This term, KIST was happy to welcome MIT-AITI's first mobile programming
course in Rwanda. For six weeks, a team of four instructors from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Austin Brinson, Matthew Davidson,
Crystal Mao, and Ernie Park) taught a program on mobile technologies and
entrepreneurship to a class of twenty-six third year students in KIST's
Computer Science department.
The class met for 2-5 hours daily and was comprised of lectures, programming
labs, entrepreneurship workshops, and guest speakers. To cement a practical
merging of technical and business skills, the program culminated in a
business plan competition on July 21st, 2010. In preparation for the
competition, AITI students worked in teams of 4-5 to develop a 10 minute
business pitch, written business plans, and working technical
implementations of their ideas for mobile businesses. An audience of local
business leaders and entrepreneurs was invited to judge the competition and
offer their advice and mentorship to the teams.
The winning team, Inshuti, received the top prize of $3000 for their
SMS/web-based jobs listing, and second place winner Map-i won $1000 for a
mobile e-hospitality application that helps travelers to Rwanda find
affordable lodging (Many thanks to Google Africa and MIT MISTI for the kind
sponsorship and support!) . Other prizes included a laptop to the student
with the best technical implementation, as well as full-funding of start-up
costs to third place team. All of the students in the program also received
MIT-AITI Certificates for completing the program.
We hope that the class will use the skills and network gained from the course as
encouragement for
a lifetime of technology-based entrepreneurial ventures, and we are
optimistic that the MIT-AITI/KIST collaboration will continue for future
programs in the years to come.
KIST-MIT-AITI’s Training on Mobile Application Development
KIST was happy to welcome MIT-AITI's first mobile programming course in Rwanda. For six weeks, a
team of four instructors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Austin Brinson, Matthew
Davidson, Crystal Mao, and Ernie Park) taught a program on mobile technologies and entrepreneurship to
a class of twenty-six third year students in KIST's Computer Science department.
The class met for 2-5 hours daily and was comprised of lectures, programming labs, entrepreneurship
workshops, and guest speakers.
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Rwandan Minister of ICT judges our Elevator Pitch Competition
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Wednesday was another crazy, busy day for us!
With projects moving forward full-force, most of the day was spent in “workshop” mode. We
met with teams individually to give feed back on their presentations and to help them rethink
Tuesday’s ideas from both a technical and business-strategy perspective. We had been a little
concerned about the feasibility of some of the more grandiose ideas (generally requiring initial
cooperation from government ministries or large corporations), but by the end of the meetings all
the teams had come up with something that is both self-implementable in the short term and
scalable in the long term.
Team reps present their elevator pitches to the esteemed panel..
Towards the end of class, the Rwandan Minister of ICT Dr. Ignace Gatare, the Rector, and
several other members of KIST faculty/staff joined to watch our teams in their second minicompetition of the week–2 minute elevator pitches. Proud-teacher bias aside, our teams
absolutely rocked it! I was amazed at the improvement in professionalism, clarity, and overall
idea quality in their presentations after only 1 day. Gauging from the audience’s reaction to the
pitches, our guests were similarly impressed. The Rector encouraged all of our teams to apply for
the five 20,000 euro PSF prizes, which is another great example of the resources beginning to
open up for young entrepreneurs here.
We put the Minister (a former KIST professor) on the spot by asking him to select a winner for
us and he graciously agreed, awarding the 50,000RWF prize to Team Gerayo for their pitch of a
mobile/web-based hotel and short-term home rental directory in Rwanda.
All of our presenters with Minister Gatare
After a long day, we relaxed with dinner + world cup at the famous poolside of Hotel des Milles
Colline. (wooo Spain!)
Tags: rwanda10
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Final Projects are Underway! - Initial Ideas
Saturday, July 10th, 2010
Team Rad_i talks about their idea for a suite of mobile applications
There are less than three weeks left until the business plan competition!
