In a recent post on Techloy, Bankole Oluwafemi wrote an insightful expository about how Google is pushing it harder and harder into the deeper trenches in the African market. They are really had at work. They are not just helping businesses come online and creating opportunities for schools to be connected and bringing more youths online and conversant with their product, Google is really putting its money where its mouth is. How?
In a blog post, Joe Mucheru, on the Google African blog, announced a recent support Google has just given to two different organisations that are helping more Kenyan’s embrace technology and connect to the internet. Google gave these two organisations USD 350,000 [approximately NGN55.3 million]. Wow! Who says Google is just playing around? If you don’t believe before that these guys mean real business, it is time to have a rethink.
Some excerpts of the release are stated below:
“Both Nairobi’s Innovation Hub (the *iHub) and Kenya Education Network (KENET) are doing really important work when it comes to building the Internet community in Kenya. The iHub, a popular hangout for techies, is home to many of Kenya’s young entrepreneurs, web and mobile programmers, designers and researchers. KENET is a non-profit institution that connects educational institutions with a private, affordable high speed Internet network. It supports many universities, tertiary and research institutions.
“Today we’re happy to be giving these two organisations USD 350,000 (KSh 28m) to help them expand their infrastructure and purchase tools to better serve the developer and academic communities in Kenya. We hope that this support will help strengthen the *iHub and KENET communities respectively. It’s the good work of organisations like these that helps us achieve our goals of increasing access to the Internet and creating locally relevant content. We look forward to following their progress!”
Google is definitely not going anywhere any time soon. The more they spread their tents the harder it is for individuals and businesses to avoid not having contact with them and using one or more of their products. This is particularly going to be interesting. I met one off the developers who won the Google Plus hackathon held at the CCHub recently and he told me they have a ticket to attend the I/O conference in America.
Do you think Google deepening its reach in Africa and Nigeria is good for the tech ecosystem? What’s your thought?
Image Credit: Anna Bishop
