CIO Africa Magazine October 2022

VOL 28 | ISSUE19 | OCTOBER 2022 EDITION

DIANI · MOMBASA

Putting Technology On Trial ICT Enhanced Elections 2.0 If you had to think about it without picking a side, would you say technology won, lost or confused the election process?

Preventing A Hack Attack In 2022, there has been over 1.5 billion stolen in the crypto space.

what’s trending the latest news, technology, trends and innovations from across africa

KSHS.300 | USHS.9,000 | TSHS.6,000 | RWF.2,200 | OTHER USD.9

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Contents

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06

GUEST EDITOR

10

the lead

16

the lead 2

20

i.t leadership

36

thinking aloud

28

the round-up

34

nova

40

vmwARE - VFORUM

42

hard talk

Finserve Africa: The Milestones

Putting Technology On Trial - ICT Enhanced Elections 2.0

22

Why, And How, Kenya Must Prepare For Elections 3.0

Why ADC Has Invested $500 Million To Build More Data Centres

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Preventing A Hack Attack

The Latest News From The Continent

Handling Steep Learning Curves In Your Career Path

vForum Pictorial

Blockchain; More Fluff Than Fact

www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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editor’s note In Technology We Do/Not Trust?

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines trust as the “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” Or “one in which confidence is placed,” as well as “dependence on something future or contingent.”

We do not need a definition of trust for it to click with our reality. We all know when trust has been broken, and as adults, that has happened on more than one occasion. In fact, it would be completely insane to say you have never violated someone’s trust. You have. You will. You must. It is part of the human experience.

Trust features a little more than average in this edition. For starters, I don’t have much to say about the elections. A lot has been said, more of which you will find in these pages from those who are far more knowledgeable than I. What I do know is that voting can give you both a sense of power and a sense of powerlessness depending on your wager. The polls took a well-trodden path that led from ballot centres to the Supreme Court. We have been here before, so none of these was a shocker as such.

What the techies all understood this to mean though, was that the illusion of trust is just as important as trust itself. And when the illusion is broken, trust is perceived to have been broken. There are countless quotes about broken trust and how it can never be recovered, how it puts a dent in the world – a dent that can never be undented. Everyone from Shakespeare, Einstein, Lao Tzu to your mother has a chest of quotes on trust.

Trust, but verify – the journalist’s motto, is not abided by as often as you would think because it breeds skeptics who think there is such a thing as free-falling into trust. Yet, by its very definition, trust is jumping knowing that the net will appear. This is why trust is not easy. You could be the leader of the Free World, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a techie leading a team of techies or even someone being led, and you would need to trust something, someone and sometime.

Think of trust in a broader context.

“Trust is like a vase, once it’s broken, though you can fix it, the vase will never be same again.”

— Walter Anderson

In an imperfect world where humans are the power behind technology, and we must lean hard on tech, we kinda must trust it. We do that with our cars and phones and trust that Netflix will deliver what we pay them for on our smart TVs. We really have no choice but to trust tech. But and I am interested in hearing your thoughts on this, there is a mustard seed of doubt swirling somewhere in the primordial soup or in this case, source code. We don’t trust technology implicitly. We expect that it will do what it was made to do. Nevertheless, we trust.

PwC.com asks, “Can we really trust technology? To answer “yes,” we must make tech safe, secure, dependable, responsible, accountable, and protective of privacy and jobs.” We must, it seems, also make that tech ethical. This, naturally, raises the question whose ethics shall we fall back on? Natural law? Technology trust, “The subjective probability by which organisations believe that the underlying technology infrastructure is capable of facilitating transactions according to their confident expectations,” strikes closer to home for the CIO. Trust requires in-depth discourse. This merely introduces the topic. Next time you are confronted with tech, take a moment and reflect on your trust levels. You might surprise yourself. www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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FINSERVE AFRICA:

THE MILESTONES

Finserve Africa, Equity Group’s fintech subsidiary, drives the innovation and supports the Group’s digital and technological operations. It is well known for its groundbreaking products that include Equitel, Equity Group’s Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) as well as Jenga Payment Gateway and Jenga API. Jenga Payment Gateway (PGW), consolidates all paymentscard & mobile wallets to the Jenga platform and presents one integration to businesses enabling them to receive payments 6

www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

across 180 countries. Merchants also have the option to get paid by sending simple payment links to their clients wherever they are. In all this, security is key, Finserve has taken critical steps to be globally at par by maintaining the highest security standards in payments that is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant. It fuses Azure cloud Security and firewall with secure socket layer (SSL) at application level to give you an all rounded secure solution.

Jenga APIs provide an integrated platform for businesses

advertorial to send money, buy, pay, manage their accounts, manage credit, withdraw cash as well as conduct KYC, CRB and AML queries. It also facilitates payments to mobile wallets and banks, including integrating single airtime APIs that purchase airtime across multiple telcos. The platform takes away the complexity of building and integration with simple guides, API references and dashboards to get businesses started in no time.

With the growing adoption of e-commerce, Finserve is working on a marketplace solution that will offer both consumers and merchants a secure platform to trade a variety of products and services. The platform will take care of every stage of the whole e-commerce value chain in order to ease barriers for businesses and enable them to tap into expanded markets and reach a wider customer pool, including facilitating cross border trade . Today’s consumer is not limited to local goods, but is spoilt for choice. They can choose a platform that facilitates cross border trade and that’s where Finserve’s marketplace comes in.

With Equitel, Finserve’s flagship solution, customers get to enjoy convenience and greater value across mobile banking, 1 08/07/2022 07:29 customers telephonyCIO_API-PGW_AD.pdf and internet services.

Equitel provides

the convenience to manage their bank accounts, enabling them to send money to any bank and any mobile network, pay for goods and services, apply and receive instant loans on their phones. Equitel also offers fast browsing speeds and competitive call rates of 1 bob per minute across all networks.

With over 60 functionalities, the Equitel 4G SIM card gives customers freedom, choice and control at their fingertips.

This year, Finserve won 2 Gold awards (Fintech Company of the year and Payment Solutions of the year) at the 4th Edition of the Kenya E-Commerce Awards 2022 held in Nairobi.

The award recognizes Finserve’s continued commitment to innovation and customer-obsession.Finserve seeks to remain competitive globally while distinguishing itself as an innovator with futuristic solutions that will contribute to the ease of doing business in Africa.

Ready to take on this journey of growth and disruption with us?

Talk to us on sales@finserve.africa or support@finserve.africa today.

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ARTICLE by

John Gichohi Senior Systems Engineer East Africa, Fortinet

The Importance Of A Zero Trust Approach To Cybersecurity Maintaining network visibility, orchestrating security policies, and consistently enforcing controls has become particularly challenging due to near-constant digital innovation over the last few years.

Efforts to remain competitive in today’s digital marketplace have led to fractured network perimeters and the expansion of the attack surface. To address these challenges, IT teams must move toward a zero trust approach to cybersecurity.

Remote and Hybrid Work Connectivity Needs with Zero Trust The strain on security teams was exacerbated during the massive work-from-home shift that forced most employees to essentially operate as a branch of one. Due to increased network complexity, the need for remote connections to critical corporate resources, and the introduction of both work and personal devices on unsecured home networks, VPNs alone were not enough to securely support all the connectivity needs of remote and hybrid workforces.

The Zero Trust Approach to Cybersecurity Securing highly distributed networks – particularly those filled with remote workers, dynamically changing environments, and IoT devices– begins with a zero trust approach. This means trusting nothing and no one while also assuming any user or device that seeks network access has already been compromised.

With zero trust, no devices are allowed to connect to corporate resources freely.

Instead, any user or device requesting access must provide validated 8

credentials. Even then, they are only permitted to access the minimally required resources needed to do their job. By denying all unvalidated traffic by default, bad actors and compromised devices can’t even ping the network to explore its resources, let alone the rest of the network.

Organisations must adopt two critical strategies to implement a true zero trust approach to cybersecurity: zero trust access (ZTA) and zero trust network access (ZTNA).

Zero Trust Access (ZTA) The way ZTA works is by extending and expanding on the perimeter access controls already in place. This includes firewalls, authentication, authorisation, and accounting (AAA) services, as well as single sign-on (SSO). ZTA also adds additional levels of verification to this existing setup, such as tying access to the user’s role, physical geolocation, or even the time/day. All devices are likewise scrutinised to determine whether they are corporate or noncorporate assets, what software they are running, and whether they have the latest patches and required security solutions installed and enabled.

For network-connected devices without an end-user, such as printers, secured entryways, security cameras, HVAC systems, and other IoT solutions, a ZTA solution should also include network access control (NAC) technology for

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discovery, authentication, and control, in addition to also applying the same zero trust principle of least access.

Authenticating every device and user provides IT teams with up-todate network visibility and control, enabling easy identification of anything suspicious and allowing them to take appropriate countermeasures as needed.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) As the new addition to the zero trust model, ZTNA is designed for organisations and users who rely on applications. With ZTNA, any users connecting to the network on any device and from any location – including inside and outside the corporate network – are authenticated and granted access based on policy, with each user receiving the same level of protection.

