The next Bitcoin Kenya meetup is Friday, March 7th - 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.
Pete's Cafe and Burrito Haven
Ground Floor, Bishop Magua House, Ngong Rd., Nairobi
(Ground level of the building where iHub is located).
Special guest: Tomer Kantor (iamsatoshi), who will be filming the meetup, so don't be late.
Bitcoin startups in Kenya include:
Kipochi
BitPesa
CoinFling
TagPesa
and a number of merchants and charitable organizations now accept Bitcoin payments / donations:
Give Directly
The Water Project
TunaPanda
Wageni Technologies
Kenya presents a unique opportunity for Bitcoin in that well over half the population is already comfortable storing value "on their phones" and using that value to transfer amounts small and large to peers, or for use in bill payment or even retail purchases. Kenya is one of the few place where a measurable percent of the country's GDP passes through the mobile payments network -- and Kenya leads all other areas with about a third of the GDP's value traversing the M-PESA and Airtel mobile payment networks. Though M-PESA serves the market relatively well today, its users continue to suffer from the payment network's availability and performance issues and the network's operator faces renewed regulatory and other external pressures such that a gap for Bitcoin to fill exists now.
Here's an example -- Airtel mobile money woes.
e.g.,
http://www.techtrends.co.zm/mobile/airtel-money-instant
