Tandaa Grant review meetup to be held at The NaiLab

Kutandaza Tandaa.

Well, as always, I was the first one to make noise when the grant winners were announced.

Soon afterwards, after it was declared safe for the rest of the public to blog, some other blogs and gutter-press started talking about it. Calling names ofcourse, unlike here where ONLY facts were reported.

Being the Man he is, @pkukubo lent us his ear and we DEMANDED a meeting to address a number of issues we are not happy about the entire grant process. He obliged.

The government meeting room at Teleposta towers was too small for the expected crowd. So we suggested the meeting be moved to an ICT location. Bishop Magua.

Of course, insignificant attention seekers led by the one and only person with the longest and hardest pubic hair on twirra, aka Mr BigWig with a swag, refused to attend the meeting, if held at iHub. Understandable. The last time one of them showed up here, we witnessed a filming of Scream 5, Kenyan Edition.

So, to be fair to the unfortunate,

@Samgichuru of Nailab offered free space. At Nailab, there is an open-door policy and anyone is invited. All that is required, as always, is respect for others and mature talk. No censorship. No persona non-gratas.

The meeting will be held at 2 PM at Nailab, Bishop Magua Building, Ngong road, 4th floor. This Friday.

Among the issues some of my peers want to raise are:

• Where the focus is. Is it new entrants or start-ups? Whydo  tyre-kickers like PaySure get funded to start doing an Internet payment gateway, something SIMILAR to what companies like PesaPal, JamboPay and iPay already do and were denied the funding. PesaPal has carved a niche in mobile payments. Why not fund someone who knows what they are doing? Why fund a chef to do modelling, and leave a model out to dry.

• Why are startups being ignored, while million-dollar companies get grants? A double-standard with the point number 1. Why do companies like VirtualCity, with NO NEED for funding whatsoever, get funded (albeit on matching-grant), whereas people with viable products don’t?

• Where is the follow-up or background check? Someone read my last blog post and boisterously talked about how his ‘friend’ got the grant and partied with the money. What are the benchmarks? Are the funding decisions just based on proposals? Is the ICT board that lazy? Whatever happened to due-diligence?

Ofcourse, I am sure you have more questions to ask.

Welcome all. Even gutter-press. If Nailab is too far from your ghetto, let us know and we will Mpesa you the fare. For once utumie cab. Si matt fulltime.

Come to Nailab and let us make this a fruitful meetup. No insults or getting personal. Just facts and mature vibe.

And ofcourse, I give the rest of you permission to blog about this. As sensationally as you want.

Back to code.

Wazi