Worth Reading: 5 key takeaways for ICT development in the Caribbean from Silicon Savannah

Within the last seven years, Kenya, which has been dubbed “Silicon Savannah”, has become one of the leading ICT destinations in Africa, and is being increasingly recognised globally as a hotbed for tech innovation. This post highlights five takeaways from the Kenyan experience.

The event, which is themed “Developing the Caribbean”, is in its third year and focusedprimarily on Open Data ‘as a catalyst for regional development, and the role of software development as a locus of innovation’ (Source: event website). The conference also included a 24-hour Code Sprint or hackathon, where within 24 hours, teams of programmers compete to develop software applications using publicly available datasets. Similar to last year, conferences and/or hackathons are being held in: Cuba; Dominica Republic; Guyana; Jamaica; Suriname; Trinidad & Tobago.

At the Jamaica leg of the conference, the keynote speaker was Mr. Paul Kukubo, Chief Executive Officer of the Kenya ICT Board, a statutory corporation under the Ministry of Information and Communications that oversees the development of the marketing of Kenya as and ICT investment destination. Mr. Kukubo gave a riveting talk in which he shared some of Kenya’s strategies to become the ICT hub of East Africa. Outlined below are five learnings that Caribbean countries should consider in order to realise their own ICT-related development goals. More