Safaricom PLC launched the Safaricom Engineering Community in a two-day inaugural summit dubbed Decode last week. The hybrid event hosted 719 physical and over 26,000 online attendees that comprised innovators and disruptors from small businesses, large industries, academia, and government realms in the Software Engineering field.
The summit was a platform to showcase new technology and emerging trends while bringing together a community for Kenyan engineers to explore the latest research, build connections and spark innovation to meet Kenya’s future challenges.
“Safaricom intends to ensure that about 70% to 80% of the technology we use is built in-house. Indeed, the Safaricom app and M-PESA app were developed and continue to be improved by our internal teams. Therefore, to ensure sustainability and even achieve more milestones, we must create a training ground and grow a big community of software engineers.” Peter Ndegwa CEO Safaricom PLC
The Safaricom Engineering community comprises 9 chapters including Software Engineering, Data Science, Cyber Security, IoT(Internet of Things), Cloud Computing, UX Design, Fintech, Product Management, and Performance Engineering.
The community will allow developers to give back to the community as mentors and create opportunities for community members to connect, network, and learn from other developers in a bid to address the increasing engineering talent shortage in the market
Yesterday's Safaricom Engineering summit was an eye opener to how much I didn't know.I enjoyed the sessions on Day 2 and learnt how #MachineLearning is used to improve customer experience by reducing the mean time taken to recover/detect.#SafaricomDecode pic.twitter.com/PDCPZFgHJT
— Melisa Michuki.py (@MelisaMichuki) July 16, 2022
“Kenya has long been known as Africa’s Silicon Savannah. Living up to this expectation, we intend to form a vibrant community of tech enthusiasts willing to find real solutions to real challenges,” Peter Ndegwa
Safaricom Growing Partnerships, Mozilla on Decode.
Speaking on behalf of Mozilla, one of the summit’s platinum sponsors, Alice Munyua, Director, Africa Mradi – Mozilla lauded the company for the summit and encouraged Kenyans in the technology space to create products and solutions that are meaningful and impactful to society.
The decode summit gives techies an opportunity to work together, but above all, also share ideas in times when regulations seem uncertain, for example, when parliament approved the ICT bill in parliament earlier last month, and also to enjoy developments like when Safaricom & visa launched the M-Pesa Global Payment solutions.
