You know you are dealing with an out-and-out entrepreneur when Anthony Kahinga lists the types of business he has engaged in since he was in second year of university.
It started with selling fruit salads in Nairobi. As that flourished, thanks to capital from a friend, it ripened to the importation of phone and computer accessories from Dubai and China. That recorded a slump, and it detoured into the servicing of electronics. Because parents would come with gadgets broken and ruined by children, the servicing business gave birth to selling tablets that can address gadget addiction among the young ones while offering education and fun.
That tablet business is called ElimuTab, and it employs about 30 people.
Anthony’s entry into entrepreneurship came at a heavy cost to his studies. He remembers flunking horribly while in the second year at the University of Nairobi (UoN), where he was studying chemistry.
"You pay yourself last. The first thing you pay is everyone else, and then what remains is what you grapple with. Sometimes, you receive salary last."
His parents were concerned, and he had to come clean and tell them that he was more into business than attending laboratory sessions to secure a chemistry degree.
They decided to give him a rope, metaphorically. They asked him to find out how much it would cost to obtain a business degree to build on his Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Kenya qualification. The figure was slightly under Sh700,000. The parents gave him the money, told him to do all the business he wanted with it, but on condition that they would be attending his university graduation in two years.
“That was the ultimatum, and then I moved all the money to the business and I used to pay fees in Sh10,000 or Sh20,000 [at a time],” he recalls.
But it worked out. He graduated with a commerce degree (marketing option) from KCA University on December 5, 2014, and had his wedding the next day. He has never returned to the UoN, where he abandoned the pursuit of his chemistry degree.
“Since I had CPAs, I was able to pivot and have two years exemption [at KCA],” he says.
ElimuTab offers schools and parents with gadgets to help raise a tech-savvy generation.
Their business banks on three pillars. Tablets made for children of various ages is the first. The second is interactive screens to help teachers deliver their lessons in a fun way. Coding and robotics is the third where they train children in how to code, create websites and related activities.
They are big on parental monitoring and control of the time minors spend on gadgets and the content they access. This is done through their ElimuSafe software.
“With ElimuSafe, you’re able to control what your child is seeing and how long the child uses the tablet. If you want them to use it for two hours, you set it remotely on your phone and immediately two hours are over, the tablet will shut down,” says Anthony.
The tech firm has gone big on loading books onto the tablets, through collaborating with publishers, and so a single tablet can have as many as 1,000 books.
“The government introduced about a million tablets in public schools, and the private schools now are catching up to make sure that digital learning is happening in the classroom. So, the uptake is quite good, and more schools are getting to be digital,” says Anthony.
There are many lessons he has picked from his entrepreneurship journey, and one of them is that you don’t always have to be nice.
“You don’t have to be nice with everybody,” he says. “We hire different staff. Like us with a team of 30, they come in different shapes and sizes. So, you do not have to be lovable by everyone.”
He has also learnt that an entrepreneur has to work harder than everyone else.
“You never sleep. You are always thinking about business,” he says.
It gets even more interesting because his wife, whom he met while attending CPA classes after high school, is the operations manager at ElimuTab. They have been in business together since the first time he ventured into entrepreneurship.
He also knows that business requires a lot of sacrifice.
“You pay yourself last. The first thing you pay is everyone else, and then what remains is what you grapple with. Sometimes, you receive salary last,” he says.
For ElimuTab, the current dream is transforming education in Kenya.
“With CBC (competency-based curriculum), there’s a lot of confusion on how technology is going to impact education. We are there to take up that space. We are there to guide the owners of schools, to guide the teachers, to guide the children for that,” he says.
“Our plan is to prepare our young children to be ready for the future of work. The future of work will be AI: a lot of coding, a lot of working from home, opening your laptop and working for Amazon. So, we have to prepare now because we say Africa will produce the biggest labour force by 2050. Are we preparing them for that?” poses Anthony.
– Elvis Ondieki