Tag: technology

E-Commerce in Egypt – The Tipping Point: Episode 1

Hussein Mohieldin Leave a comment

Episode 1: Identifying the stakeholders & controlling forces

Being at the heart of the E-Commerce scene in Egypt and while working on the preparations for robusta’s upcoming E-Commerce Summit 2018 (contact me if you’re interested in participation) I can’t help but keep asking myself what’s left till the market reaches its tipping point in Egypt. Inspite of having one of the highest social media penetration rates in the world with more than 33 million users on Facebook alone massive increase starting 2011 and between 2014 to 2017,  E-Commerce in Egypt hasn’t reached anywhere near the global E-Commerce growth rates for the obvious reasons like, for starters, the fact that the Egyptian customer is still hanging on having to see and feel the product they’re buying to make sure it’s good and being afraid to use their credit cards online and fearing their goods won’t be shipped (aka Egyptians have trust issues).

Being half engineer and half consultant, I couldn’t help but tackle this from a merely analytical perspective and run a quick mostly qualitative assessment of both the market stakeholders and controlling forces through a series of upcoming blog posts in an attempt to at least present the problem and try to find practical solutions and get you, the customer, the business owner, the rising entrepreneur, the big brand and anyone who believes, like me and everyone at robusta, that there’s a great future and opportunities yet to be snatched in the business of E-Commerce in Egypt, to weigh on this matter and give each other pieces of our mind, turning this from the thoughts of one individual to a discussion among those who are concerned and who knows what else. For starters, Identifying the stakeholders is mostly straight forward; however, identifying the controlling forces can get a little bit tricky.

Out of our experience at robusta for the past 4 years with several E-Commerce implementations, some of which are true models for successful case studies, I believe the most critical mix to look at of stakeholders and forces would be:

  1. Supply: that would be the retailers and product providers. Think B.TECH.
  2. Demand: that would be the end consumers. That’s everyone of us, the end users.
  3. Mediators: in some cases there’s a marketplace acting as a mediator bridging the supply & demand. Think Souq, Jumia, Edfa3ly, etc..
  4. Technology: that comes at the core and probably the key contributor to E-Commerce over the traditional brick-and-mortar retail and distribution.
  5. Logistics: though a key pillar of traditional retail, E-Commerce adds an additional layer of complexity to optimize on cost and meet customers’ expectations.
  6. Customer Service: in a global world that truly brings international E-Commerce players as close to local consumers as local players, customers expectations have truly hit the roof
  7. Marketing: between the classical 4Ps and the need to go almost fully digital, marketing becomes one of the key barriers to new entrants to the market to realize the full potential of the market
  8. People: most analysis would overlook the role of knowledgeable workers, management capacities and small business owners setting and E-Commerce strategies and respective implementations.

In the following series, I will look at each of the aforementioned and attempt to do an assessment of the current status of each in an attempt to look at the missing jigsaw pieces and anticipate the moment in time where they all click and unleash a huge potential of an economy on its own that can be a critical driver for economic development as it does not only develop the retail business but obviously creates lots of jobs on the logistics, customer service and significantly contributes to the development of the technology and financial sectors.

Would love to get thoughts on this as I plan to break it down into a series of detailed analysis of each of the aforementioned and I’m quite flexible to adjust for a more inclusive perspective that’s hopefully one step forwards towards the market tipping point.

I believe other perspectives looking at the topic could also be quite enlightening, one of which would be the study of the evolution in other more developed markets and the different phases it has gone through until it reached maturity.

Developer Communities: All You Need to Know

Ahmad Alfy Leave a comment

What are Developer Communities?

Developer communities are places where we can

  • Share and brag about our work
  • Ask questions and find help
  • Follow for news
  • Make new connections and meet new people in the development field

They’re all about “finding solutions” and building up new experience, closer aligned with a community of practice than a community of any other type.

Communities you have to be following

In our field, there are A LOT of online communities that focus solely on development like

We also have other channels that are superiorly active like

  • Facebook tech groups/pages
  • Reddit tech subreddits
  • Google developer groups
  • Twitter

Huge companies and enterprises building products for the developers to use started to realize the importance of actively participating in the community through seeking the developers themselves. A new role has emerged called “Developer Evangelism,” where a developer evangelist is someone participating in the community in a way that makes him advertise for a product while making it sound exciting to others and without being intrusive.

