In July I sat down with Isaiah Kasunda at UniPod Malawi for the fourth episode of Innovator’s Desk, part of UniPod’s Podtalk series. We talked for an hour about how I got into software, the projects I built at MUBAS, and what building for real users in Malawi has taught me.
What we covered.#
The thread running through the conversation is the move from building things because they are fun to building things people will actually use. My first serious project, a platform for finding electronics repairs you can trust, didn’t make the shortlist for the MUBAS Innovation Awards. A year later we came back with Nyani, which was recognised there. The difference wasn’t the technology. It was whether anyone wanted what we had built.
Isaiah asked about the Cable Theft Detection System, my final-year project: ground sensors and a computer-vision camera that can tell a person from an animal, reporting in real time to a web dashboard. It was aimed at the cable theft that cuts power to Illovo’s irrigation pivots. We presented it to Illovo, and their critique sent us back to iterate on it.
We also talked about Kwenda, where we learned that most people would rather buy a ticket over USSD than in an app, and where we verified every account before believing we had passed 500,000 unique users.
Most of what I’ve built, I’ve built with Chiyembekezo Chilembwe. We have worked on projects together for years, and we still do.