Originally from Algeria, Samir Abdelkrim is an adventurous blogger and entrepreneur. He’s been travelling for over fifteen months touring the innovation scene across Africa.
‘While innovation is clearly enabled by the public sector which facilitates conditions for the emergence of startups, innovation is driven by the citizens and their urge to find solutions for themselves when the governments fail to do so’, Abdelkrim explains.
He mentions Lagos-incubated startup iBudget and Kenya’s famous crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi as examples.
He is ready to look back at his travels and encounters with a whole new project.
Abdelkrim began his travels in Dakar back in May 2014. He aimed to meet with African innovators from all over the continent while publishing weekly columns on his findings.
Today, he is ready to look back at his travels and encounters with a whole new project.
‘Writing columns is a great tool to promote African tech entrepreneurs but it actually limits your subject matter. I want to go deeper. So I came up with the idea of writing a book. It’s a way for me to cultivate my content and the relationships with entrepreneurs and innovators’. The book is currently being successfully crowdfunded.
‘I think everyone was expecting me to do it, that’s why the campaign is being met with such success’, he prides himself. The book, he promises, will include portraits, stories and analysis of Africa’s entrepreneurial innovation.
Abdelkrim has also founded StartupBRICS with the ambition to shed the light on how innovation is being done in emerging economies.
Follow Abdelkrim on Twitter @SamirAbdelkrim