You can find developer evangelists all around you. They are the people you follow on Twitter for news, who write tutorials on their blogs telling you how to do something. Think of them as social and brand influencers of all things technical development. Examples are countless and include

In Egypt, most of the tech communities are driven by individuals and not by companies or organizations. The role of developer evangelism hasn’t really matured enough yet. Instead, big companies who build ready-to-use “solutions” (like Oracle and Microsoft) advocate these solutions to other companies; not to developers

We have a big chance of taking the lead in the tech communities through focusing on the “Individuals.”

Why you should actively participate in developer communities

Developers in general show interest in participating in tech communities because it’s a way to create new connections. Connections are important because they mean

  • New technical knowledge
  • New job opportunities

How you can start contributing to the community TODAY

 Before you start contributing, there’s a set of skills you need to know that you have to work on along the way

  •  Be extremely eager to learn
  •  Be an excellent communicator through verbal and written communication
  •  Enrich your technical competence in your areas of interest
  •  Be an excellent listener and have the capacity to discuss anything

There are mainly 2 channels you should be focusing on…

 1. Online communities

   These will massively help you grow your technical knowledge and will show you how others discuss things and communicate with each other. Most importantly, they will highlight your weaknesses and allow you to work on them at your leisure.

 2. Offline/Local communities

  These are where you start having impact on others, sharing as well as always learning along the way. You start to advocate and give advice.Take care that you should be open to all opinions even those that trigger you and those you think are worthless though.

Benefits of having a leading role in local communities

  •  Your technical knowledge will grow significantly.
  •  You become more confident in the work you do and start enjoying it more and more.
  •  People start to idolize you as an expert (careful about that).
  •  You build relationships with other developers, entrepreneurs, and companies. Your connections grow beyond what you ever thought they could.
  •  You dedicate sometime everyday to reject the job offers you are getting via LinkedIn and emails 🙂

Benefits that the organization you belong to gains

  • With the growth of your technical knowledge, your organization is directly affected by the quality of the work that you perform.
  • Customers will have more confidence in your organization’s work.
  • Your organization starts attracting more customers.
  • Your organization starts attracting candidates who are eager to learn because they want to work with “YOU”.

Where you should start first

 1. Online

  • Participate in online discussions like Stackoverflow, Reddit, Github
  • Build something that you know will benefit other developers.
  • Write down articles on your personal blog, organization blog, Medium, WordPress giving your personal insights and ideas on a particular problem
  • Check local communities like Facebook tech groups and help others whenever you can through comments and answering questions whenever possible.

 2. Offline

  • Check for student activities and offer your services as a mentor/speaker at universities.
  • Offer to help those who are trying to give back to the community either through organization or through metorship/speaking (RailsGirls Cairo)
  • Find and attend local meetups and show your will to participate in organization and speaking. If none is available, start building your own community with the help of your friends and colleagues.

Bro tips

  • A good advocate is someone who is technically superior. Keep reading and learning and trying. Question your work and methods. Seek excellence.
  • Be kind to others around you. Their age, color, gender, religion or technical capabilities should never matter. As long as they are not toxic, you should stand at the same distance from all.
  • Listen carefully and don’t underestimate anyone. You would be surprised by the ideas and the work of the people you frankly think they aren’t as good as you.
  • Always be humble.
  • Give without waiting for a return. Good deeds pay off in ways you cannot imagine.
  • It’s a long-term investment that takes time. Be PATIENT and always enjoy the ride.

Capitalizing on Technology in Charity

Ahmed Abousafy Leave a comment

Charity has always been one of the fundamental themes in the lives of Egyptians. With the continuous declination of the standard of living for both the lower-middle and lower classes in the society, NGOs and people working in the charity and CSR fields are facing a huge challenge to provide an adequate support to those social classes that the country’s government is failing to provide.

Charity and community service in Egypt comes in many forms such as NGOs, CSR departments in corporates, clubs in universities, small groups of friends or even individuals. Activities in all these entities are typically more centralized around some seasons that are mostly religion-related. However, to give you a hint of how huge this theme is in Egypt, during Ramadan only in 2015 approximately EGP 30 Billion donations were collected according to the official numbers. (For more details about the economics of donations in Ramadan, we recommend this article by Omar El Shenety.)

