I first met Steve at the Cafe Numerique, a networking and discussion event for those interested in digital developments. He was there to meet Kinshasa’s techies, developers, people who can work with him. Steve works in e-business and is gearing up to launch his new start-up – a car-selling app that puts car owners in Kinshasa and potential buyers in touch. After that is up and running, he has more ideas – an app to find doctors, a dating app, perhaps a bit like Tinder, an online shop selling Congolese clothes or jewellery.
Steve left Congo when he was 12. At the time the country was still called Zaire. He lived in France and didn’t return until the age of 30. He only seriously considered working in DRC much later. He was pretty settled there – is married in Europe – but he no longer wanted to be employed. He wanted to be his own master and perhaps, just perhaps leave a bit of a mark on this earth. So after he first tried to set up an e-business in France, he tried it in DRC. In the last few years he has been in and out of the country, but today, he spends more time here than in France.
With the decision to start a company in DRC, he managed to get a Singaporean investor aboard. His company is therefore also based in Singapore – who wants to put all their eggs into one basket after all, he says – but he has now managed to register his business, Internet Ventures Congo, in DRC. He has started recruiting personnel, is looking for office space and hopes that he will be ready to launch his app in the next few weeks.
While Steve is starting off small, launching an e-business in DRC, is perhaps not the most obvious move. The internet is slow, many people haven’t even heard of the term ‘start-up’ and young and eager developers are there, but not in abundance. But Steve thinks that he has managed to find a small team of able people. Just recently he visited an IT institute to talk to the students – I need them and they need me, he explains. What he would like, is a team of people who can work with him and take real ownership of the company. If he was just out for freelancers he could outsource the work to Asia, but then of course he couldn’t count himself as one of the pioneers in the DRC tech-world.
Mapping Kinshasa 