A New Research Centre for ICT to be set up

Last Updated 14 years ago by Kenya Engineer

The University of Nairobi (UoN) will house the new research centre aimed at promoting development of relevant and user-friendly softwares .The Centre of Excellence in Computing for Development as it will be referred to will focus on key areas including mobile money transfer, e-governance and ICT for development.

The center to be based at the University’s School of Computing and Informatics follows concerns by researchers and industry players on the slow uptake of mobile money applications despite the country achieving a 70 per cent mobile penetration rate. The concerns were raised during the inaugural Africa Mobile Money Researchers conference held at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies in Nairobi.

The lack of synergy between the industry and the developers has been blamed as the cause of failure for most applications to make an impact in the market. The center will however enjoy a multi-disciplinary human resource capacity that will enable researchers come up with comprehensive market insights from conceptualization to commercialization of applications.

“Lack of understanding of consumer needs has seen many applications brought to the market with producers not thinking through the whole product cycle”, noted Prof Timothy Waema an associate professor in UoN.

Funding of the centre is expected to come from the yet-to-be-established government research kitty. The government is expected to commit one per cent of the national GDP to research and development.Prof Waema added that they would also seek complementary funding from the private sector.

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