Before we go into the questions, I'll share a bit of our story. The AWS User Group Kenya. So basically we are based in Nairobi and we serve more than 5,000 members right now. We have held more than 40 meetups so far, and one of our greatest events was AWS Community Day 2024, which was a remarkable event. So I'll invite Mark to share more on the user group. Thank you.
I guess we'll have to optimize on the mics for now. Absolutely. Yeah, so thank you very much for just gracing us today. I think it's surreal. I just, even before I do this, I'll just do a quick poll in the room because these are the super users who are here today. How many are students here? How many just students generally? Students.
Wow. Okay. Excellent. Wow. Cool. How many community builders are here? Community builders. Community builders. Can you show your face? How many community builders? Yeah. Absolutely amazing. Cloud captains. Cloud captains. There we go. Yeah. Others are actually outside as volunteers. And yeah, obviously last but not least, how many heroes are here?
That's amazing. That's amazing. Yes. So I think she's already mentioned about User Group Kenya and she's done a really amazing job with that. There's also AWS User Group Mombasa. Morata is not here. He's out of the country, but it's led by Jacob Morata. They have hosted over 200 plus events. I guess for them, the coast, so they kind of enjoy a bit of the beach, do a bit more. For us, we're in Nairobi, more traffic, but still a lot more people. Also I think we can talk about also the AIML User Group Kenya led by Kevin. I think Adel can go on with that.
Okay, for AIML, it's being led by Kevin, founded this year, and is one of the AWS user groups, the newest AWS user group in Kenya, and an active one. So their main agenda is to bring cloud engineers, data science, machine learning engineers just to learn and leverage on AWS technology. So they have hosted two major events: AWS Terraform Cloud Day as well as Women in AI event. Yeah, absolutely. And again, the user group leader is Kevin. I think Kevin, you can just stand up. He's doing an amazing job as an MC also. Absolutely.
I think he also had the privilege of seeing your keynote at last year's re:Invent, and he was just telling us about it. I think it was really, really amazing. Beyond that, would love to appreciate the AWS team who've kind of made this possible. I think they're in the audience here. Robin Velisa, there's Jason Dan who's not here, and Absentia Martis also, who's also a community manager. So we really appreciate you guys. You're not here, but hopefully the next time we'll be able to have you here. So we'll kind of dive into the questions.
Well, what I want to add to that actually is that the fact that we're here, you should see this as how important we think Kenya, but in general, Sub-Saharan Africa is. We just visited Rwanda last week as well. The fact that we're here actually really hope signals to you as well that we're here to help sort of raise the next level, the next level of engineers that need to fuel the digital economy of Kenya. Yeah. And it's you that is excellent.
Yeah. Amazing. So, we'll dive into the questions. I think once we finish the questions, we'll do a few photo sessions, then go on break essentially. That's cool. All right. So, I'll go into the first question essentially. Right. I've just done a poll in the room. The community builders, the students who are here. Oh, there's also AWS employees here. I think from the ADC in Kenya. I don't know how are they here. ADC in Kenya. AWS engineers. There they are. Absolutely. We've probably harassed them with a few of our requests. So we apologize, but yeah, probably still have others I'll kind of get to you guys later on. But my question is: the AWS community in Kenya has grown impressively, with over 10 plus community builders who are in the room, three active user groups. What advice would you give community leaders about fostering sustainable tech communities in emerging markets?
I don't know, advice: keep doing what you're doing. You're doing it really well. But what advice do I have to the community is that I don't know if you look at the last lesson that I gave you, disconfirm your beliefs. Yeah. I mean, learn from each other. I think the most important part of the community groups is to come together and maybe have a bit of fun and do a bit of hacking and build some things. But it's so important to get your hands dirty. But if you do that in isolation, there's nobody there, it's hard to learn.
Yeah. And even if there's online learning or things like that, but doing things together makes, first of all, learning so much more fun, but also prepares you for the reality. I saw a lot of students here. I don't know how many students have actually programmed as a group. Yeah. And even if you do it as a group, you probably hated it. Yeah. Because those others were all slacking and never doing what they were doing, things like that.
In reality, in the real world, in businesses, everything is determined by collaboration with people in your team. Yeah. So, you need to be, you know, working together here prepares you also for being a very good team member because you know how to do things together. You know, if I think about, you know, if you think about sort of hiring people directly out of college for Amazon, one of the things that I would have looked for always: have they been part of some open-source project? Because in general, in an open-source project, you need to work together with other people.
Yeah. You need to do code reviews. I mean, who in college has ever done a code review? Nobody. Yeah, you always get to start things from scratch. No one gives you 10,000 lines of code that says refactor this. Yeah, by the way, a really good job for Amazon Q as well. Yeah, refactoring. Not too great. So, advice I would have for the community is to stick together, to learn from each other, to also help each other because after all, that's why you're part of the community. Yeah. And you will all be able to have a great future together if you help each other.
Okay, on to the next question. Kenya has been recognized as the mobile-first innovation. How would you see this experience positioning Kenya developers and contributing to the global unique ecosystem?
Connectivity. Yeah. Well, you guys need to fix that. Yeah, let me just put that. I mean, there's little I can do to fix this for you except for putting more satellites in the sky.
Yeah, I think in talking to some of the government folks, I know everybody's eager to put more and more fiber into the ground. We also hear that, you know, much of this fiber is just shared by different providers. So it's not necessarily if you use two providers that you know you can sort of load balance over them because it's somewhere over the same line. You see lots of fiber cuts happening, things like that. I think crucial for having a good, solid digital economy is that connectivity needs to work just really well.
Now, you know, we really want that. And at some moment, I thought like every night at 10:00 a.m., 10:00 p.m. the internet would disappear. I thought maybe there's a government action that says it's 10:00, time to go to bed. Yeah. Stop. Stop scrolling. What are you doing? Yeah.
But you know, if we build systems, if we built our systems in AWS and we built them 99.99% available, but your connectivity is only, you see one line, you know what's, you need to, this is an effort that needs to fix. I think at Amazon we want to contribute to that. I mean, but we're not a company that lays fiber into the ground, but we are putting satellites in the sky. And I know quite a few of people in remote areas are really using Starlink, which is great, but I also think that competition is great in that space.
So we need to have multiple providers that will provide satellite connectivity in the future, such that, and whether you use that as your primary link or whether you use it as your backup link, I see that that's really crucially important. Now in Rwanda, I haven't visited enough companies yet here so can't give too many Kenya examples, but for example in Rwanda, the government wants to have access to information from all the healthcare centers and even all the individual healthcare workers in the country in real time so they can look for outbreaks and they can look for bigger patterns and things like that. So everyone has a Starlink as a backup because it's important that this information flows.
If as a government you want to start building more and more digital systems, you need to make sure that all your citizens can get access to those systems, not just the privileged crew that happen to have fiber to their home. Yeah. And as such, I think, you know, building out that infrastructure, which you're doing, by the way, is crucial for the future of a solid digital economy.
And I hope that, you know, we launched 27 satellites about two months ago, I believe. On Monday. Is that public? On Monday we launch another 27. And we'll continue to launch these satellites to make sure that there is satellite connectivity in every area regardless whether there's fiber or not.
