William Ruto landed in San Francisco, western United States (Thursday). Before going to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the Kenyan president makes a stop to meet the giants of Silicon Valley. In particular, he must meet with the leaders of Microsoft, Intel, Google and Apple. New technologies are at the heart of the Kenyan president’s development strategy. He is banking in particular on his “Silicon Savannah” to offer employment to Kenyan youth.
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According to the spokesperson for the Kenyan presidency, William Ruto will focus on young Kenyan talents to attract American investors. According to a study published by Google and Accenture in 2021, Kenya already had 8% of African IT developers. Giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have already established themselves there. But make no mistake, explains a French entrepreneur based in Nairobi, these multinationals come looking for cheap coders. To read the magazine Business Daily, a junior developer can earn up to 300,000 shillings per month working for these large groups, or 2500 euros. Much less than in the United States, but it is still six times higher than the average salary of three-quarters of Kenyan workers.
Local start-ups, for their part, complain of seeing their talents siphoned off by the American majors who offer salaries with which they cannot match. Under these conditions, according to them, it is impossible to develop a real local ecosystem of new technologies.