Determinar si la infraestructura física entregada por el PMC se ajusta a las

It’s June 2016m and I’m sitting on a couch in the open-plan coworking space of the iHub on the 4th floor of the Bishop Magua Building. The couch is blue, almost a faded denim color with a square chocolate brown table in front of it. To my right is a small coffee bar with white tiles and a yellow-green wall, called Pete’s Coffee. Today the space feels buzzing and warm. The sun is finally out after a few days of English style cloud cover and the room is surrounded by full-length windows, filling the space with light and energy after the rain. Around the space sit about 25 different individuals, most working at laptops with headphones on and coffee cups or water bottles nearby, while others are engaged in discussions with their neighbors. Some I know to be entrepreneurs working on small startups, others are freelance developers working on code for contracts, others are students participating in ongoing coding bootcamps, while a handful are employees at the iHub. I’ve been away for a week doing some data collection in Mombasa so my time quickly fills up catching up with colleagues and friends. A British man running a small technology NGO comes to tell me about his recent work trip to South Sudan helping a group there figure out how to use a new SMS program to report conflict. One of the iHub’s

communication officers gives me an update on how their communication strategy has changed in the week I’ve been away. I send him links to some YouTube videos I think might help with their new strategy. A freelance blogger I know asks about some photographs that I owe him for a piece he’s doing on Safaricom in the tech space. The space’s community manager chats with me about the stresses involved in organizing a startup competition, DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival, that’s scheduled to take place the next day. And one of the entrepreneurs who regularly works in the space comes by to ask my “non-developer” opinion about the new user interface for a music application he’d been developing.

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It has been five years since I first visited the iHub and started this ethnographic process. And over the course of that time, I have had many days like the one described above. Most days there were filled with constant conversations and face-to-face interactions with the iHub’s staff, with the entrepreneurs that they hosted, and with many of the Kenyan and international visitors who passed through the space. Some days were more active, like when the space was taken over by startup competitions, like the DLD Tel Aviv one mentioned above, or by a TED cocktail event to recruit new fellows. Some were much quieter and were spent simply working on my laptop on a particular project, often related to the iHub’s communication strategy, while seated next to the iHub’s staff. But regardless of how busy, every day served as a reminder of how the day-to-day lived experiences of the people around me were not just locally-grounded in the physical space in Nairobi in which we were situated, and in the geographically located communities in which they belonged, but were also intricately engaged with “multiple elsewheres” (Mbembé & Nuttall, 2004), in other parts of Kenya, Africa, and across the globe. Even from my first visit to the iHub, it was readily apparent that it was a physical space full of “flows, of flux, of translocation, with multiple nexuses of entry and exit points” (Mbembé & Nuttall, 2004, p. 351).

Mbembé and Nuttall wrote in a 2004 special edition of Public Culture that both the popular and academic representations of Africa continued to describe the continent as “apart from the world” (Mbembé & Nuttall, 2004, p. 348). The field of ethnography certainly shares some of the blame for this with its historic conceptualizations of bounded isolated African fieldsites distinct and apart from the world that the researchers inhabited, combined with the reluctance many of us have about generalizing beyond the unique fieldsites that we study (Ferguson, 2006). Quite the contrary, as Mbembé and Nuttall have argued, Africa, and particularly its cities, have long been “embeddedness in multiple elsewhere” (Mbembé & Nuttall, 2004, p. 348), and

continue to be “places of experimentation for engagement, the terms of which are not exclusively fixed or determined in advance” (Simone, 2001).

With technological advancement and the pace of economic and cultural engagement from such elsewheres increasing, urban studies scholars like AbdouMaliq Simone have shown how Africans, like people elsewhere, are even more closely interconnected with people and ideas from around the world than before (Simone, 2004, 2010). Ethnographers too have explored more frequently in the last 10 years the multiple “elsewhere” in Africa and their connections to the globe through the production of media content (S. Avle, 2011) and in their use of the internet (Jenna Burrell, 2012), how those connections complicate the processes of meaning making and identity construction among urban Africans (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001). But to date, I believe there has still be insufficient research into how Africans negotiate these complicated processes through their participation in the production of new technologies, the very platforms through which we experience and engage with one another online. The African theorist Herman

Wasserman recently wrote that “historical narratives about the internet have tended to foreground the development of technology itself rather than the experiences of its users” (Wasserman, 2017, p.129). The development of new histories and understandings of the internet needs to include not only the experiences of the users, but also the experiences and subjectivities of the producers, from those writing the latest data mining algorithms at Facebook to those developing a new privacy enhancing application in Mombasa. And while a wealth of new research is emerging that looks at technology producers, particularly in the field of Human Computer Interaction, we need more research in this area. Especially with how interconnected and often hierarchical I found work in the Global Community of Technology Innovators (GCTI) to be, we need more research that looks at the experiences of designers, programmers, engineers, and entrepreneurs in diverse contexts like Kenya or from diverse socio-cultural and economic backgrounds. Such research could be crucial for helping to understand the quality of access that diverse individuals have or don’t have to participate in the important technological development processes shaping everything from how we communicate to how we send money.

