AWS Community Day Kenya 2025 Keynote: Dr. Werner Vogels - Amazon CTO

The welcoming remarks and opening remarks even as he hands over the program back to AWS. Welcome Dr. Roich. Thank you.

Good morning everybody. Yes, I'm so happy to be here again for the third AWS Community Day. I think it's been a journey. We started back in 2022. Now we're in 2025. We are looking forward to hosting another one in 2026, 2027 up to 2050. So we'll be here every year hosting the AWS Community Day. I want to welcome you. This is a very important day. Here in Kenya, it's a big day to have a vice president in our attendance. The vice president of Amazon group, the big tech organization. Feel welcome, karibu to Kenya, the land of wildlife and athletes. We are the ones who win marathons around the world, but soon we'll be competing with the US and others in terms of technology. You've heard that this is a Silicon Savannah, so we are coming up very well. I think events like this take us a step forward in nurturing the talent that we require to power this country in the years ahead. To the people who are here, I want to thank Silicon Overdrive who have been our partner in this journey, especially this year. I want to thank Valisa for getting into a plane all the way from South Africa up to this place. I keep forgetting your name. Last year you gave a very good speech. Yes, Robin. Yes. And of course the Cloud Queen and all the visitors who have come today, feel welcome. I am looking at events like this not just as a gathering of people or just education, but as a destination point for innovative ideas that will change the way we do things in this country and the way we develop new products and solutions for this country. Kenya, most of you here are Kenyans. In Kenya in 1963, somebody stood up. The first prime minister of Kenya who later became the president, Jomo Kenyatta, said that we have three enemies: poverty, disease, and ignorance. That was in 1963. In 2025, we still have those enemies. We have not even been able to defeat a single one of them. So I think young people like the ones in this room, the Gen Z, we are passing the baton to you so that you can take on these enemies in a decisive manner the way you did last year. You know what you did last year. I don't want to say what you did last year. But I think this is a very good event. On behalf of the vice chancellor, I want to assure you that KCA is ready and willing to work with Amazon Web Services not just today but in the years to come. We told the Cloud Queen here in 2022 when she came that Amazon doesn't need to host events in a hotel. This is their home because the university belongs to the community. Otherwise it would be an elitist organization serving vested interests. We are here to serve the community. So feel welcome and have a good education day. I hope to see you again next year 2026 at a time like this. Thank you very much and welcome to KCA.