Iridium Interactive partners with KPMG for its annual Kenya’s Top 100 mid-sized companies Survey (‘Top 100 Survey’) as the Digital Partners for the Second Consecutive year. This is an initiative of KPMG Kenya and Nation Media Group. The Survey seeks to identify Kenya’s fastest growing medium sized companies in order to showcase business excellence and highlight some of the country’s most successful entrepreneurship stories. The Survey is to celebrate the entrepreneurs who have contributed to wealth and job creation in the country. KPMG intends that new role models and national heroes will emerge from the Survey.

Essentially, a “Top 100 Mid-sized Company” (‘Top 100 Company’) is one which ranks ahead of its peers in terms of revenue growth, profit growth, returns to shareholders and cash generation/liquidity. A Winning Top 100 company is one which has succeeded in progressively growing its market position in the industries in which it operates and over time.

The Kenya Top100 Conference is on the 09th Oct 2014, followed by the Gala Dinner on the 10th Oct 2014 when the Top100 SME Companies will be honored.

As Kuza Biashara Founder & Chief Mentor, Mr Sriram Bharatam, shares in this interview with CNBC Africa’s Bonney Tunya, small business owners can effectively leverage on technology to Learn, Connect and Grow.

Some Quick Takeaways From This Video

• How young entrepreneurs can benefit from our recent partnership with AITEC-Africa
• Insights into Kuza Biashara training for small businesses
• Insights into Sri’s TED talk on “Why start-ups fail”
• Insights into the TIBU system done by Kuza Biashara’s sister companies to improve healthcare services to TB patients

This is definitely an interview worth watching…and as usual we’re counting on your to SHARE IT!

About the Event

The AITEC Banking & Mobile Money conference was held at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies which is 5 Kilometers from the Nairobi CBD. The event was themed “Finance SMEs – Fire Up The Economy”. More than 350 guests attended, five of whom were young entrepreneurs who were sponsored by iridium interactive.

Notable speakers and moderators includes Mr. Fred Matiangi, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary For Information, Communication and Technology; Mr. Sriram Bharatam, CEO iridium Interactive; Heshan Devani, Founder VenCap Kenya; Mr. Sean Moroney, Chairman AITEC Africa.

#AITECmobilemoney – Twitter Trendsetter

If you are a Twitter fan of Twitter, you are familiar with the word hashtag. In this event, iridium Interactive took full charge of this Twitter handle, broadcasting to the entire world. In time, other guests and partners at the event joined in and the debate went viral. In less than 48 hours, word of the event reached over 184,000 twitter accounts. Cumulatively, our social media experts estimated the aggregate reach to be almost 500,000. Our sister organization, Kuza Biashara, also contributed to event success. Through the use of its popular blog which enjoys broad readership and its Facebook Page which has over 109,000 Likes, Kuza Biashara brought an near-instant buzz to the event bringing it to the attention of over 25,000 SME owners who form part of its client-base.

Comprehensive Coverage

A dedicated team of video production expert was on the ground to provide comprehensive video coverage for the event. Working tirelessly and with minimal breaks, the talented team set their eyes set on one goal – capturing every moment of the event and presenting it out to the world in the most elaborate ways possible.

The event was a success, all thanks to you…

Thanks to everybody who made this event the success of which participants, sponsors and organizers alike can be proud. We look forward to making #AITECmobilemoney2015 trend…see you there.

Aitec Africa has been focussed on ICT publishing, event management, professional development and training in Africa. AITEC has been a market-leader in terms of spreading knowledge on the Internet, computing and telecommunications across most of English-speaking Africa.

iridiumInteractive Limited is an Innovative Business Solutions company that helps some of the world’s leading brands solve their complex business problems. Iridium has success stories across various verticals ranging from Non-Profit, Education, Retail, Healthcare, Consulting, Manufacturing, Media, Entertainment and Government.  Iridium is uniquely positioned with varied experience and success stories and recognitions, both International and National.

African banks have a great challenge in overcoming their heritage of colonial banking, which was designed to cater primarily for government, corporate and high-worth individuals. The bottom part of the pyramid has been badly neglected. Now that the mobile operators are setting the pace in terms of providing low-cost banking services, banks are scrambling to catch up. This they can do not only through technological innovation, but also through a customer-oriented corporate culture and service innovation.

Entering its eighth year as the region’s leading banking forum, AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA Conference 2014 is set to address the key issues faced by the region’s increasingly dynamic financial services sector. The 8th edition of AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA Conference 2014,  slated to take place on the 10th & 11th of September, the event will draw over 350  Banking & Finance professionals from Banking / Mobile Banking industry from the COMESA region and a representation from the Industry & SME Sector .

