Kenya Dispatch #3: Digital Design and Bush Glamour

Along with Samasource intern and Stanford MBA student Kate Brennan, I spent the week interviewing staff from our 6 local partners. We heard some great stories. One young man working for Intrepid, a small software company in Nairobi, first touched a computer just over a year ago. Thanks to the Nairobits Digital Design School (a program that trains youth from slums in graphic design), he’s now designing the interface for Hope.FM, a Kenyan radio station. Another young man at Intrepid is working on an intake page for a Samasource YouTube captioning project.

On Wednesday, we were invited to dine with the fascinating Carolyn Roumeguere, a jewelry designer who was raised in Kenya by a Maasai father and a French-South African anthropologist mother. Carolyn is a pioneer of what I like to call “bush glamour” (she lives in a remote part of the country, flies her own plane, and sells her wares to the likes of Donna Karan).

Tomorrow morning we’re heading to the Dadaab refugee camps, home to more than 250,000 displaced people from conflict in neighboring Somalia. We’re going to figure out if we can use computer labs in the camps to help refugees earn money doing basic web-based work for a company in San Francisco.