Forty kilometres south of Nairobi, the government began constructing Konza Technopolis, an entirely new city designed to be Kenya's Silicon Valley. The project, launched in 2013, was ambitious to the point of audacity: a purpose-built smart city with broadband infrastructure, green energy, university campuses and technology company offices built from empty savannah.
By 2019, construction was underway but progress was slower than planned. Konza became a test case for whether Kenya could execute large-scale government-led development projects, with all the delays, funding challenges and questions about whether the market would come.