The 2-day event will showcase

• 04 Indepth Workshops
  • Latest anti-money laundering threats and strategies
  • Achieving compliance with ISO27001
  • Securing data in on-premise and cloud infrastructure
  • Effective incident response and investigation

• Focused on 09 Topics
  • How can banks better support SMEs – and fire up the economy?
  • Innovation for inclusion,  Solutions for consumer services
  • Mapping low-income financial needs and services
  • Solutions for financial inclusion,  Security strategies & solutions
  • Core banking: Breaking the meld
  • Agent banking for financial inclusion
  • Regional payments integration

Which will be presented by

• 58 speakers
• delivering insightful keynotes, panel discussions and breakout sessions.

iridiumInteractive is the Digital Partner of AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA Conference 2014.  Speaking on this occasion, Mr. Sean Moroney, AITEC Africa Chairman said “We are pleased to have signed up with iridiumInteractive as our Digital Media Partner for all our events.  It is through them that we will be reaching out to a wider audience plus provide interactive participation in the conference, both pre and post conference.”

This initiative is to identify Kenya’s fastest growing medium sized companies and showcase business excellence, highlight & celebrate the country’s most successful entrepreneurship stories, who have contributed to the wealth and jobs in the country. Beyond the Top 100 there is also another level, the Club 101. iridiumInteractive has been encouraging the members to push themselves to get into Club 101.

Partnering with KPMG Top 100 Survey for the second consecutive year, iridiumInteractive made a positive impact by contributing towards creating the digital assets, which is the online platform where prospective participants could learn about the survey and even fill in the survey and perform their financial calculations.

And as thought leaders, iridiumInteractive brought in the media buzz by leveraging the Social Media to promote an opportunity like this. This not only enhanced the reach to the prospects but also showed them how they can leverage this and go beyond. iridiumInteractive, when it first partnered with KPMG Top 100, brought in a spate of innovative ideas, which were very openly embraced by the Policy Team and the people behind KPMG.

As Sriram Bharatham, CEO and Founder, iridiumInteractive affirms “There is no other platform like KPMG Top 100 as of my knowledge right now in East Africa. And what really encouraged us and what we are seeing here is that as a team, collectively, all the partners are really driving at setting the bar higher. This is the 2nd consecutive year that we are part of it and we have already raised the bar. And we will continue doing this till there is a time we can see, there is a change coming in.”

Sriram Bharatham realized the need to have a community of entrepreneurs who could trust each other and serve as a sounding board for learning and growth. He wanted to create a group of likeminded entrepreneurs who would share common core values and work together towards nurturing and growing their career paths. As he says “ The chapter launch is one of the high points in my life”

Sriram Bharatam who pioneered EO East Africa Chapter in August 2013, as the Founding President of Entrepreneurs Organization East Africa received the Randi Caroll Award for the Best EO start up Chapter globally at Athens. The Global Leadership Conference was attended by 1,100 Entrepreneurial leaders from 46 countries. EO East Africa achieved a membership of over 45 in just one year.

Sriram Bharatham expresses his mission, his goal in establishing the EO Chapter “ We wish to create a positive learning environment and help local and regional entrepreneurs leverage the EO network. We are also pursuing opportunities in the form of local and regional learning events, which will serve as an opportunity to create once- in-a-lifetime experiences for our new and prospective members. As Chapter President, I want to set the right structure and culture, and nurture leaders who can sustain and grow our influence beyond East Africa. And as a task force member of EO’s Africa 750 initiative, I’m helping EO achieve 750 members by 2018 and roll out Africa as an independent region. As a chapter, we’re confident that we will play a major role in achieving these targets”

As a young organization, ALA was thrilled to have the ability to utilize Salesforce under the “Power of Us’, program run by the Salesforce Foundation. Unfortunately, ALA’s Salesforce implementation across differently, rapidly growing departments, were not coordinated as a result of which data became increasingly complicated and problems arose with data integrity and duplication due to data uploads with inconsistent review and clean up. Things got complicate further by the creation of two silos of data, -Salesforce and a password protected portal.

Iridium Interactive stepped in to optimize ALA’s ACN platform into a scalable, user-friendly one that allows its Staff, Students and Graduates to interact with one another, identify opportunities like internships, mentoring and job openings, and also support ALA’s graduates at university and throughout their careers.

Using the Salesforce platform , Iridium built a robust ACN portal with a fully personalized user experience for prospective students and applicants The portal consolidates all the information the potential students need in one place and displays necessary information to students at different points in the application process.

Sriram Bharatham,CEO and Founder of Iridium Interactive spoke about the challenge “ ALA teams were working in silos on various islands of systems. Data integrity and reliability was at high risk and as a result, the communication with ALA graduates were ad-hoc, intermittent and mainly via email, all this resulting to highly dissatisfied users. They made an excellent choice of working with Salesforce but the biggest challenge was that it needed to be tamed internally along with other islands of systems in place”

Sharmi Surianarain, Director of Lifelong Engagement, Africa Careers Network, ALA, appreciated Iridium’s role “ Iridium Interactive helped us to significantly streamline operational efficiency and simultaneously enabled the ACN team to provide imporved feedback, timely notifications, closely matching with opportunities stated with career interests etc.