ZTNA provides secure access to applications regardless of whether they are deployed in data centers or in private or public clouds. Once authenticated, users are granted access only to the requested application. The authentication process is dynamic, seamless, and transparent to the user unless they are denied access to something they do not have permission for.

Zero Trust is Vital IT leaders have been looking for ways to maintain network control and visibility as the network edge evolves and the threat landscape expands. The changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic made the need for consistent network visibility and access control even more pressing. With remote work likely here to stay even as offices open up around the world, and with network complexity ever on the rise, IT and security teams must implement zero trust protections and controls to enable robust cybersecurity.

Fortinet’s Zero-Trust Access framework allows organizations to identify, authenticate, and monitor users and devices on and off the network.

www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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ARTICLE by

Ben Roberts

Group Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies.

Putting Technology On Trial ICT Enhanced Elections 2.0 If you had to think about it without picking a side, would you say technology won, lost or confused the election process?

2022 had two moments in Kenya’s history when the world collectively held its breath. One was the afternoon of 15 August when Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Commissioner Wafula Chebukati announced William Samoei Ruto as President-Elect to the mellifluous tunes of a choir on repeat; the other, just as heightened if slightly less lyrical, when Chief Justice Martha Koome read the Supreme Court verdict on the Raila Odinga & Martha Wangari Karua V Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission & Others presidential petition citing phrases such as ‘hot air,’ and ‘bombshell.’

It had been a tense month of dread with an expectation of violence hanging in the air. There is no denying Kenyan elections have been fraught over the past 15 years. The stakes are always so high, business grinds to a halt. 2022’s Elections 2.0 dated back to The Kriegler Commission Report of 2007, one that conclusively merged the manual electoral system with a technological one.

In his paper Digital Dilemmas: The Unintended Consequences 10 www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

the lead Of Election Technology, Political Scientist Professor Nic Cheeseman puts forward that, “Digital technologies are increasingly used in elections around the world. Where the resources and capacity of the state are limited, some have argued that such technologies make it possible to rapidly “leapfrog” to cleaner and more credible elections.”

Nearly half of elections in Africa now involve the use of technology, especially to assist in the areas of voter registration, biometric authentication of voters and results transmission. The rapid expansion of ownership of digital gadgets combined with other emerging technologies such as social media have enabled widescale participation by citizens in campaigning, activism, commentating in and around election periods, all at the speed of light. But it does come at a high cost, and Kenya’s elections are reported to be one of the most expensive per citizen in the whole of Africa by topping $1 billion.

I love technology, and I do trust in tech to have the potential to increase transparency and improve reporting speed in any complex numerical or accounting process. But any such process that relies on humans to collect mass data, and input that data into digital systems, is going to have some margins of error which can be by data entry mistakes or deliberate actions of those humans in the process. The key to success of election tech falls somewhere between making the process easy for the humans involved to minimise mistakes, and to provide oversight and verification to make it impossible to have deliberate actions of tampering with the process.

Technology has been deployed progressively in elections over the years using methods like indelible ink made in India on the fingers of voters who have cast their vote, security features on the ballot papers, and even replacement of the paper “X marks the spot” method with voting machines. But when an election is close or contested, it can be complex to review the electoral process. www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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the lead I remember all too well as I was in the US at the time following the Bush vs Gore 2000 election, watching the painful comedy of election officers taking days and weeks to closely examine pieces of paper looking for “hanging Chads”, a technical term popularised at the time to describe a tiny piece of paper that had not quite been punched out of a voting card by the voting machine.

the ground. The 2017 elections featured the first use of the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management System (KIEMS), which featured biometric voter registration and validation at polling stations, counting ballots directly at the station, and electronic transmission of results forms, and online public cloud based central systems to publish results.

However, in recent decades the use of high-tech digital solutions has become more prevalent, with Latin America (yes, I said Latin America) leading the way in this area of innovation, deploying a digital voting pilot in Columbia as early as 1992. In 1998 voters in Brazil cast their votes using computers on a secure LAN, and Venezuela introduced the scanning and transmission of results. Technology that found its way to Elections 2.0. In fact, Smartmatic International Holding b.v, a multinational company with roots in Venezuela, was founded in 2000, inspired by the hanging Chad debacle, to explore better technologies to improve elections. Digital election technology can include: -

But the technology itself was deeply challenged, with allegations of hacking by the opposition at the time who successfully contested the elections in court, then later boycotted the second run of the presidential elections. The Kenya 2017 election story also saw the tragic and brutal murder of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ICT Director Chris Msando. The 2017 Supreme Court judgement brought legal clarifications that led to number of process and systems improvements

by IEBC in the elections of 2022.

Also, two important developments in ICT Infrastructure and foundational legislation had taken place in the fiveyear timespan.

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Biometric registration records voter’s fingerprints, faces, or other biodata to authenticate the person when they come to vote.

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Alternatives to the ballot paper using Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting, optical character recognition (OCR) and Optical Mark Recognition (OMR).

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Electronic transmission of vote tallies, to speed up collation, and to guarantee against tampering of election materials during ground transport.

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Counting and collating applications (even Microsoft Excel is very good at this) often using mobile phones.

With all this innovation, plus a history of contested elections and electionassociated violence, it is little wonder therefore that Kenya has been an adopter of some of these technologies, applied for the unique environment on

The rollout of 4G networks across the country has increased the availability of faster mobile data signals in Kenya.

A 2022 update to the Access Gap Study from the Communications Authority of Kenya, noted that over 96 per cent of the population of Kenya has a mobile phone data signal of some sort (2G, 3G or 4G) and that in fact 4G coverage is greater than 3G, due to the lower frequency band used which penetrates larger distances.

There are parts of where you can’t get a mobile phone signal though, and last year on a summit attempt for Batian Peak on Mt Kenya, I had a four-day (enforced) break from the digital world, since much of the Mt Kenya National Park lacks a signal. However, my guide carried a satellite phone for emergencies, and I also successfully tracked my progress using Liquid Intelligent Technologies 0G IoT (Internet of Things) network that is purpose-built for low bandwidth IoT communications.

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In this world, we are never away from a digital signal of some sort!

Since the last election, Kenya has new legislation, the Kenya Data Protection Act (2019), in place to protect data of citizens in Kenya. In her article In Kenya’s 2022 Elections, Technology and Data Protection Must Go Hand-in-Hand, Deputy Data Protection Commissioner Rose Mosero discusses the impact of this legislation and associated regulations on the ICT solutions utilised in the election process. The new law has led to increased protection over voter’s rights to privacy in the data that is collected for the purpose of voter registration, clarified cross border data transfer regulations and has already brought breakthroughs in the process of registering citizens as members of political parties.

Since 2020, the Office of Registration of Political Parties (ORPP) has enabled online systems where a person can check if they have been registered as a party member, and to resign or change one’s party membership if they find they no longer want to be associated with a particular group. Rose predicts that some harmonisation of election legislation may follow to further comply with data protection, and that future elections will balance the rights of people involved in elections. It was noted by election observers and vigilant Kenyans as well in 2022 that publicly online completed forms 34A published phone numbers of returning offices and party agents, and tragically, IEBC staff have once again been harassed, assaulted, and even murdered during this election cycle.

Overall, the election technology used in 2022 seemed to work. A small number of polling station KIEMS kits failed to work out of the box but were rapidly replaced by working ones. The kits authenticated voters by fingerprint, or by face image where fingerprints did not work. IEBC provided a portal where one could check in advance for one’s registered polling station, using features to ensure data protection, though some

the lead

Did Kenya Get It Right With Technology In The General Elections?

Following the contentious 2007 general elections that led to the death of 1100 people, Kenya introduced technology to manage the process with the aim of making it more transparent and credible.

Technology, therefore, was used in the subsequent elections (2013, 2017 and 2022) in voter registration, identification and in the transmission of results. The use of technology, however, remains a major source of concern to some stakeholders who do not trust the process. To them, the process, especially the transmission of result, is open to manipulation.

For this reason, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) put up an open portal for the presidential results forms 34A in the 2022 general elections.

How would you score the IEBC on a scale of 1-10 on managing the tech aspect of the elections? The Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet), a multistakeholder think tank for ICT policy and regulation deployed 90 observers in 21 counties to observe the tech component of the Kenyan general elections. The observers focused on tech preparedness, the voting process, transmission, and post-election processes.

Open Portal KICTANet, in a report, lauded the IEBC for furnishing an open portal for presidential results forms 34A, where anyone could access them. The lobby also commended the electoral body for the high success rate in the use of KIEMs for voter identification, ensuring the stability of servers throughout the process and successful transmission of results from the polling stations to the national tallying centre.

“The IEBC was adequately prepared in case of network challenges.

There’s great network coverage across the countries except for very few counties in the Coastal region. More than 90 per cent of Form 34As were transmitted 25 hours after closing and counting of polls. The internet across the country worked well, and there was no internet shutdown or any other forms of network interference,” it said.

