Meet Kenya’s daring problem solvers

Ever since Kenya invented the mobile money transfer service Mpesa, in 2007, the country’s innovation space has been getting busier by the day. Perhaps egged on by the high rates of unemployment, newly minted graduates are thinking outside the box – creating inventions that are inducing venture capitalists to seek a piece of the innovation pie. And opportunities for innovation abound. A locust plague in northern Kenya piqued innovators to think about animal feeds; others saw paving blocks and roofing tiles in plastic waste; discarded flip flops littering our beaches became boat-building materials. Even the dark cloud of the Covid-19 pandemic has had its silver lining. msafiri takes a look at recent innovations that are once again putting Kenya on the global map.

Skanda and his team repurposed 30,000 flip flops into a 10m-long dhow, weighing 7 tonnes, while the sail was made from 1500 plastic bottles. This was a world first

1 THE FLIPFLOPI MIR ACLE

In 2015, repulsed by the increase in rubbish on Africa’s beaches, Ben Morison, founder of Far & Wild Travel, came up with a radical idea – collecting tonnes of plastic waste, mainly flip flops, and creating a sailing dhow similar to those that have plied the waters of the Indian