Kenya recently launched m-lab, Africa’s first apps lab. The World Bank , Nokia and Government of Findland backed project seeks to encourage innovation in the East African country, a major ICT hub on the continent.

The Nairobi-based facility will house six startups . It will also benefit from linkages with the well established iHub Consortium that includes Nairobi’s iHub, eMobils, the World Wide Web Foundation and the University of Nairobi School of Computing and Informatics. The iHub is a fast-growing incubator space for Kenyan start-ups, investors and technologists, and the m-lab will bring similar benefits. The m-lab will tackle two missing features that are crucial for a true ICT business-enabled environment to flourish: access to market and finance for embryonic enterprises.

The nature of the m-lab project and the iHub initiative underscores the reasons for the rapid expansion of Kenya’s ICT sector, which now constitutes about 5% of GDP: co-location, cohesive ICT policies, sustained expansion of service to rural areas and investment in infrastructure.

The launch of m-lab follows the staging of the Nairobi-based Pivot25 mobile app developer contest, which was created to give start-ups a platform on which to share their innovations, access funding and penetrate new markets.

The World Bank also plans to roll-out m-lab projects in South Africa, Armenia, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Business, technology and users: three areas to focus on…