However, the Think Tank noted that, “The only tech/automated aspects have been voter identification and the open portal for the results.” They asked the IEBC to automate other functions including voting and tallying.

“IEBC should explore a completely tech-enabled election. This would hasten the tallying process and lessen the anxiety and mistrust around results,” it said.

It further called on the Commission to share all forms of electoral positions in an open portal to decentralise focus from the presidential results.

KICTANet also recommended to the electoral body to avail to observers, political parties and generally to the public, an online portal (akin to the online Forms 34A) the metadata of the Kiems kits that show the exact turnout at each polling station, opening and closing times, voter identification among others. They asked the IEBC to allow tech observers access to the backend to be able to tell if the system is free of manipulation.

To avoid misinformation that was shared on social media platforms, KICTANet recommended that the IEBC leverage on various technologies to provide a single point of verified information and reduce the public information gap. www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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compiled using form 34Bs that they had verified.

IEBC also made measures to use technology to improve accessibility for persons living with disabilities (PWDs).

This area of ICT, known as assistive technology, has seen several innovative young companies come up with local solutions to help the lives of PWDs in Kenya. In this election IEBC partnered with Kenyan innovative start-up assistALL, to enable live translation for the deaf, in Kenya sign language, to help voters with hearing difficulties to participate in the elections.

But now to the crux of the matter, this article dates to 2017 when allegations of hacking came into the successful petitions against the election results. In 2017, each party in the court defended their own cases as to whether the elections were free and fair, but nobody really stood up to defend the technology itself. Damage was done to the reputation of local data servers, the sleeping patterns of public cloud helpdesks in France, and a lot of confusion followed when it came to the regulatory and risk side of public v private cloud.

people failed to use this and turned up in the wrong polling station or even the wrong county on the day.

But overall, election observers seemed to feel that people who turned up to vote were able to do so, and that devices were able to communicate over the networks. The decentralised counting system means that each polling stream must count only 700 votes and then transmit them, so by midnight on the day of polling, over 98 per cent of forms 34A recording polling station presidential ballot counts, were publicly available on the IEBC portal.

This then enabled election observers, media, and political groups to do their

own counting and verify or predict the results that would be announced.

Perhaps though the technology worked just too well with masses of polling forms arriving at IEBC website in a few hours leaving media houses rather swamped to collate the publicly available station tallies so that they strung out their analysis painfully slowly.

Mainstream media have been strongly criticised for their failure to collate the results, either not deploying enough resources, or purposefully failing to complete a process that they started.

However, online financial analysts Mwango Capital were the first to publish a complete transparent count projection

14 www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

Anticipating a repeat of the same, Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) stepped up and formed a group of volunteers to be election technology observers. The volunteers went to ground to observe the deployment and operations at polling stations, while observing the internet and election web servers as well. Comprehensive reports have been posted on KICTANet website at the various stages of the election process.

As was predictable, following the announcement of the very close election results, a series of petitions were presented to the Supreme Court, challenging the results of the presidential poll. As evidence and filings trickled in, affidavits detailed allegations of complex schemes to intercept, digitally modify, and then retransmit results, using back doors into the system exposed by alleged hackers.

Upon seeing some of the evidence,

the lead leading experts were unanimous that documents, especially log files, presented to the court, did not seem to be what they were claimed to be. So, very rapidly, a new group was formed, the ICT expert Amicis Curiae, rapidly coopted out of the CIO Council, an informal collective of the top CIOs, CTOs and CISOs in Kenya, the crème d la crème of top tier tech leadership.

Using online collaboration tools, the Amici quickly analysed all filings to the court that touched on technology.

Reports were penned, and a robust discussion and peer review took place to very tight deadlines. The Friends of the Court filed their presentation represented by counsel and three volunteers from the CIO Council as petitioners, John Walubengo, CISA, CDPSE, (OGW), ICT Lecturer, Multimedia University of Kenya, Consulting Data Protection Officer (DPO) Ajua and Trustee at KICTAnet, former Industrial Engineer Dr Joseph Sevilla, the Director, @iLabAfrica and @iBizAfrica, and Martin Mirero, the CTO at up and rising start-up Ajua enjoined to take part in the case with their filings considered (and even paraphrased) by the judges of the Supreme Court of Kenya in reaching the verdict. “Upon considering the pleadings, submissions, and the ICT Scrutiny and Inspection, Tallying and Recount Report by the Registrar which fully examined the IEBC’s Result Transmission System (RTS), the Court was not persuaded that the technology deployed by IEBC failed the standard of Article 86(a) of the Constitution on integrity, verifiability, security and transparency.”

However, this time it wasn’t just technology that was on trial. The basics of mathematics itself seemed under challenge. Although adding up 46,000 sets of four numbers is a process of very basic arithmetic, made easy and quick by modern computer processing power, press conferences and then court filings introduced a ‘new math’ working backwards from rounded percentages, that online Kenyan’s known as #KOT jokingly named as Mazematics. As the

Supreme Court of Kenya stated, “The Court was satisfied that IEBC carried out the verification, tallying, and declaration of the Presidential Election results in accordance with Article 138 (3) (c) and (10) of the Constitution.”

With the courts clearing the good name of ICT, as well as Mathematics, one of the basic constructs of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), then we can get back to growing the ICT Industry in Kenya, though we now are mostly referring to ICT as ‘The Digital Economy,’ but in conclusion we can look at how the Digital Economy can further improve elections.

The Digital Economy Blueprint launched

by President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2019 defined five pillars of the digital economy these being: i).

Digital government

ii).

Digital infrastructure

iii). Digital business iv). Innovation driven entrepreneurship v).

Digital skills and values.

Digital infrastructure has made huge leaps in mobile coverage, local data centres, cloud edge accelerator nodes, enabling the whole IEBC process to work smoother and faster. A manifesto pledge from the new government will see Wi-Fi installed in all schools, which will further boost the connectivity options for many polling stations.

Digital government systems have been key in elections for the last few years.

We expect to see further harmonisation of digital government platforms and digital identity (re: Huduma Namba) which can only go further to making all government processes transparent and efficient.

In terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, it would be great to see more home-grown technology companies deliver solutions for the election process. But it may be a little ambitious to see Kenya follow the Venezuela example of growing a

leading global election tech company like Smartmatic. But perhaps other elections in Africa and the world may be able to emulate the local innovation adopted by IEBC and its use of the assistALL translation app for the deaf voters.

Digital business in Kenya has transformed the way we order a taxi or get a pizza delivered. I am sure that the digitally enabled distribution tech companies in Kenya, using mobile apps or IoT, can help with future elections to improve the traceability and efficiency in delivering election materials.

Digital skills and values go hand in hand.

Prof Cheeseman in his article quoted John Githongo, Kenya’s former anticorruption tsar as saying, “You cannot digitise integrity.” There have been many a discussion about the expertise of our legal system when it comes to analysing complex ICT arguments, and to validate digital evidence such as log files. Hard discussions will be needed around that going forward, but it certainly should not be used as the Trojan Horse to bring back the soundly rejected ICT Practitioners Bill.

Another manifesto pledge is to increase spending into science, technology, and innovation from 0.8 per cent to 2 per cent of the GDP, and this will certainly bring more tech savvy youth into the digital economy.

But lastly, we must mention that Kenya has been one of the few countries in Africa that has undergone such controversial and contested elections with no disturbance, filtering, blocking, or shutting down of its internet. In #KOT language, Kenya #KeptitOn, and also managed to #KilltheICTBill in the same year! A free and accessible internet, in line with the principles on which the internet was developed, could not find a better home than Kenya. Independence of the regulator the Communications Authority of Kenya, as well as the strong leadership of Cabinet Secretary Joseph Mucheru, have ensured that Kenya remains probably the best country in Africa for ICT investment.

www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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ARTICLE by

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Francis Kamuyu

CIO, Multichoice Kenya.

the lead

Why, And How, Kenya Must Prepare For Elections 3.0 Kenya’s elections have been hedging slowly towards more sophisticated technology to simplify the process. You would be forgiven for thinking that 9 August only complicated this process. Not so. If anything, it might just inspire Elections 3.0 five years down the road.

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Calling the election will henceforth require investment in ML/DNN to read the forms, not just humans.

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Azimio asked for the wrong logs.

They should have asked for the logs of the CA, not just portal or database, as all evidence must trace back to the immutability of form 34A.

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Former Chief Justice Maraga’s court made form 34A immutable.

Chief Justice Koome’s court would benefit future elections by making it infallible.

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Kenya operates a Zero-Trust election context, and the solution is to have Open Data philosophy before the elections, not after the elections during a petition.

This will involve sharing of all log data with all stakeholders as the election progresses, after prior understanding and mapping of all systems to configure these logs for complete transparency.

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Once uploaded onto the portal, the form must not be edited, deleted or changed in any way. Form 34A immutability should be shared with the form 34A IEBC portal.