To get our class comfortable with the idea of business competitions, we had all seven teams give
initial pitches of their ideas on Tuesday, with a mini-prize of 50,000 RWF going to the team with
the most convincing idea.
(The timestamps from many of the presentations we got were from veeeery early in the
morning–not unlike how group projects operate at MIT!)
While all the teams still have lots of work to do in refining their ideas, the proposed mobile
applications we heard were thoughtful and very socially conscious, spanning everything from
sending farmers agriculture updates to family planning calendars to systems for digitizing
medical insurance cards in Rwanda. Some teams also had fun coming up with extras like logos,
management structures, UI mock-ups, and future plans for entire suites of products.
After some deliberation, we awarded the prize for the day to Team Inshuti, who pitched an SMS
application that will connect rural job seekers with employment openings (currently, most job
openings in Kigali are advertised on the radio or in the New Times — both outlets witb
unreliable access in the countryside). Inshuti impressed us with a thorough, logical, and
confident presentation that spoke to the feasibility of their idea–great job guys!
To cement a practical merging of technical and business skills, the program culminated in a business plan
competition
on
July
21st,
2010.
In
preparation
for
the
competition, AITI students worked in teams of 4-5 to develop a 10 minute business pitch, written
business plans, and working technical implementations of their ideas for mobile businesses. Some of the
teams were proposing excellent m-health applications. An audience of local business leaders and
entrepreneurs was invited to judge the competition and offer their advice and mentorship to the teams.
All of the students in the program also received MIT-AITI Certificates for completing the program. We
hope that the class will use the skills and network gained from the course as encouragement for a lifetime
of technology-based entrepreneurial ventures, and we are optimistic that the MIT-AITI/KIST
collaboration will continue for future programs in the years to come.
On Wednesday afternoon, we welcomed a sizable audience of KIST students, administrators,
friends, and of course judges to join us in the culmination of our work here–the MIT-AITI
business plan competition.
The Format:
team rad_i walks through their application, with excellent time management!
Each team prepared a 10 minute presentation, followed by 5 minutes of questions and comments
from the judges. The presentations discussed both business and technical aspects of their
proposals. All the groups were also able to include a live demonstration of their implementations,
which is impressive given the tight (<10 day) timeframe that we’ve been working with.
Our teams also prepared more extensive written business plans that were provided to the judges
in advance of the competition.
The Judges:
Dr. Carter Crockett, Partner at Karisimbi Partners
Jeff Gasana, Founder + General Manager of SMS Media
Emile Nyibizi, Founder of Bnizworks and Lecturer at Universite Libre de Kigali
Cyprian Kumwaka, Business IT Lecturer at Rwanda Tourism University + Former AITI alumni
We were very honored to have such an accomplished panel of business professionals volunteer
their time and expertise to our competition. The thought that they put into evaluating the
proposed businesses was obvious through the tough, thorough probing that each team went
through during Q&A (”the longest five minutes of my life”, as one student confided to me
afterward) !
Prior to the start of the presentations, we told the judges that the key criteria to look for is
viability — our program only wants to fund teams with realistically-implementable businesses in
the short term that also have the potential to scale well in the over time.
our esteemed judges hard at work
The Decision:
After nearly an hour of careful deliberation, the judges announced two winning teams — Inshuti
took home a first prize of $3000 for their SMS/web-based jobs listing, and Mapi won $1000 for a
SMS/web-based e-hospitality application. As a surprise (even to us!), there were additional
prizes from our judges as well — SMS Media gave a free laptop to Jean Delacroix (part of team
Digital Thunder) for having the strongest technical implementation, and judge Cyprian
generously agreed to self-fund the start-up costs of the third place team, Rad-i.
Listening to the judges explain the rationale behind their decisions was also a great personal
learning experience for me, as they discussed several local factors (regarding the habits of local
mobile carriers, for example) that I wouldn’t have the perspective to realize were important.