Edwin's Corner

The ancient Chinese farmer, medieval Venetian merchant and the conquering Victorian company man had one thing in common. They took insurance. Arguably, our civilization has gone this far because men took risks and knew there was a fallback plan in the face of insurmountable odds. Generally, the insurance industry has grown over several centuries into a hydra of products and services, vastly complex and vaguely understood. However, through all its manifestations, the primary goal of insurance is to hedge against the risk of contingent loss. To this end, it has failed to ignite the African imagination. Historically brought by the white man as he colonized and disenfranchised Africa, Insurance has suffered shame in the hands of a misinformed continent. Only the affluent and middle class seem to grasp its power with penetration rates in the continent below 5% . Insurance agents have also failed to inspire its uptake with a general feeling that they are unreliable, u...

  I remember the first time a computer made an impression. It was in 1993, and I was living in Nanyuki an outpost town in Kenya (at least back then). I was ten, and I had gone to visit a programmer who had been hired by a research team studying Mount Kenya and the ecology around it. Although most details are hazy today, I remember the programmer, I really thought he was the most intelligent man alive and everything that came out of his mouth was the golden truth. I promised myself that one day I would own and operate a computer like him. I was one of the first students in Kenya back in 1997 to take up IT as a subject in high school, I honesty think that was a blessing because we had a volunteer from the UK who had experience in developing software, he took us through three of the four year in high school, it is through him that we really dug into C++, C and Pascal programming languages. It is from here that some of my colleagues eventually found themselves working...