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The main challenge of fully digitizing electoral technology is simultaneously guaranteeing both confidentiality and transparency.

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Eventually we could perfect elections technologies (perhaps on blockchain) and export to the rest of the world, hence turning our expensive electoral technology to an export asset.

As the results of forms 34A started trickling into the portal in the 2022 General Election in Kenya, the Starehe IT Professionals WhatsApp group, like most IT groups in the country, got immersed in trying to find an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solution to read the results and update the tallies automatically. Two initiatives were tried out, but the different handwritings were difficult for OCR to read. The next solution to test was based on Machine Learning, but that didn’t work either.

In the CIO Council WhatsApp group, someone else also had a similar problem. It is then that I got one of those Eureka! moments. Most algorithms are lazy, and so they preferred to learn to read the typed sections that were easy, repetitive no-brainers as opposed to the dynamic handwritten sections. As with all problems in life, it’s the difficult-toread sections that were valuable. They were information intensive. The typed sections had no actual value.

They then isolated the section of the form with the handwritten figures, as the names of the presidential

candidates always appeared typed in the same way thanks to a previous Supreme Court of Kenya order. In all cases, the results were a lot more promising. By the next elections, I am certain, there will be ready solutions to read the forms in real time as they are uploaded. Consistency and uniformity of results is something the Media Society of Kenya could pool resources over, providing a unified solution to supply all media houses with the same results, instead of all media houses struggling with sub optimal solutions.

When the petitions made waves online, the various IT WhatsApp groups once again started interrogating the technical claims. One of us had handed in a technical affidavit in support of the petition. Unfortunately, it was time barred. I then contributed to the Amici Curiae petition along with a raft of CIOs. My part was specifically to refute the Benson Wesonga affidavit. However, in the spirit of resolution, we all worked together to interrogate any and all technical claims.

The Wesonga affidavit that was time barred was premised on an interesting hypothesis: that the time stamps when the forms 34A were uploaded were easily available in a report. The times the forms were created on the KIEMS kit were stated to also be easily available.

Wesonga’s hypothesis was that forms that took longer than average to transit

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from the KIEMS kit to the portal must have been modified. By this time, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), had not explained these scenarios.

It didn’t take long to munge the data and analyse it. We didn’t find any visual evidence of any modifications after isolating the forms that took the longest. There were tools that seemed to suggest most of the forms had been modified, but the distribution of the forms, the results and the number just didn’t make sense. Most importantly, we realised the good justices of the Supreme Court would be interested in visual evidence corroborated by actual data and a reconstruction of the original form to show the changes made. If the changes were then tallied and the total was significantly higher than an estimated 70,000 votes, no court would uphold the election. This is because Dr William Ruto escaped a run-off with less than 70,000 votes.

commission is employed to safeguard the sanctity of the correctly filled Form 34A. It is difficult to pontificate on the importance of this one form that is then collated into Forms 34B and 34C, which don’t share its sanctity. It could even be argued that the Polling Officer at that humble polling station is the most important employee of IEBC, and everyone else above that is an overpaid clerk, including the IEBC Chairman.

Any technical evidence must therefore be about this one form. The most successful evidence is evidence that shows the defilement of Form 34A’s sanctity, as this is treasonable usurpation of the sovereignty of the citizen.

Now that we have established the primacy of Form 34A, let us figure out the three points where illegalities and irregularities can change the will of the people. a.

They say hindsight is 20/20. What might have helped the case now that this hypothesis wasn’t proven?

The Sovereign is Wanjiku, And Form 34A is Her Sceptre It can’t be over emphasised that any technical evidence will not be enough unless it shows modifications on Form 34A. The results of Form 34A are therefore immutable as per CJ Maraga’s court.

The election takes place at the polling station. That dusty, dilapidated classroom with drunk-looking wooden desks, dirt earth and holes in the noisy iron sheet roof and is the dais on which the poor peasants exercise their sovereignty in accordance with the 2010 Constitution.

No commission, however pre-eminent the members; no parliament, president, petition, or justice, however powerful, noble or numerous, can overturn the decision of the citizen as captured on that humble form 34A. Every step of the process; every check and balance; every commissioner, clerk, or chairman of the

It didn’t take long to munge the data and analyse it.

We didn’t find any visual evidence of any modifications after isolating the forms that took the longest.

Polling Station: The most obvious illegality is that the votes cast are not reflected on Form 34A. This can be due to (as per some petitions) votes meant for one candidate credited to another candidate, total votes cast underreported (makes it easier for the leading candidate to avoid a runoff), voter suppression, lost ballots, ballot stuffing, etc.

•

All these illegalities are the reason why parties have agents at polling stations, in addition to use of KIEMS kits for registration, identification and authorisation, among other measures.

b.

Portal: The form can indeed be properly filled, but when uploaded, it is replaced with another form.

Any agents who signed the original form would have to be compromised not to raise the alarm. They could even sign on another form as instructed but this is not compulsory.

c.

Constituency and National Tallying Centers. When collating or verifying the forms at the constituency or national tallying centers, illegalities

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and irregularities can change the form.

False Sense Of Security Kenya is a Zero-Trust election context.

In the never-ending quest to seal loopholes, we have comforted ourselves with several false assumptions about technology: 1.

Agents must sign the modified Form 34A forms afresh This is not necessary. In fact, in this era of deep fakes, the PDF can be modified using deep neural networks. This is an advanced branch of AI that can be used to write different figures on a form that looks the same as the original, complete with the same handwriting and signatures. All that is needed is collusion with the IEBC staff and the party agents and samples of the handwritings.

2.

A Certification Authority is a sure sign that the forms were not modified.

Not necessarily. Smartmatic supplied the Certification Authority (CA). Meaning they could configure it to give the same certificate to a modified PDF as to the original PDF.

the lead

3.

The portal’s transparency directly correlates with election transparency.

Again, this is not a given. In polling stations where a party didn’t have agents, the polling staff could collude with the agents of the represented party. This is a case of garbage in, garbage out.

4.

practice is to use an independent CA. As mentioned briefly above, an internal CA could be compromised to reissue the same certificate to a modified PDF, hence defeating the purpose of the digital signature.

•

Voter registration using bio data on the KEIMS kits is enough to safeguard the voter register.

It’s not, as the audit just before the last elections revealed. There needs to be an open mechanism to ensure that all dead voters, double registrations, and other anomalies are dealt with at least three months before the elections.

How then can we safeguard the election of the future with technology while avoiding false self-assuring security?

Proposed Future Improvements: 1.

Smartmatic uses a local, internal Certification Authority (CA). Best

•

One of the Azimio affidavits focused on log files of the Linux operating system instead of the database server. The consensus is that the database log files would have shown which data was modified. However, the log files that would have shed light on any modifications are the portal’s log files, as the portal doesn’t necessarily have to store the documents in a database.

Unfortunately, there was no requirement for the portal to log uploads and changes other than the basic upload time. This is a significant gap that I address later below.

What no one seems to realise so far is that the most important log files might not be the database or

even portal log files, but the CA log files. The CA shows when the Form 34A was issued a digital certificate as it was created at the polling station.

•

That’s a critical audit data point that can only be picked from the 46,000 KIEMS kits, a near impossibility in the two days for investigations. Getting the log files from the CA would, however, take just a few minutes, and they can be analysed within an hour. The next critical audit data point is any other certificate issued to the Form 34A from the same polling station, as that could be a red alert signifying a modified Form 34A.

•

Of all the missed opportunities of the Azimio petitions, this is probably the most significant technical analysis that should have taken place. It would have proven the most important possible illegality: that Forms 34A were modified after they left the KIEMS kits.

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•

This should have been enough to annul the presidential election, as the law is clear on the immutability of Form 34A.

2.

To protect the privacy of the agents and the polling officers, they should not have their telephone numbers, names and ID numbers on the form. That level of exposure is borderline criminal in this age of data privacy. All agents should be registered with IEBC and given a unique ID. This database should be available in case an agent needs to be contacted. This is the unique ID that the agent should publish on Form 34A.

3.

•

The uploaded forms were of varying quality. The POs should be trained on how to scan and upload the form in abundant but not blinding light. The KIEMS kit should be enabled to scan in colour, and this training should be a critical requirement to qualify. Form quality should be a disqualifying factor on uploading, one of the checks that could be performed as explained below.

I suspect that IEBC made the uploaded Form 34A gray scale to avoid downloads and modifications that would then confuse the court. IEBC can, however, provide a process of logged downloads so that what is provided as evidence in court is tracked back to the server/ KIEMS kit as discussed below. This will support future presidential petitions as IEBC cannot then disown their own forms.

parties which of their agents didn’t show up at the affected polling stations. The supervisors can then make whatever needed arrangements are needed. If this exercise is undertaken two hours before polling begins there is time to get a replacement.

•

The parties should then contact their missing local agents separately without delaying the election. The communication should only go to the registered constituency party agent at this point.