It is my hope that this dissertation has taken a small step in this direction and shown how a group of Kenyan innovators at the iHub are negotiating their engagement with an imagined community of technology innovators around the world. Through a rich communicative ecology of in-person visits and shared online platforms, YouTube videos and TED talks, news articles, entrepreneur biographies, and media narratives, members of the iHub are connected to the practices, stories, and values of their counterparts abroad. Through physical spaces like the iHub, they are adopting elements of material culture that have become “transnationally legible emblems of innovation” (Irani. 2015, p. 801), recognizable to anyone building or hoping to build a startup around the world. Moreover, through the concurrent migration to and touring of people through the iHub and other sites of innovation in Nairobi, and of Kenyan entrepreneurs through similar spaces abroad, they are connected in person as well as virtually and symbolically. Some of the people I knew at the iHub had studied abroad and returned to start companies in Kenya, like Avle’s ‘glocal’ entrepreneurs in Ghana (S. Avle, 2011), others had traveled abroad for startup competitions or had been invited to give talks or appear on panels at conferences at MIT Media Lab, South by Southwest, and to entrepreneurs’ clubs in Hong Kong. Others had never left Nairobi but worked for large Western companies like Google or IBM or with American entrepreneurs, Chinese investors, or South African engineers, or met Ugandan entrepreneurs at startup competitions or Dutch investors at networking events.

But while the iHub’s communication strategists would likely characterize these

international connections and collaborations as necessarily positive, I hope to have shown in this dissertation how a more critical lens, using a theoretical framework that integrates narrative theory with the communities of practice framework, sheds light on the hierarchies of power and legitimacy embedded in many of the narratives and much of this transnational work that can often influence Africans’ ability to be taken seriously as workers on an international stage.

In Chapter 2, I showed how the development of the Anyone Anywhere Narrative and its resonance with pre-existing identity narratives among Kenyans helped to influence many

Kenyans to try their luck at becoming tech entrepreneurs. While that narrative became adapted and retold locally to become the Kenyans Can! Narrative, conveying a belief that Kenyans were particularly well-suited for life as tech entrepreneurs, it could equally be applied in other cultural contexts that identify with some of the practices in the GCTI. In short, it could easily become something akin to a We Can Here! Narrative in many varied contexts.

But in Chapter 3, I used the lived experiences of the Kenyan innovators I worked with to demonstrate some of the very real limitations Kenyans face in becoming technology

entrepreneurs and gaining legitimacy as members of the GCTI, limitations which mean that everyone everywhere doesn’t always have the same chance of success or access to membership in the GCTI. In the case of Kenyan innovators, some of those limitations came in the form of geography. Even in a global community in which many individuals travel frequently and pitches and ideas can be communicated online, sometimes face-to-face engagement is still necessary for gaining access to the full repertoire of practices necessary to gain expertise and membership in a community of practice, even a global one. For others, narratives also created barriers. Narratives about members’ identity (like the Dominant Identity Narrative that often portrays the lone white male genius who drops out of university as the archetypal GCTI member) as well as broader narratives outside of the community (like Africa Rising or the Failed Continent Narratives) not only create a model for new members, but also create barriers for them, as these narratives can influence the expectations of gatekeepers like investors whose perceptions of what makes a successful entrepreneur are, often unconsciously, shaped by such narratives. Time and time again, I spoke with frustrated Kenyan entrepreneurs who believed that they were being pigeonholed by investors as “social” rather than “serious” entrepreneurs. And while many of them cared deeply about social issues like access to education or healthcare, their frustration came from the perception that they were not the ones setting the terms of what social impact was important or from the belief that they were somehow being treated differently from their entrepreneurial counterparts elsewhere in the world.

Moreover, my conversations with investors indicated that there is some basis for their concerns. Many investors in Kenya readily acknowledged that in choosing to come to Africa to look for startups, they were at least in part motivated by a desire to have a “social impact” and were looking for startups that could do so. And while this clearly comes from a well-meaning place and a desire to “do good”, it is still an approach that sees Africa as a continent in need of help from the “more fortunate” outside, rather than a continent building and shaping its own technological future. Furthermore, while many investors I spoke with were well aware of the potential for racial power imbalances and worked very hard not to judge entrepreneurs based on skin tone or nationality, the most recent data indicates that the majority of startups based in Kenya that were successful at receiving investment from venture capitalists had at least one white foreigner involved in the management team, if not serving as the founder or CEO. Many

