Kenyan Social Entrepreneurship and Wishvast
January 16th, 2009The first week of the Kenyan social entrepreneurship program has convinced me that signing up for this venture was one of the best decisions I’ve made this academic year. It was great to have a chance of meeting people in different disciplines who want to work towards a common goal. The program is composed of several overlapping classes at Penn State University that are all working together. The projects meet individually, but there is a weekly seminar that students from all projects must attend.
I signed up for the Wishvast project, a cell-phone based social network that is currently in stealth because of intellectual property issues. The two other projects are:
Ecovillage
- Building infrastructure, education, agricultural, and microenterprise systems for the Children and Youth Empowerment Center (CYEC) in Nyeri, Kenya
- A self-sustainable medical station that will enable the remote evaluation of Kenyan patients.
The Ecovillage project team will be primarily be working within the CYEC compound, but Mashavu and Wishvast will develop products that will be beta tested in the area and eventually distributed across the country (maybe even the continent).
Wishvast was the project that sparked my interest in enrolling in the Kenyan classes. The technology and social-media aspect immediately caught my eye, and I could easily relate to the goals that its founder, Khanjan Mehta, had envisioned. Wishvast was also an opportunity for me to pursue my interests in social entrepreneurship. Over the last semester I have been reading up on ideas like the “double bottom line” and “social return on investment.” My close friends and I have had many discussions about starting up businesses and pursuing ideas to realization. Wishvast is a service that could potentially change the way millions of entrepreneurs interact in Kenya. I enrolled in this class because I found that I was very passionate about the Wishvast mission.
I want to bring my knowledge of social media, information technology, operational security, and intelligence analysis to the table and give a valuable contribution to Wishvast. I am championing Wishvast’s network management infrastructure . This component is crucial to the reliability and usability of the Wishvast network. Ultimately, I will help create a service that will be valued by its end-users in Kenya. I want our users to be enabled by the value of the relationships that they build on the Wishvast network.
The skills that I hope to develop during the course of this project will reinforce many of the key concepts that my IST and Security and Risk Analysis degrees emphasis. I want to bring back my experiences that I gain from the Wishvast project and apply them to my future career(s). A technology or security start-up has been a recent interest of mine, and I think the Wishvast project will be a good starting point in developing entrepreneurial skills.
The first Kenyan seminar, which meets every Tuesday evening, covered the organizational breakdown of the Ecovillage, Mashavu, and Wishvast teams. Later on we had a speaker give us information on the Children and Youth Empowerment Center in Nyeri, Kenya.
Nyeri, Kenya - Googles Maps
The only minor setback I have with our seminar class is the usage of the distance learning classrooms. There are about 100 students enrolled in the seminar and space issues have forced us to be separated into two separate classrooms equipped with video conferencing systems. This is something that I believe might pose a challenge to the seminar’s learning objectives.
The first Wishvast project meeting was at 8pm on Thursday night. As Khanjan put it, we are lean and mean. Our small group consists of information technology specialists, one electrical engineer, one computer science major, and two post-graduate education students.
During our first official meeting, we got a chance to know one another, championed various components of the project, and assigned a couple of issues to research before our next meeting. We changed the time of our weekly gathering to 8pm on Monday nights. Looks like I’m going to miss this season of House unless I get my TV tuner working.
I will be posting weekly updates on the progress of the Wishvast project.