SKILLS
KPC's Inuka fellowship placed 30% of its first cohort
Thirty fellows were picked from more than 1,000 applicants, half of them women, for a six-month in-person apprenticeship in Python, machine learning, dashboards, automation and data storytelling, run by Kenya Pipeline Company and its Foundation with Power Learn Project. Thirty percent have jobs — as fibre optic technicians, operational data analysts, business intelligence analysts and predictive analytics engineers — matched through PLP's Talent Hub. "The market informs the curriculum; students are trained, and thereafter they go for attachment and secure jobs," says KPC Foundation manager Rachel Gathoni. That ordering is the whole argument: build the course from the vacancies, not the other way round.
TechTrends KE
FINTECH
Equity moves payment approval to your face or thumb
Equity Mobile now authorises transactions with Face ID or fingerprint instead of a PIN, set up through Settings, Security, then confirmed once with the existing PIN — optional, so PIN users can carry on. The bank's three claims are worth separating: you cannot phish a fingerprint, which is true of the credential itself and not of the social engineering around it; the biometric stays on the handset and never reaches Equity's servers, which is the important architectural point; and a stolen phone is no longer enough to move money. Against Kenya's run of SIM-swap and social-engineering fraud, moving the second factor onto the device's secure element is the right direction.
TechTrends KE
INFRASTRUCTURE
Posta's parcels jumped 549% in a quarter — and still fell for the year
The Postal Corporation of Kenya handled 667,978 domestic parcels in the April–June quarter against 102,890 in the previous one, a 549.2% jump the CA attributes to a new partnership with an e-commerce consolidator and the lifting of restrictions on EMS items. Zoom out and the picture inverts: full-year parcel volumes fell 33.2% to 993,090 from 1.49 million, and domestic letters dropped 70.2%. Meanwhile private couriers took revenues up 6.7% to KSh6.70 billion on 14.4 million domestic parcels — roughly fifteen times what Posta moved. One good quarter on somebody else's e-commerce volume is not a turnaround.
TechTrends KE
STARTUPS
Bolt and the Red Cross will train 500 boda riders in first aid
The programme puts Kenya Red Cross first-aid training in front of 500 motorcycle riders on Bolt's platform — the people who reach a Nairobi crash site before an ambulance does, and who are themselves heavily represented in road casualty figures. It sits alongside Bolt's other Kenyan commitments this month, from the Comfort tier's expansion to its decade-in-Kenya numbers, but this one is cheap and unusually well targeted: riders are already first on scene, and until now almost none of them were trained for it.
TechTrends KE