investors, and even other members of Kenya’s own Community of Technology Innovators (CTI), attribute this to other factors, including communication style during the pitches or to a lack of experience. Kenya’s own CTI is indeed very young, but there are also not as many opportunities in it in which to gain experience in building a “serious” startup as there would be in London or Berlin. Part of this, I believe, is directly related to the self-selection of the investors who come to Kenya. As of the time of this writing, those looking for the niche kind of startup working on “social innovation” seemed to still be more likely to come to Kenya looking for investments than those not interested in social entrepreneurship. If other “serious” investors do not begin to see Africa as a place worth visiting for businesses beyond those in social fields like waste

management or health, it will continue to be difficult for Kenyan entrepreneurs to gain access to the practices necessary and to build up the expertise necessary to become serious entrepreneurs and respected members of the GCTI. This is not to say that social entrepreneurship is a bad thing or investors looking for startups with a social impact are in and of themselves problematic, rather it is to say that it will be problematic if foreign social impact investors continue to dominate the

investment landscape in Kenya’s CTI. More diverse investors from abroad, as well as the growth of a Kenyan and African investor pool could go some way to rectifying this.

Together, narratives in and around the GCTI reinforce pre-existing hierarchies of legitimacy within the community that disadvantage African innovators. As such, it is not impossible for Africans to gain legitimacy and become respected community members, but they do face roadblocks that should be further scrutinized.

In Chapter 4, I built on these findings and used my narratives-enriched communities of practice framework to analyze what happens when a discrepancy emerges between dominant community narratives like the Kenyans Can Narrative and the reality experienced by Kenyan innovators. In the case of the GCTI, when many Kenyans found membership in the GCTI and international legitimacy difficult to obtain and also found it difficult to shape community level practices in the GCTI, it is not surprising that many began to reorient towards Kenya’s own CTI and gradually turned away from the global. At the national level, many found a community of practice in which they had greater influence and legitimacy, and in which they were better able to shape the terms of membership and the community’s accepted practices.

The narrative/communities of practice framework also helps to understand how

individuals and organizations in Kenya worked to shape the accepted practices in Kenya’s CTI. In 2016, I believe that this national level community of practice was actively undergoing an important phase of re-negotiation and reconstruction. While in its early years, many of its innovation practices had mimicked those of Silicon Valley, by 2016 there was a movement to change the community’s practices to better reflect the needs and values of the Kenyans in the community. In addition to choices made by individual members to reject practices like the pressure to scale globally, inflated valuations, and the fetishization of open-plan spaces, members of this movement endeavored to change practices at the community level by employing

storytelling and narrative construction. By first using more subversive communication techniques like rumor and humor for telling counter-stories about exploitative practices in the community, they were eventually able to build on real world scandals like those at Angani and Ushahidi to construct counter-narratives about how sexual misconduct and discriminatory investment practices should be excluded from the community’s repertoire of accepted practices. I also make the case that the development of these counter-narratives represents a movement to disentangle the Kenyan CTI from the Global Community and to generate a debate about how to practice technology innovation in Kenya in a way that is reflective of Kenyan needs and values and not just subject to the pressure to conform to existing global norms of practice.

Of all the members of Kenya’s CTI, one of those that struggled the most during the narrative reconstruction of Kenya’s CTI was the iHub. In fact, I would contend that it is impossible to fully understand the iHub’s fate and its role in Kenya’s CTI without the narrative/communities of practice framework.

As perhaps the entity that had played the most active part in shaping the narrative about Kenya as a “tech hub” of Africa, drawing international media attention and investor money, the iHub was in many ways intimately invested in Kenya’s involvement in the GCTI. Acting as a gatekeeper for international members of the GCTI wishing to visit Kenya, the iHub also shaped which members and in turn the kinds of innovation practices Kenyans had access to; for many individual entrepreneurs, the iHub was also instrumental in helping them connect with investors and gain their own legitimacy in the GCTI. But with many of the iHub’s most visible members having acted as storytellers reshaping the Anyone Anywhere Narrative for the Kenyan context, the iHub’s reputation became closely linked with that narrative’s fate. In the end, when that narrative came into question as many Kenyan entrepreneurs began to voice their frustrations with their experiences with international investors, the iHub’s own reputation and legitimacy in Kenya’s CTI also began to suffer. For many in Kenya, the iHub had become more interested in belonging to the GCTI than the Kenyan CTI, leading to the growth of counter-narratives about it being over-hyped, too elitist, and too international. Over the course of five years, the iHub went

from being a prominent shaper of the narratives about its own organization and about Kenya’s CTI, to being overwhelmed by counter-narratives questioning its commitment to the local community and therefore its legitimacy within it. By bringing on new investors and a new CEO, implementing a new business model, and physically moving out of the Bishop Magua Centre, the iHub was symbolically re-exerting itself in this ongoing narrative debate. Given its connections to the GCTI, it is no wonder that it staked out a position in this debate in favor of moving the