I’m a freelancer and I do it out of passion and love to excel.I’m very happy. While I agree that the consistency of finances is definitely not guaranteed, I MUST point out that this is an opportunity you can make a decent living with, grow to real stability-only if you IF you are serious about it. The problem is that most of us in this country or can I say Africa have a very disturbing attitude and it really worries me. We always see a problem before we even make the first step! We want everything to be smooth before we start walking! We want to hear that if you do this and that you are guaranteed of making a million a month so that we can say yes I like this and I will go for it.

We never have the daring heart but instead we want to sit and feel bad about all things!! When you put obviously negative comments here remember that you are terribly discouraging an enthusiastic starter.Your failure can never be a standard, neither your success.

Success is a decision and nothing more. Talk to those guys in India or the Philipines and you will be shocked how much they are making! There are even guys in the developed world itself like USA and Britain who are making a living out of freelancing!! So waht do we want? We want to wake up one day, get online and make a million instantly!Why cant we learn to be patient guys? The freelancers making it didnt wake up one day and found themselves making the dollars. You must be ready to start from somewhere and you better know that you will cry, sweat and cry again before you can say Yes I made it.

We all know that suceess is not easy and self made success comes by walking on the path least travelled.If you are not ready for the pain, dont discourage the strong hearted please!

You raise some very good points about not waiting for everything to be perfect before you launch a business.

However, in terms of trying to get foreign clients in the west, frankly, people do it because that’s where the money is! African countries are still very poor and they just don’t have the spending power. So, you have to go where the money is and I suppose this is simple capitalism.

Here in the US people did not wait for broadband before they started conducting business on the net. when the fastest modem was 14.4k modem people were already setting up businesses and businesses were already using the internet to conduct business they didnt sit around and wait for broadband to arrive.They just innovated around whatever constraints existed.And even then people were already outsourcing – eg medical transcription. Neither did they wait for regulations regulations follow innovation and not the other way round

On the issue of outsourcing – its a 2 way street. bear in mind that costs of doing business in Kenya are much higher than in India and china and so businesses in Kenya can outsource as much as businesses abroad can outsource to Kenya so the net longterm effect maybe 0.

And why oh why do we keep building a dual economy
why should everything that i geared towards serving foreigner organized and sophisticated while everything that serves Kenyans is substandard and rundown. its the same old story we have a sophisticated horticultural industry, modern tourist hotels, now we will have high speed internet except like everything else its designed to serve other people.

Worrying about taxes is not an issue for most people who are just starting businesses. Their main problem is revenue generation. So, talking about taxes will not be an interesting topic for most kenyan entrepreneurs. It’s the least of their worries when they are first starting out.

I no longer know what is regulated, what isn’t, what the law is, what it isn’t? who knows?

they should just get the cable in-country & leave the entrepreneurs to figure out the rest.

Apparently information is indeed missing over board, a visit to http://www.information.go.ke & http://www.ict.go.ke you will get little if any!
Sometimes back i came across an interesting piece published by my friend Moses http://moseskemibaro.com/?tag=ict-bill

“There is no better channel than the internet as well as mobile media for distributing and selling music. However, the main problem in Kenya today is that we do not have the required legislation in place yet to address this issue. This, we hope should not be a problem in 2009 when it is expected that the draft ICT Bill will be passed by parliament. This is a crucial bill that the Kenyan parliament needs to pass since it will address e-commerce, m-commerce, digital intellectual property and content regulation issues for Kenya. However, its key that this legislation is done right and already a few red flags have been raised by ICT industry stakeholders since some clauses need to be amended, removed or added to make the bill comprehensive and current.”

Anyway as indicated on my previous post, ICT legislation in Kenya is core to opening up the industry.
Having said that, i wish to point out that indeed the ICT bill was passed in parliament early this year and His Excellency President Kibaki appended his signature to it consequently making it Law! Do you remember the ‘Media Bill’ that brought alot of fuss…yeah that was it!
So we have a Law that restricts we Kenyans from sending alarming text messages via our cellphones…..

Its important to note though that the Media fraternity backed by some dishonest politicians put pressure to having the law rejected by President Kibaki even after it had been passed by parliament. Owing to the pressure, His Excellency directed the Hon. Attorney General to amend if necessary what was thought to be ‘punitive’ towards some section of the Society.

As far as ICT is concerned and if you read the Law properly, you will note that the Communication Commission of Kenya has the mandate to regulate the Industry.
I have reliable information that the CCK is trying to formulate a program of legislation that allows companies such as PayPal be licensed to service Kenya. Better still CCK has to act with urgency as the undersea cable is on its finality before it goes live in a few days.
Once the CCK establishes structures to regulate the Industry with licensing and what have you then some of us Kenyans are more that ready to spend more than $7 for e-services!

Give us more information on this issue if you have it. Like I said, we are all trying to learn from each other here.