•

This will cure the problem of agents not being available at the beginning, when most of the ballot stuffing allegedly takes place. By isolating these polling stations, it’s easier to investigate if ballot stuffing took place.

c.

One of the issues that emerged in this petition is that there could have been two copies of Forms 34A. This can be put to good use.

The PO can fill in results in Form 34A then upload. If what they upload doesn’t have obvious errors (votes per candidate don’t add up to total votes cast less spoilt votes, illegible figures, missing signatures, blank forms etc.) It is accepted by the portal and becomes Form 34A.

•

KIEMS KIT Enhancements The KIEMS kits are used for voter registration and identification, as well as uploading the Form 34A PDF. The same KIEMS kit can however solve more problems discussed in this case: b.

They can be programmed to begin with agents signing in with their thumb prints, complete with selfies, to ensure that agents are present when voting begins, and to notify

•

If what they upload is invalid based on the rules the PO should then make the corrections pointed out by the system as to the reason why the results were not uploaded and then write on a draft Form 34A-1.

If that has no errors the PO should then fill in the second form 34A and upload.

This process should be automated and hidden from everyone else other than an AI solution. All these transactions should be meticulously logged with the images of all draft forms uploaded, and all the communication should be automatically shared in real time with all the local and national

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party agents and their supervisors in case there are patterns that can suggest fraud. As all party portals get the form directly from the KIEMS kits, there will also be no fears of man-in-the-middle if the logs show that the forms hit all portals at about the same time.

•

Former Chief Justice David Maraga’s court made Form 34A immutable. This change in process will make the form infallible. It will also greatly improve the trust of the voters in the technology.

4.

All Agents can accept the results on the same kit using their fingerprints on the KIEMS kit and get the original PDF of 34A sent to their phones and all the national tallying centers of the parties.

That way, the fear that forms are intercepted and modified before they hit the portal is minimised.

If they sign into the KIEMS kits with their private keys, they can send to several portals, including the IEBC national tallying portal.

Since the uploaded form is not the official form this change should not necessitate a change in the law.

Open Government 5.

To ensure the integrity and transparency of the whole system, the court could order that the principles of open government must apply throughout the process.

The critical technologies used should have logging enabled and shared in real time:

a.

All KIEMS kit periodic update logs should be available in real time: these include opening time, total ballots cast so far, total manual voters so far, closing time. This is in addition to all the other data points discussed above.

b.

The CA logs should also be available in real time to track the signing of PDFs at the KIEMS kits.

c.

The database and portal logs should be enabled and configured,

the lead edited, deleted, modified or updated in any way. Only the KIEMS kit should upload to the primary portal.

•

All modified forms must be saved on a secondary portal also available to the public with a clear reference to the primary portal source file.

This proposal will be most valuable if the proposal above to make Form 34A is not adopted. But even if the proposal is adopted, it’s important to have this law clearly making the portal immutable.

We have come a long way as a country from the 1988 Mlolongo system. The decision by IEBC to provide a real-time portal of Forms 34A in compliance with the 2017 was a great milestone.

As media houses didn’t have enough capacity to tally the forms in real time, they ended up tallying at the same pace as IEBC, hence easing the pressure on the commission. That was genius on the side of IEBC. It was a master stroke.

that information is not sufficient to describe the portal, and they didn’t have enough time to investigate all possibilities. It’s even possible for IEBC to provide a honeypot for analysis when the real system with the required logs is safely kept away from any investigations.

The technical and functional integrations between the different components should have been understood and challenged before the elections.

then availed in real time to track any changes to the uploaded PDFs. •

In addition to the log files, when transmitting results, all forms should be sent to everyone in original JPEG/PDF as well as final PDF formats with all the rest of the details.

6.

The urgency of a presidential petition is not the time to analyse the IT systems used to manage the elections. Such engagements should have been done much earlier, and the logging configured and tested extensively and completely before the elections.

The Registrar’s reports read that one of the portals was an Ubuntu server.

•

While Ubuntu is a great solution,

Form 34A Portal Immutability 7.

Form 34A is already immutable at the polling station, but not at the portal where several were changed in the 2022 presidential elections.

Once a form has been uploaded on the primary portal it should not be

Kenya made M-Pesa successful. Due to the highly competitive nature of our politics, we have ended up with a great process for conducting elections. We can leverage technology to automate the process as is, so that CJ Maraga’s immutable Form 34A can now be infallible. That way we can have fewer presidential election petitions in future.

Eventually, I look forward to the day that we will have a fully automated election. Wanjiku will walk into a polling station, vote on a digital tablet, then immediately the last person in her polling station votes she will know who won at her polling station. Going by our Zero-Trust context that will most likely have to be designed on a blockchain platform with full transparency and verifiability while also maintaining the required confidentiality.

It is a bright future, where the sovereignty of the citizen will be sacrosanct, elections will be inexpensive, results will be fast and trust levels will be high, resulting in happy, engaged, and patriotic citizens, thanks to technology.

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ARTICLE by

KEVIN Namunwa

Why ADC Has Invested $500 Million To Build More Data Centres Africa Data Centres has seen the future and are investing half a billion dollars into its expansion plans which will see the company build hyperscale data centres throughout Africa.

Data centres come in handy when a company needs remote storage of data, processing of the same, or distribution of large amounts of data. Data centres do cost a lot though; whether you are looking for the services of one or wanting to set up your own.

Setting up a data centre costs about $1,000 per square foot, not taking into account that it can often cost in excess of $10,000 per mile that it takes to have fibre installed to reach your location.

With these costs, investing in a data centre is a big statement. It shows the belief that digital transformation is on the growth journey and there will be enough business, for you. This is a statement that African Data Centres (ADC) are making in the continent.

Africa Data Centres is investing $500 million into its expansion plans which will see the company build hyperscale data centres throughout Africa. This is an investment into Africa’s digital transformation, and it will double ADC’s already significant investment in the continent.

Behold The Hyperscalers! dx⁵ caught up with the Managing Director, ADC, East African, Dan Kwach. According to Kwach, getting this investment is something that the company has been working on for a long time. “We are not just doing this now. It is something that has been a work in progress for a long time to make sure that we are proactively

building infrastructure that can position Africa in a place of advantage in the same way other global players are. We can have technology infrastructure that can even be consumed by the hyperscalers locally in Africa.”

With the mention of hyperscalers, it is clear that the continent needs to invest more in technology infrastructure. Over the recent past we have seen a lot of hyperscalers come into the African space. This year alone we have seen Google, Microsoft, and Amazon set up office in Kenya.

With hyperscalers around, it means very large consumption of data centre resources. However, most of the hyperscalers resort to storing their data in centres located abroad.

This, unfortunately, includes African data thanks to the lack of technology infrastructure. Most local companies that have their data sitting locally have it in traditional, privately owned infrastructure, by way of computing, storage and networking resources.

ADC has been growing and is timely with this investment like continental soothsayers. “We have data centre assets which can help us position ourselves not only to consume data centre resources outside of Africa, but also have these resources in Africa, consumed by the global market,” Kwach notes.

Cloud Adoption/ Cloud Migration

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Without a doubt, the coming of hyperscalers into the continent has necessitated the setting up of more technology infrastructure here. Cloud adoption has risen with many African firms migrating to the cloud. Currently, people are talking about migrating to the cloud for obvious reasons: it is cheaper, and one can actually make use of cloud resources.

This need for companies to migrate to the cloud has created a need for data centres to boost their infrastructure. If continental data centres do not do this, a lot more companies will opt to store their data outside the continent. “When we boost our infrastructure, we will be sure bring African companies to store their data here in the continent,” Kwach states.

“At ADC, we always want to build infrastructure that could house technology or provide technological services in a way that promotes digital inclusion. We want to do things in a way that leaves no African behind.” This is the firm making a bold statement in support of cloud migration with their investment.

“Yes, it is a bold statement by way of us assessing the market. It is based on our understanding of the local market and the need for them to migrate to the cloud. We have conversations with them and a lot of enterprise customers that we currently have are talking about cloud support.”

it leadership

www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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Digital Transformation Awards

DIANI · MOMBASA

Come join us at the Africa dx100 Awards as we celebrate and award organisations that have made enormous strides in ditigal Transformation in various sectors in business.

Banking Sector Sacco Sector Hospitality Sector Education Sector Government/Public Sector Health Sector Manufacturing Sector Insurance Sector Transport/Logistics Sector

Go to dx100.cioafrica.co Contact us at: events@cioafrica.co

Past Winners who will be next?

CIO OF THE

CIO OF THE

CIO OF THE

Tom Mboya

Jane Mwai

James Kizza

YEAR 2021

YEAR 2020

YEAR 2019

CIO OF THE

CIO OF THE

CIO OF THE

George Njuguna

Ken Ogwang

Jack Maina

YEAR 2018

YEAR 2016

YEAR 2015

ARTICLE by

MICHAEL MICHIE

Preventing A Hack Attack In 2022, there has been over 1.5 billion stolen in the crypto space.

These hacks are exposing the soft low hanging fruit that is crypto wallets, exchanges, and bridges.