In spite of this huge amount of spending and donations, the relationship between charity and technology in Egypt remains very shallow. From my personal experience in this field and what we have reached in robusta throughout the different engagements with NGOs and CSR departments, I believe that technology isn’t being fully utilized or even slightly utilized at a minimum level to help in the charity work here in Egypt.

During our previous engagements in robusta with lots of NGOs, we noticed that most of them are only willing to make use of technology superficially by building simple websites to use them only as an online informative tool. While on the other side there are several serious problems that are present in the current charity/CSR model that technology would really help in resolving but utilizing technology isn’t on their roadmap.

Below are some examples of the current problems and how technology can help resolve that.

Accessibility of Donating

It is such a pity that people are creating WhatsApp groups to collect money for certain cases. Meanwhile a simple web/mobile application listing the cases by their different types and with detailed information can be very handy especially when it is integrated with an online payment gateway provided by bank or independent platforms like Payfort.

Cases Reach

Lots of people sometimes want to donate money/furniture/…etc and actually don’t know where or how to donate despite the huge number of NGOs. The idea is that you want a simple way to do so which is quite feasible by a location based mobile app that detects users’ locations and can show the different cases around them with their needs. Location based apps can be used in an opposite way by NGOs to see the donors around them and get in contact with them.

Reaching out to more people around the globe

A lot of Egyptians all over the globe would mostly prefer to give their money donations or Zakah to the poor in Egypt or to help the people here to establish microprojects via microloans or similar models yet unfortunately there are no easy to use, credible and transparent platforms where they can do that. Then what about a mobile application that aggregates the cases from the different NGOs with their statuses and integrates with a payment gateway allowing people from other countries to donate their money online to specific cases.

Transparency

Any donor usually needs answers to some questions, where am I putting my donations exactly? which case am I supporting? and the more the donor pays, the more details and follow up they would expect to be provided with. This type of transparency is typically very difficult when you donate, for instance, via SMS or when you donate to an NGO via bank transfer but you aren’t sure where this amount of money was placed. The issue of transparency normally hinders some people from donating to NGOs. Again, this can be achieved by personalization of the donation experience when the user can have a dashboard listing the cases they are donating to and follow up on their progress with whatever amounts of money paid and with some history and statistics about the previous donations and cases.

Recurring Reminders and Notifications

We all usually get consumed in our daily work so we continuously need those reminders from NGOs or our friends if we pay a recurring donation to help some cases and technology definitely can help automating all of that with a combination of simple cron jobs on the server side and push notifications via an almost free service like Amazon SNS.

Follow up and Reconnecting

Technology in general will easily help the NGOs and the donors in several other aspects. One of those is following up on some cases that they donated for via SMSs or Push notifications which will definitely increase the credibility of the NGO.

Another one is reconnecting with the donors in case they are interested in helping specific types of cases when those cases appear or even sending and receiving feedback between Donors and NGOs.

Some Inspiring Examples

There are several inspiring examples in the charity world. I will just demonstrate the idea of three of them and there are others of course all over the globe.

Kiva is an amazing platform that provides microloans to different people all over the world to use them in unique and useful projects that would fit in their environment. The donations are mainly crowd-sourced and you can actually even choose to lend some people to help them do their project and then return your money back after they pay  and if you’re worried about being getting your money back, the loan repayment rate is 97% which indicates how successful they are.

Watsi is another adorable non-profit platform that focuses on crowd-sourcing donations to patients all over the world who are facing difficulties in paying for their treatments. They have an extensive database about the patients with their detailed cases, their stories and so on.

Farmraiser is a web and mobile platform that was built by robusta. It is a very good example for a community-service-like profitable platform. It is built to help organizations like schools, clubs,…etc raise funds for their campaigns by making students sell healthy food and these profits go to funding campaigns so there are four parties that are benefiting and profiting here, vendors who sell their products, campaign organizers who receive  funds for their campaigns, customers who buy healthy products and are encouraged to lead a healthy lifestyle and finally students who participate in the whole community service experience and learn to give back to their community.

There are definitely tons of other platforms with various ideas out there yet those three examples are just simple examples on the different types of platforms we are talking about and hope they would be utilized, implemented and followed instead of going for an informative website for an NGO.
To sum up, it is crucial for all NGOs and people working in the CSR field to pay attention to capitalizing on the available technologies and think creatively about new ideas that would make the lives of everyone easier and gets the most benefit out of the available tools that are already utilized by many and are becoming part of the people’s daily lives and culture.