beyondbrics

Artist's impression

Kenya has begun converting 5,000 acres of savannah dotted with antelopes and ringed by hills into “the most modern city in Africa”. Contractors begin work this week on the $10bn Konza Techno City project, 60km south of the capital Nairobi, which has been dubbed Kenya’s Silicon Savannah.

“This is an ultra-modern and visionary undertaking,” said Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, breaking ground on Tuesday in front of a 3,000 strong crowd at the scrubland site, which he said would be a game-changer for Kenya’s $36bn economy. “You may not believe that there will be 200,000 jobs here, but you better just keep watching.”

Designers say the scale of the project compares with creating another Manhattan, central London or inner-city Beijing.

“This is a globally significant project,” says Todd Sigaty at SHoP Architects, which leads the design team for the master plan and has previously designed Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, which opened last year.

The project has been designed to tap into Kenya’s emerging role as a centre for information technology and innovation.

The country has four undersea fibre-optic cables for high-speed internet, which could rise to seven by the end of the year. In 2007 Kenyans created a system to send money and pay bills via mobile phones that today transfers the equivalent of 27 per cent of its GDP and has been exported around the world.

Rather than echo a smattering of tech parks and business centres starting up on the continent, Kenya envisions a broader city-from-scratch to bring research universities, industry and government together, along the lines of Silicon Valley.

“We want to use that to incubate start-ups,” says Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary at the ministry of information and communications, who conceived and lobbied for the project against naysayers.

“We can quickly create something like Canary Wharf,” he says. “It can never be a white elephant – why would it be when land in [Nairobi district] Upper Hill for one acre is 1bn shillings [$11.5m]. We bought Konza for 200,000 shillings an acre.”

The government is counting on winning the lion’s share of financing from global and domestic private sector players keen to tap into African growth and Nairobi’s appeal as a pan-continental hub.

Already companies such as Google and IBM are looking beyond South Africa for regional headquarters and Kenya is benefitting.

The government will spend an initial $210m building the basics – water, energy, sewerage, roads – and hopes the private sector will take over after that, building offices, homes, universities and data centres in line with a state-led master plan. The first $3bn five-year phase envisages housing 30,000 people.

Ndemo says 14 companies, including China’s Huawei, Canada’s Research in Motion and Korea’s Samsung, are ready to work with developers to design and build their plots. Others are hanging back until after elections slated for March 4. Boeing and Fedex have also discussed making Konzo their Africa headquarters, said vice president Kalonzo Musyoka. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“We want to build the national database, an airport for low-cost connections and a university here,” said Richard Bell, CEO of East Africa Capital Partners, a venture capital fund among the 14 that has raised $300m for regional technology investments in the past four years.

The pre-election launch of Konza is a deliberately timed effort to signify hopes Kenya will ride out forthcoming polls, which take place in the shadow of violence that killed more than 1,100 people following 2007 elections and stalled the economy.

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Kick-starting Konza, Kenya’s ‘silicon savannah’, beyondbrics
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