What happens when you cross gaming, decentralised ledger technology and digital currencies? Over 600 million stolen in a hack.

can be attacked is through exploiting the deposit process by creating fake deposits. Exploiting by bypassing validation on deposits.

The three main crypto hacks happen on exchanges, wallets, and bridges.

Securing these platforms takes more specialised skills and an understanding of smart contracts other related concepts. So how do hacks target each of these three and what does it mean for the growth and popularity of cryptocurrencies and other assets from distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Exchange Hacks:

Bridge attacks: The Ronin sidechain hack in 2022 saw over 600 million dollars, making it one of the largest DeFi (decentralised finance) hacks. Axie Infinity is a play to earn game on the Ronin side chain that bridge attack. A blockchain bridge is a connection that allows the transfer of digital assets from one blockchain to another. When transferring tokens using bridges, the bridge protocol locks the funds into a contract on a chain then the funds are given to the recipient in form of wrapped tokens. The wrapped tokens are backed by cryptocurrency stored in reserve.

Attacks take advantage of the number of nodes that are required to authorise transactions, some bridges require two nodes, while others such as in the case of the Ronin hack requires 5 out of the 9 nodes. They achieve this by decrypting the private key on the network and it’s more useful to attacks when the same private key is used for multiple nodes. Other places where bridges

An exchange is where people buy and sell digital assets such as cryptocurrency or NFTs. Exchanges are a prime target due to their huge reserves (like banks with all their deposits). While targeting exchanges most attacks focus on the custodial keys held by the exchange.

Wallet attacks: Wallets are where your private keys to your wallet addresses on a blockchain are stored. Hot wallets are those that are connected to the internet are mostly targeted. Cold wallets are hardware based and more secure. Vulnerabilities to hot wallets can exist due to poor coding practices such as having authentication done on the client end and not server end.

As more and more attacks continue these platforms there is a need for building best practices that can be used to ensure more security for the end users and the platforms. Some cryptocurrency security standards include Key/seed generation, Wallet Creation, Key Storage, Key Usage, Key Compromise policy, Keyholder Grant/ Revoke Policy and Procedures, Thirdparty audits, Data Sanitisation Policy, Proof of Reserve and Log Audits.

Further to this, it is also important for these platforms to have the right kind of security professionals working on these

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security issues. Being a technology that is not fully mature, there are a lot of unknown unknowns as well as known unknowns that could be exploited.

This requires professionals who are significantly conversant with writing DLT programmes, understanding the infrastructure behind such technology and capable of practicing security by design without slowing down business demands to grow but also ensuring that the growth is done safely. These professionals are now highly sought after as they possess unique skill sets that make them experts in a niche that few can handle.

While most people would consider all the hacks around DLTs and their use cases as a sign of poor security practice and that they are not worth what they claim to be, we should remember that they are targeted for the same reason as banks are; for having a lot in reserve. As more and more press is put out there on the hacks on this fairly new platforms, we should appreciate the extent at which research is being poured into building the right security standards for safer use and storage on these platforms.

Always, with new technology, there is no path most travelled that can be used to ensure you have all security paradigms set up correctly. The goal over time is to reduce the attack surface area and make it harder to successfully exploit them. Attacks will always be a common thing where there is value to be made.

Maybe we should look at all these hacks as a sign that there is a long-time value for these platforms.

thinking aloud

www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

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ARTICLE by

STEVE MBEGO & KEVIN Namunwa

What’s Trending The Latest News From The Continent

OCTOBER2022 2022| |CIO CIOAfrica AfricaMagazine Magazine| by | bydx⁵ dx⁵ 28 www.cioafrica.co | AUGUST

the round-up

Why Businesses Are Turning To SDWan For Digital Transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation (dx) in most industries with companies rushing to meet the new demands of customers who opted favoured online experiences over physical ones.

networking technologies are rapidly becoming obsolete and inefficient.

The goals of an enterprise’s digital acceleration can be significantly advanced through the implementation of SD-WAN.”

In the banking industry, for example, customers embraced mobile banking leading to reduced footprint in physical outlets. Moreover, there was the need to link both digital banking services with traditional physical outlets to provide seamless experience for customers. While customers prefer to do their business digitally, there were still some complex issues that can only be best solved at physical branches.

Ndegwa opines that by using this smart networking technology, companies can build more agile, responsive, reliable, and secure networks that can scale up as their operations expand. “For both large and small businesses, SD-WAN solutions will ensure that your business remains effective in a rapidly evolving digital world,” he adds.

To achieve flexible branch networking operations that are in sync with their digital transformation agenda, business goals and customer expectations, customers are ditching traditional network solutions for the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).

For example, Absa Bank has settled on Huawei’s SD-WAN solution to meet its service expansion and digital innovation requirements during its digital upgrade. In a use case report published by Huawei, Moses Okundi, CIO of Absa Bank Kenya highlighted some of the benefits of the SD-WAN.

According to Patrick Ndegwa, SEACOM Business Sales Lead for SEACOM East Africa, “Modern networks must be fast, reliable, secure, and always available. This is what drives digital transformation and underlies ongoing improvements and innovations. Traditional

“We strive to offer our customers a seamless digital experience.

We want to enable them to bank and transact without any hitch and in a seamless manner at the convenience of whatever they could be. To realize that the bank needed to build a new infrastructure

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the round-up to improve the efficiency of various banking services, reduce O&M costs, and enhance user experience at branches,” said Moses Okundi said.

SD-WAN also provides real-time visibility into application traffic and performance to ensure session quality of business-critical applications. “We got to a point where we can manage traffic and distribute traffic evenly across various technology options or connectivity options from various connectivity providers. The value of this is that it gives us robust resilience in managing that connectivity,” added Okundi.

Through the solution, Absa Bank Kenya can visualize application traffic of all branches, and therefore allows the IT team to monitor the dynamic data and adjust the bandwidth of each branch in a timely manner. This brings efficient and intelligent operations.

Okundi explained: “For my tech team, we now have a very good level of visibility regarding the usage of the connectivity partners we have engaged. We can see where the usage is and how the traffic is distributed.

And in the worst-case scenario where manual intervention is required, our team can pinpoint the challenges, making their intervention very accurate and efficient.”

Absa Bank Kenya’s also revealed its intelligent cloud-based branch network will serve as a critical foundation for the financial giant’s digital transformation.

“I see it as Lego blocks where the bottom layer is a strong technology foundation that gives us a platform to really offer cutting-edge digital solutions to our customers. And right at the bottom layer is strong connectivity,” Okundi expounded.

According to Okundi, “In the future, this powerful branch network will further promote the intelligent upgrade of Absa Bank and eventually help them evolve into intelligent customer experience centres.”

Three Firms Secure $6.8M Funding To Train Data Talent In Sub-Saharan Africa gaps in the field and create meaningful solutions that improve lives,” said Tariq Khokhar, Head of Data for Science and Health at Wellcome.

The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia have announced $6.8 million in funding from Wellcome, a global charitable foundation, in support of the data.org-led Capacity Accelerator Network (CAN).

The funding will be split amongst the three partners and aims to foster global data talent for climate and health impact. data.org will work with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and J-PAL South Asia to establish new accelerators in Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

The accelerators will equip emerging data professionals with the interdisciplinary skills needed to work at the intersection of climate and health to tackle society’s greatest challenges and improve lives across the world.

“Data is crucial for helping us understand and tackle the health effects of climate change. But right now, the field lacks people with the necessary skills and expertise, particularly within the communities that live on the frontlines of the climate crisis. We must train a new generation of data practitioners to address the health impacts of climate change where it matters most. That’s why we’re pleased to support data. org with the accelerators in India and Sub-Saharan Africa — to help bridge

30 www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

The grant will boost data.org’s ambitious mission to train 1 million purpose-driven data practitioners over the next decade, as it leads global efforts to strengthen data talent in the social impact sector. This initiative builds on its recent partnership with the University of Chicago’s Financial Inclusion Accelerator, made possible by funding from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

“At data.org, we believe in democratising data, for good. Creating a network of capacity accelerators around the world puts that concept into action, informing, training, and mobilising the next generation of data professionals,” said Danil Mikhailov, Executive Director of data.org.

“Against a backdrop of the climate crisis, pandemics, and rising inequality, the world faces enormous, systemic challenges. Data science and other data-driven technologies can offer part of the solution through their tremendous ability to scale, but only if we ensure these data professionals are equipped with the interdisciplinary skills to ask the right questions and build trust with the communities they serve,” he added.

The first capacity accelerator will be based in Sub-Saharan Africa in collaboration with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD), followed by the launch of a second accelerator in India in collaboration with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia.

“To achieve better outcomes for people and the planet, we as the international data community need to collaborate to make technical skills and

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knowledge more accessible to all. The Global Partnership is working to help governments address information gaps in climate, health, and vital statistics.

