CNN Interviews Kenyan Millionaire and Entrepreneur

This Wednesday, 21 May 2014 on ‘African Start-Up’, CNN International profiles 26-year-old Boniface Githinji, founder of a tech start-up called Sematime – an SMS service for small- and medium-sized businesses in Nairobi.

While in school, Githinji realized that some students were not delivering report cards to their parents and when he was in university he thought of tackling this problem. “With the little knowledge I had of programming I thought I could do something useful about this that could be beneficial to almost all the parents, so we came up with the idea of sending report cards via SMS,” Githinji explains on ‘African Start-Up.’

With over 70 percent mobile phone penetration in Kenya, it means virtually every parent owns a cell phone which he or she can use to comfortably receive SMS’s from Sematime.

Though Kenyan schools are their biggest clients, Sematime also do custom designs allowing clients to send information, bills and invoices to large groups through text messages.

Like many other entrepreneurs, Githinji’s biggest challenge initially was capital but he easily got help from Nailab – Nairobi Incubation Lab – an organization that supports start-ups that don’t have the necessary resources.

After joining Nailab, Sematime had a successful start and last year alone the company made about Kshs. 6 million.

Don’t miss this Kenyan success story on ‘African Start-Up’, Wednesday 21 May in ‘Connect the World’ at 1800 Kenyan time on CNN International.

Website www.cnn.com/africanstartup