My vision is to see Kiswahili take its rightful place in our country

It is the desire of every budding entrepreneur to meet and learn from the best and most successful businesspeople.

For Almasi Ndangili, an entrepreneur and ICT graduate from United States International University (USIU-Africa), this dream is about to come true.

Early this year, his start-up business, Imarisha Productions, was one of only a handful of business ideas by entrepreneurs from around the world who were selected by BootUP Ventures to participate in a week-long entrepreneurship boot camp later this year at Silicon Valley in California, United States.

“BootUP Ventures is a social enterprise that organises an intensive one-week boot camp where highly motivated and upcoming entrepreneurs from around the world converge,” Almasi explains.

During the boot camp, budding entrepreneurs meet and interact with some of the brightest and most talented business leaders and mentors at Silicon Valley.

“These interactive sessions help the participants to accelerate growth of their businesses through mentorship,” he says.

PASSIONATE

Almasi, 25, is passionate about Kiswahili, therefore when he founded Imarisha Productions as a talent academy in 2016, he hoped to promote the language, which, according to him, has not received sufficient attention befitting its status as the country’s national language.

“It is sad that Kiswahili often plays second fiddle to English in most settings in Kenya. There has not been enough effort from stakeholders at all levels of the economy to propel Kiswahili to its rightful status,” he notes.

He argues that even with the rich talent pool available in Kenya, for instance, many Swahili artists still do not have an avenue to showcase their works.

To put this into context, there are between 60 and 150 million speakers of Kiswahili worldwide, according to the University of Arizona’s Critical Languages Programme. To Almasi, this is a huge market for Kiswahili and Kiswahili products waiting to be tapped into.

“If you visited Alliance Françoise today, for instance, you would be surprised by the number of plays, drama and poems staged in English and French every week. You would, however, be lucky to find a Kiswahili play during the same time,” he says.

This is the gap that Imarisha Productions hopes to plug, he says, by promoting the place of Kiswahili through entertainment and education. “We tap, mentor and provide a platform for young exceptional acting, poetry and writing talents from secondary schools and universities in Kenya. By recruiting them into our company, we help them to earn a living and commercialise their art,” explains Almasi.

“Our key focus is to encourage our team of artists and content creators to leverage on technology so as to reach out to a broader audience,” he adds.

As a techie, Almasi is also tinkering with technology to develop educative content. So far, he has used his IT skills to create animations “by use of characters of Africa descent” which he says resonate better with local audiences.

“You cannot perpetuate a language without perpetuating the culture of its speakers. These two elements constitute a package. To promote Kiswahili in our households, we need animations of Kiswahili-speaking Africans,” he notes.

He laments the limited amount of Kiswahili content online, saying that this has affected the overall status of the language, including translation.

“Translating a text from one language to Kiswahili and vice versa on the web sometimes returns laughable results. Google translation tools work by picking the material available online for reference. The fewer the material there is in a language, the harder it is to digitally translate any text into that language,” he explains.

The solution, he says, is to get more professionals to publish their work online, by giving them not just a platform that allows them to share their work, but also one that earns them an income.

In 2017, Almasi partnered with students from a number of universities and colleges across the country to establish Tamasha la Kiswahili (Kiswahili Festival) as a vehicle to promote the language locally and regionally.

“This festival brings together lovers of Kiswahili language, media outlets, artists and other players on a single platform to celebrate Kiswahili and to promote its place in our societies. It is also an avenue for artists to showcase their creative works,” Almasi adds. In its third edition in March this year, more than 1,000 people participated, including high school and university students.

The event, held at the Kenya National Library Services at Buru Buru in Nairobi, also brought together industry bigwigs such as celebrated Kiswahili authors Wallah bin Wallah and Prof Ken Walibora, journalists Swaleh Mdoe and Munene Nyaga and author Kinyanjui Kombani.

So far, Almasi has been working closely with local publishers to finance his social enterprise.

He hopes to use the boot camp as an opportunity to meet potential investors to fund his idea to become a successful business venture in the near future.