The ability to process over 1000 applications, link with over 400 partner organizations and over 800 students in network, have greatly improved ALA’s customer service orientation, with Iridium’s infallible guidance

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.*

Theme: Dream. Live. Become

Nairobi, Kenya
August 10th, 2013
About this event

TEDxKaren brought together 100 people from around Nairobi to listen to a stunning array of presentations by renowned speakers.

Topics covered included waste management, youth empowerment, entrepreneurial idea incubation, environmental consciousness, diaspora economics, online reputation management, water conservation, brand protection, technological renaissance, ethnic rivalry, graphic design and extrasensory perception.

Speakers

Sriram Bharatam
Founder and Chief Mentor, Kuza Biashara Ltd

Stephen Njoroge
Founder and President, We Care Club

Diana Mong’are
Founder and President, Green Planet Inc.

Viona Leboo
Diaspora banker. Harvard University sophomore.

Maureen Kagambi
Social Media/ Research Professional, International House LImited Kenya.

Josh Folorunso
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, 4LR Graphic Design Ltd

Francis Ekii
Founder of Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge- Uganda

Speaking on this occasion, Sriram(Sri) Bharatam, Iridium Interactive CEO and Founder said, “The best part about the TIBU solution is that it simplifies the delivery of health care services for patients and health workers alike and provides a cost-effective platform to reach every person requiring treatment across the country.”

TIBU is the only comprehensive disease tracking and health information system available globally. TIBU seamlessly integrates treatment and monitoring from patient to health facility to county and provincial health offices, and finally to Ministry of Health in Nairobi. This hybrid solution connects patients and providers through Android devices and Internet Cloud infrastructure and can successfully operate even in remote locations where there is no electricity and mobile signals.  TIBU’s real-time mapping, data analysis and reporting capabilities empower Ministry of Health staff at all levels to monitorand take immediate corrective actions, such as re-supplying warehouses when drug shortages arise or reallocating staff when patient demand increases.

In less than four months of national roll out across Kenya, TIBU captured electronic medical records for 75% of all Kenya’s TB patients and has reimbursed over US$300,000 (approx. Ksh. 28 million) to patients through more than 146,000 mobile payments via M-PESA. Android tablets are used to access electronic health records and to deliver short training videos developed by Iridium interactive to Ministry staff on how to operate TIBU, how to use the tab device itself, and how to gain or update medical knowledge and skills.

With the financial support of USAID, theKenya Ministry of Health provided the policy and technical direction to Iridium Interactive to develop  TIBU,  a Comprehensive Solution for Healthcare Delivery in collaboration with its innovation partners, Safaricom and Tangazoletu.

TIBU provides real-time TB and Leprosy data into DHIS 2 or the District Health Information System, Kenya’s National Health Data System and has done so by connecting information systems used by other MOH units or projects. Thus, the TIBU platform has the potential to expand into other disease verticals in Kenya, such as HIV/AIDS and Malaria, or be scaled geographically across Africa.

The 2013 Google Innovation Awards Winners were announced at the “Connected Kenya 2013” ICT event held at the SarovaWhite Sands, Mombasa on May 27-30, 2013. The Connected Kenya Summit is the brainchild of the Kenya ICT Board in consultation with industry players and key government decision-makers. The Summit provides a platform for collaboration, capacity-building and priority sharing between government and the IT sector to link and accelerate implementation of government IT projects to world class standards. The Connected Kenya Summit has been successfully held since 2009.  The theme for the 2013 Connected Kenya Summit was “The County Citizen. Served“

It is difficult to imagine that more than 150,000 people are affected by TB in Kenya every year and it is one of the major causes of mortality in the country. Do you know that in 2010 alone there were about 10 million orphan children as a result of TB deaths among parents throughout the world? It is very difficult to treat a HIV person infected with TB, and what is worse is that they have the potential to infect 15 others.

The estimated number of people falling ill with tuberculosis every year is declining, though very slowly. That is good news, for it means that the disease is being contained. The introduction of the new digital programme called TIBU that will help in controlling TB and managing the data of patients affected by the disease and ensuring zero TB tolerance by the year 2015.

Dr Shahnaz Sharif, the Director of Public Health and Sanitation said TIBU was model that was specially created to ensure proper data management and monitoring of data of all the TB patients in the country. One of the essential features of the programme is that it not only keeps a track of the progress on the treatment of patients but it also keeps a track of patients who have defaulted in their treatment.

TIBU is a unique model that specifically takes care of the challenges of data management and ensures tracking and monitoring the data of all TB patients throughout the country and successfully keep track of their treatment progress. The system also provides incentives to the patients for ensuring that they complete the full course of treatment – Patient Support Allowance – which will be provided through M-Pesa.

The cost of the first phase has been estimated at about Sh. 43 million while the second phase that involves rolling out the programme throughout the country will cost about Sh.130 million. The TIBU integration platform is DISH2 system of social services delivery using mobile technology.

The best part about TIBU is that it simplifies the health delivery services and provides an equitable platform for tackling the disease. The TIBU Collaborative Programme is a revolution in Health Service Delivery and as they say, it is simple, efficient, and trustworthy.