When the seven African presidents attending the Transform Africa Summit in Rwanda this week needed to call upon a young Rwandan entrepreneur to hear from directly, it was Clarisse Iribagiza, CEO of HeHe Limited that they turned to.
“As young people we want to be inventors,” she told the onlooking heads of state. “Technology’s almost second nature to us.”
A primary theme of Transform Africa, which Wired.co.uk is attending, has been the small matter of equipping Africa’s disproportionately large population of young people with the skills to use the technologies that are gradually becoming available to them, so that they are able to take control of their own education and destinies.
A parallel summit has been running for young people based around the ideas of innovation and entrepreneurship, with a carefully selected group of top young startups from across sub-Saharan Africa, including HeHe, in attendance. The final day of the youth summit saw all the attending startups given the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a panel of moderators to win a prize of $7,500 of funding.
One thing that nearly all of the young startups had in common was that they were attempting to solve a very specific local problem. Fishmate, for example, is an online marketplace for fish in Kenya. Its aim is to build a collaborative network of fishermen, fish farmers, industry players and consumers in order to eliminate the middlemen in the selling of fish and enable almost real-time trading.
Another focused on providing mobile health solutions, also in Kenya, to reduce the high rate of deaths from cervical cancer. Kinehintsa from Ethiopia is an online database of construction companies and architectural innovations that aims to help connect people and promote good standards within the industry.
It was Iribagiza and her team at HeHe though that walked away with the top prize. HeHe, which is based out of The Office startup hub in Kigali, is already an established software development company in its own right, building mobile solutions for the government and Rwanda’s main mobile network, among others. It is now seeking funding to create a campus where it can train 25 senior-year high school students through a six-month programme to give them the hands-on technology skills to excel at university or in business.
Wired.co.uk caught up with Iribagiza and her team at Transform Africa to find out more about HeHe and what the company hopes to achieve.
Wired.co.uk: What problem were you trying to solve when you started HeHe?
Iribagiza: We started HeHe out of a six-week incubation that was run out of MIT and basically we were back at the university and the need we were trying to meet was the lack of relevant information for ordinary Rwandans. If they had a mobile device perhaps they could use it to to access this information. Information on maybe location, if they were trying to find a service, or something like that. That was the need we were trying to address when we started out.
How did you build on that initial idea?
It was a lot of experimenting for us — we tried out so many ideas and at the end of it all we learned how to build mobile information systems — basically endless databases of relevant information and build applications on top of that. Whether it’s information to help a client that’s in health, or in agriculture or education. We did a lot of experimenting I would say, and we are still doing that and trying to improve our systems.
What’s your favourite project that you’ve worked on through HeHe?
My favourite thing we’ve developed, of course, number one is a platform that we built with the help of Nike foundation for Girl Hub — it’s a project that’s running here in Rwanda to empower teenage girls — and we built them a mobile platform where girls can text in for free, give their feedback and opinions on the things Girl Hub is running in Rwanda. In just the first month of launching up to 10,000 text messages came in and we have been able to impact more than 12,000 girls all over the country.
Rwanda is known for fostering and encouraging innovation in girls — what are the challenges young girls in Rwanda face if they want to do what you’ve done?
I would say that the biggest challenge is that the role models out there that should be inspiring girls to press your career in technology are all male and sometimes the girls won’t really relate to them. They tend to think it’s a man’s world.
Rwanda has a very young population — how can they best be prepared to work within the knowledge society of the future, which will likely look very different to how it does now?
We need to invest in the young people, we need to expose them — whether it’s to technology or whatever they need to be exposed to — it needs to be at an early age. It’s never too early to start. For us as a company this is what we want to do. We want to have a research, development and support campus — a lab where basically kids can have a hands-on experience with technology in solving real-world problems. Get that critical thinking skill, learn how to write code, things like that.
How easy is it for young people to start their own businesses in Rwanda?
The environment is conducive for young people to do that, but it does take a certain amount of perseverance and the will to just go through with it because it is not easy to run a business, there is a lot of challenges. But getting started, the environment, that’s the easy part.
What do you hope to achieve in the future? What’s your long-term goal?
Iribagiza: We have a lot of dreams, we really do.
Richard Rusa (HeHe’s Creative Director): We would really like to position ourselves as the pioneers of an original way Africa can do things. We keep talking about home-grown solutions and we really want to be at the centre of that movement — that really starts it and boost it up.
That’s what we keep working on — trying to come up with solutions that will be really relevant to our communities and that are home-made — made by Rwandans and Africans and consumed by Rwandans and Africans. Seeing that gap in terms of skills, seeing the gap in content, seeing all that covered, we want to be able to look back and say we were part of this.
