Plenty of white elephants in East Africa

The word "nfunirawa" comes from Luganda, a popular dialect spoken in the East African country of Uganda, and is loosely translated to mean "What's in it for me?". Companies that try to sell technology solutions and services in East Africa will often find this word used in the upper echelons where you are expected to 'line' the pockets of the technology decision maker who is already earning a salary that allows him to travel abroad on holiday more than once a year- in comparison to the rank and file who foot daily to work.

Because technology vendors are not selected on suitability or practicality but for the ability to line the pockets of the final decision maker(and sometimes his underlings) technologies implemented do not solve the problem for which they were implemented or 'almost' which as we know, does not count.

As a result, we find plenty of white elephants--technology projects that have only taken off theoretically(national ID project); technology projects that have died in infancy(rural internet projects); technology projects that do not factor in pressing issues like power availability, maintenance cost, local ownership (one-laptop per child); technology projects that do not include lowly stakeholders who unfortunately will be the major users of the technology-secretaries, assistants(consequently pcs gather dust or are used only to check personal email); the list of failed projects is long enough, unfortunately so is the list of donations for the ICT sector , whose donors will be satisfied with reports stating minimal results or a poorly crafted website.

We need to ask why with all the technology available in East Africa, the best ranked company in East Africa is KENOLKOBIL (EX-KENYA OIL CO.) at 79 out of 500 according to the The Africa Report http://www.theafricareport.com/rankings/top-500-companies.html. At a distant 139 is Safaricom then a distance off at 176 is Total Kenya. In other words, even though East Africa has 'invested' heavily in technology, the region's businesses do not seem to be earning as much as their West African or North African counterparts which have made similar investments in technology.