are hazy today, I remember the programmer, I really thought he was the most intelligent man alive and everything that came out of his mouth was the golden truth. I promised myself that one day I would own and operate a computer like him. I was one of the first students in Kenya back in 1997 to take up IT as a subject in high school, I honesty think that was a blessing because we had a volunteer from the UK who had experience in developing software, he took us through three of the four year in high school, it is through him that we really dug into C++, C and Pascal programming languages. It is from here that some of my colleagues eventually found themselves working...

The landing of a man on the Moon by the Americans engraved a deep footprint on the innovative psyche of the world. The audacious declaration to land a man on the Moon made by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 (realized a few short years later by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin at a time when war and gloom ravished the world) was a watershed moment. It also unlatched the mental constraints that had been placed on humanity a few centuries earlier, in the Dark Ages. This was the beginning of an innovation era that knew no restrain for humanity. Source: NASA Moon Landing Africa over the last two centuries has been chained and shackled like a lion in captivity. The more it fought the more it bled and when it licked its wounds they festered.   As our forebears looked over the hills and saw the plunder and enslavement of generations to come they must have seen that we would be disenfranchised from our land, but what would have broken their hearts would h...

Source: ALAMY A long time ago, before the industrial revolution and before the Dark Ages, one of the primary means of long-distance communication was the smoke signal. In most instances it relayed a need for people to assemble and advance a cause. It facilitated the social agenda, which has been a pillar for our species dominance of the planet.     The ignorance of the Dark Ages was because of the curtailing of ideas and turning everything new into a heresy. This was further propagated by the fastest transportation systems then in the form of horses and sail ships. Fortunately, this ignorance waned with the introduction of the printing press. But it was with the introduction of the telegraph-an innovation of the industrial revolution and Samuel Morse’s first public telegraph message, “What hath God Wrought?” in 1844-that the world became a lot smaller. For the first time, it was possible for humanity to communicate almost instantaneously despite distanc...

In the late 1990s the fastest way I communicated with my family was by waiting in line at my high school’s telephone booth. I always prayed that someone would pick my call on the other end.  We have come a long way in two decades and a mobile revolution has broken down the barriers that kept us apart. The rapid urbanization we see today is as a result of better communication.   It is estimated that by 2016, 500 million Africans will be living in urban areas and the number of cities with more than a million people will increase to 65 .   In these cities traffic congestion, water and air pollution, cramped and littered living spaces will continue to be a constant reminder of strained resources.     While all this is happening a technology revolution is quietly taking shape.  In 2014, Mozilla announced the intention of developing a $25 smartphone in a consortium with Indian phone-makers, Spice and Intex, and Chines...