Edition 38, November 2024

Two months to Christmas! Yaaaay!!

Welcome to the November edition of the Safaricom Newsroom Newsletter! This month, we have an exciting lineup of stories covering the latest news in innovation, sports, careers, AI and more.

To start us off, we feature Anthony Thuo, Safaricom’s Field Engineer in the Narok region who recounts on the challenging flood season experienced across the country earlier in the year. Anthony and his team had to go above and beyond to keep the network up and running for Safaricom’s customers in the region.

Nowadays, musicians are getting paid for their musical talents through non-traditional channels such as streaming and digital sales, as well as social video monetisation, when people create content using their music on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. In this month’s newsletter, you will get to learn more about how musicians are being forced out of their comfort zone to be more creative and leverage technology.

Get to learn more about our Customer Obsession department by listening to a podcast featuring Lucille Aveva, Director, Customer Obsession. She discusses customer frustrations and explains how Safaricom is working to fix the situation.

In the sports scene, get to read about the NBA’s plan in Kenya as they launched a youth basketball development programme in partnership with M-PESA.

On Faces of Safaricom, immerse yourself in the story of John Mafabi, Safaricom’s Regional Marketing lead for the Greater Western region, who has created a beautiful life outside of the office that he absolutely loves and enjoys.

Did you know you can use AI to screen diseases? At the M-PESA Foundation sponsored medical camps across the country , Zuri Health are deploying AI to help triage patients. With a ring light and a phone, you would be forgiven to think it is a TikTok video shoot. Using the phone’s camera, the screening tool can measure blood pressure, oxygen saturation, breathing rate, stress, haemoglobin, and haemoglobin A1C (HbA1C) to check glucose levels.

Lastly, get to read an inspiring story on a group of five girls from Booker Academy in Kakamega who developed an app named Malarax, to help raise awareness about malaria and educate people on preventive measures.

...TOP STORY….

Toughing it out in the Mara

Anthony Thuo can see on his monitoring devices when one of the Base Transmission Stations he oversees in the Narok region is not working, but customer feedback from a town called Narosura often comes faster. The moment the network goes off for a minute, people from Narosura call him first.

On a normal day, Anthony is used to dusty roads and moving long distances, as he ensures the network is up and running within the Narok cluster. During the flooding season, the situation was very different.

To keep systems running, Anthony and his team had to use tractors to get to some sites or wade through the water barefoot because the water level was above the height of gumboots.

Read this story to see how Anthony and his team braved the floods.

Here’s The Story

Artists, tech, and money

Over the past 20 years, the music industry has experienced incredible changes with technology playing a tremendous role in shifting how music is produced, consumed, and distributed. For musicians, it has opened up a world of endless possibilities for making money with an influx of new revenue models in the digital space.

These platforms, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and closer to home Boomplay, Skiza, and Mdundo, are growing the industry’s income at a record rate.

Today, musicians are getting paid for their musical talents through streaming and digital sales, as well as social video monetisation when people create content using their music on platforms like?TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

In this story, we speak to Tom Mahondo, the CEO of Ngomma, a Kenyan digital service provider on the evolving landscape of artists, tech and money.

Here’s The Story

Podcast: Customer Obsession, a way of life at Safaricom

The customer is the lifeblood of any business, and for Safaricom, whose 44 million subscribers use its products and services to fuel their lives, customer obsession is a way of life. Using analytics and big data, Safaricom seeks to leverage technology to cater to the evolving needs of the customer and ensure that the ‘experience of one’ and hyper-personalisation are achieved.

In this edition of the?Safaricom Newsroom podcast, Lucille Aveva, the Director of Customer Obsession, discusses customer frustrations and explains how Safaricom is working to fix the situation.

Here’s The Podcast

Inside the NBA’s plan in Kenya

Basketball is poetry in motion. In the ‘90s, Kenyan fans were glued to their TV screens every Sunday afternoon as legendary National Basketball Association (NBA) players weaved and danced across the court seeking victory.

In Kenya, basketball has a passionate following and a developed league structure. Although football and athletics dominate the country’s sports scene, basketball has carved out its niche, particularly in urban areas.

The growth of international basketball platforms and the rise of Kenyan players competing abroad have shown that the sport is here to stay.

This year, the NBA, in partnership with Safaricom through M-PESA, launched a youth basketball development programme geared towards empowering the youth by providing opportunities through sports.

Here’s The Story

Faces of Safaricom: John Mafabi on eating life with a big spoon

John Mafabi is half-Ugandan, half-Kenyan. He is Safaricom’s Regional Marketing lead for the Greater Western region.

As an experienced marketing manager with over a decade of experience in retail management and trade marketing, he likes to think of himself as open-minded and quite chill with a joyful approach to life.

He is a family man with two beautiful daughters, loves everything Christmas, and his love language is gifting. In another life, he would have been a professional basketball player, perhaps occupying the same realm as LeBron James.

Here’s His Story

When AI can help tell you’re sick: how it works

Ever had a cold and made a concoction of hot water, lemon, and honey, then, voila, you’re right as rain? This doesn’t mean you are a doctor, but it takes us back to the history of the healthcare industry, which started with home remedies.

Healthcare began as a purely reactionary medical practice in which people learned about the medicinal properties of a plant through trial and error, documented it, and passed it on to others.

It then evolved into laboratory medicine, and the latter half of the 20th?century saw rapid advancements in medical imaging technologies such as ultrasound. At the M-PESA Foundation sponsored medical camps around the country , Zuri Health are deploying AI to help triage patients.

Here’s The Story

These students built an app to help fight malaria

Had she known that the illness that made her nauseous, lose appetite and feel so sick that she could not attend classes was the easily preventable malaria, Shantelle Nyambura would have taken action earlier.

Malaria, a common and dangerous disease in Kenya, came upon Shantelle while she was at school at?Booker Academy. She is a boarder, and the experience left her shaken.

Shantelle is now in a group of five girls at the school who have developed the appropriately named Malarax, an app to help raise awareness about malaria and educate people on preventive measures.

The application was submitted to the Technovation World Summit, which took place in San Francisco on October 17th, 2024.

At the summit, young innovators pitched their technology solutions, which ranged from agriculture apps that connect farmers, to training apps for kids with cochlear implants. The girls, or Team Mars, as they named their group, were among five finalists in the junior category.

Here’s Their Story