Partnering with data.org, J-PAL South Asia, and a constellation of education providers will help collectively leverage our networks to strengthen local data talent, which in turn will help unlock solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges,” said Claire Melamed, CEO at the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

Each accelerator will produce a cohort of data practitioners with interdisciplinary subject-matter expertise in health and climate data. In surrounding communities, dozens of social impact and public sector organizations will reap the benefits, hosting paid data fellows who graduate from the program.

“The fight against poverty and climate change is more data-driven than ever before, and scalable, rigorous technical training is needed to build capacity to use data for evidence-informed decision-making. The accelerator represents a unique opportunity to build talent and impact the future of data use for research and policy, in India and worldwide, through this collaborative partnership between data.org and J-PAL South Asia,” said Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director at J-PAL. Accelerators will partner with universities and other social impact and public sector organisations that will support the research and roll out of curriculum, resources, and experiential learning programs, to engage top talent in social impact—a consistent challenge for the sector.

A recent report from data.org and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Workforce Wanted: Data Talent for Social Impact, found that there is an opportunity to develop 3.5 million data professionals focused on social impact in low - and middle-income countries over the next 10 years.

What Is Ailing Start-ups In Kenya? Why So Many Shutdowns Given that it is considered one of the biggest tech and innovation hubs in Africa, Kenya is home to a lot of start-ups with variations from locally founded start-ups and those founded by non-Kenyans.

We have seen a stream of success by various Kenyan start-ups, which have managed to raise funds and even widen their operations to cover the rest of the continent and even the rest of the globe. M-Pesa is a great example of an innovative idea that originated from Kenya but is now benefitting a lot of start-ups in Kenya, which all look to solve different problems in the continent and all over the globe.

However, despite the numerous success stories about local startups, there has been a recent surge in closure. Several reasons have been put forward. It is seen as a case of greed where most of these start-ups have closed shop a minute after securing a lumpsum in seed funding. At the same time, there are thoughts that this could be a case of an unfavorable environment as some start-ups have only closed shop in Kenya but are operating elsewhere.

A classic example of the latter is Wasoko which closed shop in Kenya and relocated to Zanzibar.

We take a look at some of these start-ups and see what circumstances led them to close shop in the East African Country.

A notorious example of a startup that closed shop in unclear circumstances is Kune Food. We all know the story of Kune Food.

One Robin Reecht claimed he paid a visit to Kenya and realised food is very expensive in the country, hence Kune Foods. Robin started out on the wrong foot with Kenyans

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who argued that there is a plenty of affordable food in Kenya and he just didn’t look hard enough. Reecht bowed out after securing funds. The startup was doing fine, selling food at an average of $3 per meal with enough orders going around, opening up physical locations for customers to walk in and have a meal.

About a year before it closed shop, the start-up had secured funding amounting to $1 million. Kune Food was shut completely and did not have a chance to spread its wings. “Since the beginning of the year, we sold more than 55,000 meals, acquired more than 6,000 individual customers and 100 corporate customers. But at $3 per meal, it just wasn’t enough to sustain our growth … Coupled with rising food costs deteriorating our margins, we just couldn’t keep going,” Reecht later wrote on his Linkedin when announcing the closure of the start-up.

It is also safe to say that Wasoko were lured to Zanzibar by the friendly in the island in partnership with the Zanzibar government. The Wasoko

the round-up Innovation Hub is the first private-public partnership between an African tech start-up and the Zanzibar government for Silicon Zanzibar, a new government initiative to attract and relocate tech companies from across Africa to the island. As part of the launch, Wasoko becomes Silicon Zanzibar’s first anchor company and official private sector ambassador.

Greytrix Africa: A Journey of Providing ERP Solutions to East African SMEs

Kenya lost this great start-up that secured most of its funding while operating from Kenya. Perhaps if the environment would have been more favourable for the start-up in the country, it would have been harder for the Zanzibar Government to lure them to moving their base to the island.

A classic case of start-ups that failed to the ground as a result of an unfavourable environment for growth is Notify Logistics and WeFarm.

Notify Logistics closed its business following a reported high cost of operations. When Notify started back in 2018, its business model was quite attractive. It would basically rent shelves to vendors to run their operations.

According to one of the start-up’s directors, it became extremely challenging to maintain the company because even the businesses run by their partners were unsustainable.

It was also revealed that Notify was paying up to approximately $7,000 per month for three floors it had acquired in a mall which was a financial constraint for the company.

For WeFarm, the Agritech start-up closed down one of its services, WeFarm shop, barely a year after setting it up.

It was an app that was developed by the company to help farmers acquire agricultural products online as well as share reviews and advice among each other. In a statement to CIO Africa, WeFarm’s Director of Growth, Sofie Mala confirmed that WeFarm shop has been forced to close down after current market conditions had made it difficult for the business to scale.

East African start-ups have been keen to rev up their technology adoption for innovations. This has been evident with the recent Fintech Global Report noting that fintech from East Africa, particularly Kenya, has received the most funding in the continent in 2022 so far.

The technology helping start-ups reap big is now trickling down to the SMEs and SMBs in the region, is ERP. Nitin Chandure, the Global Vice President for Greytrix Solutions, agrees that East African has shown that SMEs and SMBs are ready for ERP solutions. “We started our journey in 2015 here in East Africa, with an intent to serve the SMBs and SMEs in the region,” Nitin notes, adding that SMES and SMBs are embracing ERP solutions more today than when the Sage’s partner entered the East African market seven years ago.

“When we started Greytrix Africa here in Kenya, people initially doubted our commitment to the region and considered us a briefcase company. So, cracking that first deal was a major challenge. But then we stayed in sight. Initially, we took few projects at very low margins just to

cover our costs and first invested in proof of concept just to gain the clients confidence.”

The solution provider is even thinking of widening its borders to other parts of the continent.

“In the coming years, we plan to expand geographically and are also planning to diversify our product portfolio. Recently, we signed up with Sage to become business partners for West Africa, SADC and the Middle East,” Nitin says. “We are now looking beyond East Africa, which now means we have a bigger landscape to cover. This is going to keep us busy marking our presence for next couple of years.”

Greytrix chose to partner with Sage owing to their shared vision - helping medium-sized businesses and enterprises run their businesses better.

The association opens doors for Greytrix as Sage has a range of products catering to different sizes of business and types of industries like distribution, professional services, manufacturing chemical, non-profit etc. The pair deliver their solutions globally, as per the need of the businesses and on different platforms like on-premises or hosted in cloud.

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ARTICLE by

CAROL ODERO

dx nova

Handling Steep Learning Curves In Your Career Path Everline Kamau-Migwi is not just a career woman. She makes sure her Wheel of Life is balanced, and draws inspiration from her own children.

Ideally, take aways from interviews are the last things rounding up an article.

But in this case, Everline Kamau-Migwi, Senior Territory Manager, VMware, dropped so many pearls I had to start with one - be ambitious. Yes, that sounds about as inspiring as a can of soup but stick with me. Evelyn has progressively moved from rung to higher rung, each time aiming for the stars. Just go look for her on LinkedIn and you will see how much of a rising star this woman is. Not only has her strategy been personally rewarding, but it has also been financially fulfilling. Not many people will tell you this outright or otherwise. I simply speculate about the monetary rewards.

When I meet Evelyn for our interview, she has blonde hair merged with unmistakable confidence so of course I start with the most obvious one. How does she rise so fast? Usually within six months to a year of taking a job.

She had a great foundation, she says, dating back to her first job at LanTECH at the age of 22. Her employer gave her a chance with zero experience. It kept her on her toes, and she didn’t want to let him down. During the interview, they talked about her then year old baby after she showed him a tiny passportsized picture.

“There was nothing he asked of me about my grades. That’s when I realised people hire people, initially, for their attitude. What matters is, is this person willing to learn, does she have the drive? The motivation? He saw that my motivation was my child, and I was not

shy about it.” LanTECH, she says, was like university for her, coupled with throwing her into the deep end of tech and business, giving her a 360-degree view. Fast forward to her current role and it is evident Everline is some type of fierce with an admirable work ethic.

Growing from Account Manager to Customer Programme Director, Telkom Kenya, Everline remembers thinking when she got the title, she thought she did not deserve it, that it was a very big title, and that she did not want to let her employer down. “That pushes you.

If there is nothing challenging enough that keeps you awake or encourages you to fight to stay awake, leave that job.”

There was a stint with Dimension Data, at which point she was poached by Microsoft through LinkedIn and was posted in Dubai. As is the case with an African first born, she was taking care of her siblings and her first child and felt compelled to provide stability. “When you have so many factors depending on your success, the last thing you want to do is fail,” adding that “For me it is mostly the drive, the pressure, the focus, and the expectations. But most importantly - the spirit of passion – what more can I do? The fear of failure motivates me,” as does not wanting to be stagnated. Her eldest is now 17 with siblings ages 10, 6, and 1. “And they are firecrackers all the way,” declares the proud mum.

