Commentaries
Village girl climbs to global cyberspace prominence
- Details
- Published on Monday, 09 March 2009 20:25
The reason this cliché still holds — as with all clichés — is that there’s more than a grain of truth in it. There are constant examples in American mythology of the poor boy made good; of the baby born in a log cabin who grows up to be President. The legend found a massive new lease of life when Barack Obama was elected President last year.
We have no equivalent in Kenya, yet we have countless stories of humble beginnings leading to great things, whether it is being born in El Wak, and becoming chief executive of the largest bank in Kenya (Barclays’ Adan Mohamed), or being a shoeless herdsboy and finding oneself in State House in your dotage (every President we’ve had).
Well, here’s another addition to the wall of fame — the girl born in rural Kisii who goes on to get Harvard degrees and a net worth of billions. Meet Dorika Mamboleo Beckett. In 1999/2000, when new media — including the Internet, television and FM radio — were all the rage; and money, ideas and talent were flowing in copious amounts to this brave new world, one of the more exciting new names out there was Africa.com.
If you can cast your mind that far back, portals were the big thing on the Internet. The spoils (and the billions) were going to go to whoever would create a Website that served as first port of call for internet browsers, especially at a time when search was in its technical infancy.
The thinking was largely that underpinning television — the one central site would serve as a door — ‘portal’, which would be the takeoff point for news, financial information, e-mail and all the other joys of the nascent world wide web.
The millions (and billions) were duly made, by companies such as America Online and Yahoo. The model worked, and thus the race was on for the equivalent portal — and success story— in Africa.
That was where Africa.com came in, promising to introduce the medium to those of us who were new to it on the continent. There was also TV Africa, promising to be the first television network for the continent.
Like many others in their early twenties at the time, for me, the Internet was the coolest thing ever imagined by man. Anything which carried the monicker ‘cyber’, or with .com after the title, was magic. The letter ‘e’ (as in e-commerce and e-mail) was the most compelling in the alphabet.
So imagine the surprise and delight when a brief trawl on the Internet offered up the name Dorika Mamboleo (a distinctly Kenyan one) at the helm of Africa.com and TV Africa, but also — perhaps inadvisably — turned up an e-mail address which worked. And imagine the delight when I wrote to her and she replied. The e-mails (I looked at them the other day) show the stars in my eyes.
‘I believe that Africa.com is positioned to be the principal Website of the African continent’.The amazing thing is not only that she replied, but that she remembered that long-ago e-mail when I approached her a few months ago to feature in this column. So who is she?
Dorika is as truly a rural-born Kenyan as they come, born deep in Nyanza in 1968 ‘as a fifth born to a family of seven children’. She lived in Kisii pretty much through her childhood, and, would you believe it (going by what happened later in her life), she says that she ‘did not speak English or Kiswahili until I moved to Nairobi at the age of nine where I had no other alternative than to restart my primary education’.
That was no impediment, as she went on, after her re-booted primary education to excel at Moi Nairobi Girls (do they still call it Quabbz?) and Alliance Girls before gaining a scholarship to finish her A-levels in the United Kingdom. With her brains (and her newly-acquired English skills), it was
a short hop across the ‘pond’ to the American East Coast, and an undergraduate place at Harvard.It may be redundant to mention that she excelled again, obtaining a Cum Laude degree in economics. Let’s jump the story forward to the mid-nineties. She says: ‘I was in South Africa during its transition from Apartheid to democracy, it was one of the most incredible historic events to experience as an African and I am very proud of what South Africa represents in Africa.’
The entrepreneurship bug seems to have bit and refused to let go, because after South Africa, and another stint at Harvard spent acquiring an MBA, Dorika went on a company-founding spree that is yet to play itself out. She was the partner responsible for the New Africa Opportunity Fund — a $120 million private equity fund that invested in South Africa, and in companies such as Celtel/MSI, TV Africa and Africa.com.
Fast forward again, to the new millennium, when Africa.com and TV Africa were all the rage. My e-mail exchange with Dorika (in October 2000) was just after she’d left the company (legal disputes with other investors in the New Africa Fund had led to her departure); and the dotcom implosion meant that the ephemeral moment passed (although the penumbra of possibility still led others to try that route to riches, including a company called Mailafrica which was my first job after campus — but that’s another, long, story).
Her next stop was in the world of online gaming, where she (with her husband, Justin) founded an online games development company that she later sold for millions of dollars to Intermix Media. Intermix went on to burst into global prominence when it founded MySpace, the other social networking site (Facebook being the one none of us can avoid). Once those millions had been banked, the next bit of entrepreneurship was in the world of nursing. Dorika acquired a tiny healthcare staffing solutions provider — Global Nurses Online — in 2004, at a time when its revenues stood at around $150,000.
Prowess, energy and smarts have seen the company grow to 2007 revenues of around $15 million, and morph into a larger group — ATC Healthcare Services. So, onto the bare bones of a life encapsulating a Dream (American? Kenyan? Take your pick), what drives the formerly monolingual, shy schoolgirl to such heights?
Needy students
“Being a great wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, generous giver and business builder is my focus today. I have a passion to give back and to support the education of young people in Kenya and the world as a whole.”
She has gone back to her roots, founding and funding the Imani and Baraka Foundation, which funds a school in Kisii. She — with another Quabbz alumna — also supports a scholarship fund aiding needy students at Moi Nairobi Girls . And the story comes full circle in another way. She fully credits “a strong work ethic learned from my Mom in rural Kenya, a strong value of education as a key to life success, a strong spiritual life rooted in Christianity and a desire to always excel and be the best that I could be”.
And, just in case we didn’t think a Kenyan Dream was possible, she freely admits, “I owe a lot of my success to the foundation that was rooted in Kenya, the people and the values of a society that raised me.”
