I took couple years off coding to build a Kenyan infrastructure engineering firm - we're still going although I've started programming again. The biggest thing we've done is 6.7km of a mountain / lakeside ring road in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria (Kodula village section specifically, the work is visible on satellite). We're actually not completely done with it but watching the community growth from having the paved road reaching completion and improving the accessibility was absolutely incredible. Extremely frustrating sector to work in and difficult to pay yourself a salary even when it's not charity, but sometimes the rewards are awesome. I have a physics background so doing civil / electrical / mechanical stuff is tractable for me beyond programming, then we use the classic PM tooling to make things run ~relatively better than most people doing stuff out there. All Kenyan engineers other than me, lots of smart people who are highly motivated to meet and work with.
Wow, super cool, I was in Kenya and Cameroon last year on two different projects (one tech, one traditional consulting doing market research) and there are so many problems still to be solved. If you're thinking about impact/scale for problems to tackle over there, what would you be working on? Somewhat crazy q, given how bad traffic and roads are, what do you think about dirigibles for goods transport between some major cities (or even regions like cobalt mines in DRC to Zambia)?
What's Kenya like for infrastructure development compared to regional neighbors? Seems always that Kenya is miles ahead of other countries in that part of Africa on almost every metric?
I was in Kenya and Cameroon for projects last year and went to Uganda on holiday, Kenya is far ahead of Cameroon, Uganda actually had decent infrastructure but it was all two lane highways so when you get heavy freight there can be huge delays (ditto for much of Kenya, but they built a rail line at least). Power was a bit better in Kenya than Cameroon, but in my apt (in a nice part of Nairobi) it went out about once a day and had to switch to generators for a bit.
