EAST AFRICAN LOCAL CONTENT INNOVATION SUMMIT: How to make content king in East Africa

East Africa’s enterprises and innovators have a unique opportunity on their doorsteps to learn new techniques in web content development at the East African Local Content Innovation Summit to be held in Nairobi over 7-8 August. The Summit is being hosted by Ignite Consulting and AITEC Africa in response to the urgent need that to develop local content relevant to local interests and needs, especially with the region about to link to the world via undersea fibre cables that will deliver much faster and cheaper Internet connections.

“The danger is that East Africa will now become swamped with international web content and users and enterprises alike will lose focus on the need to develop their own content that serves their own needs and projects their products, profiles and services to the outside world,” said Ross van Horn, Managing Partner of Ignite Consulting and one of the facilitators at the Summit.

The Summit is unlike a standard conference because the facilitators will make it highly interactive and use specialized techniques to leverage on the combined knolwdge, experience and ideas that all the participants will bring to the event. The objective is to develop actionable ideas and through collaboration over two days to serve local content ideas – as well as design plans and strategies for real world implementation.

The other facilitator at the event is Njeri Riongi, founder of Ignite and one of Kenya’s leading ICT pioneers. As a co-founder of Wananchi Online, Njeri enganged in web innovation and development at the early stages of Kenya’s entry into Internet-based business. Outlining the two-day progrmme, Riongi sad: “This Summit is unique in Kenya because the participants themselves will develop some of the content together. Instead of being fed prefabricated data through lecture format, all participants will spend much of their time in facilitated dialogue with their peers. We know that all participants will leave with actionable ideas that they can take back to their organizations for instant implementation.”