It is not surprising that career wise, success for her means “a promotion,

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fulfillment, and growth in terms of status, sustainability in terms of personal branding - how powerful is your brand? How is your work-life balance? All those are my measures of success.” She loves that she can juggle between career, family, and being able to get an MBA, the latter being the highlight of her career. VMware seems to have captured her work soul. She has been there for almost a decade, and she has grown from strength to strength.

They know her worth; she states. “When a company invests in you and believes in you like VMware do, you can’t afford to mess up. You must just bring the game. There is no other way.”

There is also such a thing as ultimate success for her, and that is public speaking. If you know Everline, this news leaves you aghast like it does me. She is an excellent speaker with a measured and deliberate way of communicating. “I was very vocal at home but put me in front of a crowd and I couldn’t speak. I doubted myself.”

In November 2008, Everline was the youngest enrolled MBA student at Strathmore University. Work got in the way, and it was pushed to 2018 to 2020, co-funded by VMware because Everline is a finisher. “I also felt strongly that I had a lot to learn. When I looked closer at the alumni from 2008/2009, I discovered that all of them were epic.

Not only were they accomplished in their respective fields, but they also now had something to show as proof of their intelligence.” Besides which, the MBA was “smack right into my career.” She

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felt it gave her credibility in the market, and she was more mature focusing on an MBA at her age. “This is knowledge that really elevates how you think, your status, helps you think outside the box, look at things differently. As a leader you are more exposed.” Up next, she is thinking of enrolling for coach leadership to ramp up her soft skills beyond academic exposure.

When you are working for an organisation that has more than 20 individuals, many things come up.

Politics, relevance, governance at every level – and then, soft skills. How do I manage my boss? How do I ensure my growth? How do I balance my life? Soft skills, she says, need to be continuously grown and understood because the dynamics always change and learning never stops. Soft skills include people management, negotiations, meeting customers, C-level management, how to dress. “There are countries I go to, and I know I can’t go with natural hair. They would rather see me in a wig. There are all sorts of soft skills. They become even more intense when you introduce culture. And I run 10 territories. With dynamic culture, the soft skills learning never stops. My context is broader.”

Describing her leadership style as “very intuitive, almost spontaneous, but also very inward-looking. I’m always reflect on who I am. It is sub conscious.”

Leadership, for her, starts with what you have such as children, parents, and siblings. “When it comes down to it, it’s almost expected of you to always ask yourself, ‘am I doing this right?’ Having children means they always check you.

It must be very intentional. As a leader, when in a certain leadership position, you want your attitude, your way of doing things and your presence felt. It is very important to check, what do I want that will have a ripple effect? That will resonate. Am I a good example? I know it sounds cliché, but it is the case. Am I demonstrating what I am demanding of my team? Do I respect myself as a leader for the team to respect me?”

This is critical because Everline manages 36 www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

dx nova 10 territories. Planning, data, facts, and numbers matter. “Intelligence counts.

You must be very well informed and market aware. Always support your feedback with facts otherwise your boss calls your bluff, and you can’t manage him. Sometimes, you need to push back with data. When your boss trusts you, then you can manage him.”

Managing her team requires trust too, yes, but more so, authenticity. Authentic leadership may have been around since the 1960s, it roared to life in 2003 with Bill George’s book, Authentic Leadership.

Defined as “A style of leadership that focuses on transparent and ethical leader behaviour and encourages open sharing of information needed to make decisions while accepting followers’ inputs.” With a team as diverse as hers, Everline says “I believe in letting them see me for who I am. It goes back to authenticity. A team will respect you when you are real. I encourage them to dance, and they know I will be in the office by 8 am. Don’t do things to fit in with the crowd. A team cares that you deliver. If you can step in when they really need you to step in and you can save their behinds. I learn a lot from the team.”

Everline Kamau was a well-known brand before marriage. And, when she got married, she tried to change her maiden name and incorporate her husband’s name. Documentation was crazy. “It was easy for our parents to build their brand using their husband’s name. They did not have to contend with IDs, driving licenses, and passports in their maiden names.”

They married young, straight out of campus before their careers begun.

Now, you’ve been here hustling, earning, doing your job, then you get married.

“Then you tell me, let’s go back in time to change your documents: ID, passport, LinkedIn. The thing is, he found me accomplished. I had to tell him - babe, this is my brand. Look at every Kamau appearance as you would Kimbo. It also takes time for people to get used to a new marital name. Being selfish, I did not want to leave Kamau. You

still have that ego, pride, memory, and customers. All those dynamics are part of your name that people underrate. So, I hyphenated it.”

With a career that demands constant travel, Everline is fortunate to have a husband who holds it down. “If you find a man is not supportive, then he either lied to you before you got married, or you got to your success when you were already married. This plays back to my ex. He met me before I started working.

When I started working, things changed because he was used to seeing me in a particular way. I’d rather a man who sees me the way I am.”

Someone, she points out, who accommodates their women’s growth.

“Women are very resourceful. A man will make his first coin, and go out, and buy his car. Or a suit. A woman will put Kshs 2,000 somewhere in a SACCO or chama and keep increasing it. I am telling you this is fact. Women who are exposed are more powerful in a marriage. For instance, have you noticed your own mother has never run out of money. My

mum is retired but she will always have money.”

Religion is her anchor “100%.” It makes her believe she can move mountains. “I pray with my children every night before they sleep. I strongly believe every human needs to have something like God. It gives me a sense of not being the only one carrying a burden. It’s like the Wheel of Life. God is the reason I am where I am.”

Any last words? “You must be very open minded, a constant learner and put aside your pride. Be aware of change that is not planned for. And be ready to embrace it. That is usually the downfall of many leaders. Be willing to adopt and learn. Younger than is even better than older to learn from. We glean wisdom from those who are ages 60 to 80 and forget you have a lot of wisdom behind you. My (then) nine-year-old son challenged me over iPhone versus Samsung, right down to the processor.

Of course, at, 10 he picked the iPhone.

Tell me, what can I not learn from this boy?”

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Leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, VMware, held the vFORUM 2022 at Villa Rosa Kempinski that mainly highlighted the next step for the tech company and for multi-cloud in the tech world.

The event featured an array of experienced speakers both from VMware and its partners and sponsors with topics revolving around the Multi-cloud and VMware’s journey of taking multi-cloud to the next level.

The speakers included Lorna Hardie (Regional Director at VMware, Sub-Saharan Africa), Ian Jansen van Rensburg – Chief Lead Technologist VMware Sub-Saharan Africa, Boudewijn Aelbers – SE Director VMware Benelux, Norberto Carrascal – Intel EMEA Business Consumption Director among others.

To download Presentations go to vforumeastafrica.com 38 www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵

vForum 2022

Morning session

Midmorning session

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COFFEE, LUNCH & COCKTAIL

Women in tech

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vForum 2022

Customer track session

PARTNER TRACKER SESSION

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ARTICLE by

ROBERT YAWE

hard talk

Blockchain; More Fluff Than Fact A few years ago, at the height of the buzzword ‘Blockchain’, I was invited by the local Architectural Association (of Kenya) to give a presentation on how ‘blockchain’ would affect their industry.

My opening remark was “Why would you call an IT expert to explain to you what you have been doing for centuries?”

Suddenly, the room went chilly - cold.

Here were the leaders of an industry who had taken away their most valuable block of time; architects thrive in the dark and this was an evening event only for them to be told their time would have been better utilised sketching.

Too bad for them. They were all adorned and sniffed up with the networking and hobnobbing part of the session scheduled after I was done with them.

The power some of us have wielded, at times, scares me.

Technology people are the new snake oil merchants in the universe today from preaching paperless offices to monetising one’s social media content.

We claim to have the elixir for all the worlds’ ills, and we have convinced the media of its efficacy. This has been the case since we started writing with charred sticks on cave walls as our ancestors proceeded to spread the word.

The Block in blockchain, I speculated and proceeded to verbalise at the event, was actually appropriated from the culture of architects known as a Title Block which provides details about the drawing and how it relates to other drawings done previously and relating to it. When an architect picks up a drawing or opens it on their computer, the first thing they do is look at the title block to make sure they are looking at the correct version.

During the era of drawing boards, when you wanted to make a change to a drawing, one would trace the original one then makes the changes on the copy and not the original. You would then reference the original drawing within the title block of the copy including date, time and who made the change after which the new drawing

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would be reproduced on linen cloth.

For the geeks reading the paragraph above, sorry speed readers. What I have just described is an immutable record or in buzz speak, a blockchain. I remember filling drawings for a construction I was involved in sometime in the early 2000s with the then Nairobi City Council and was required to present the architectural drawings in linen.

So, what is really new in the so-called technology space? In my humble opinion, not much really. Just a lot of fluff. We believe that what we are digitising is ground-breaking but more because we have no historical reference; and because of our boastful nature, those who know better avoid correcting our false sense of importance.

After we had appropriated “block” from the architects, we unashamedly turned to the financial sector and picked the word ‘currency’ then baptised it ‘Crypto’ arap ‘Currency’ forgetting that for it to be valid, there needs to be an entity with an army to defend it.

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