It’s
a chilly morning. Evans has walked close to five kilometers to school bare
footed. The little tea he took in the morning is now cold in his stomach. The
pair of shorts he is in has undergone several repairs until you can hardly tell
its original color. But the little boy has an unstoppable spirit. He is
determined to learn.
The
teacher walks in and says, “You are going to write a composition about ‘my home’
and you have only forty minutes.” It is an earthen house that Evans calls home.
The roof leaks profusely and they have to move the fireplace every time it
rains lest the waters put off the fire. But he is a bright boy. He has big
dreams, wide and wild imaginations. In his composition he narrates his home as
a bungalow, a term he learnt in his curious look ups in his tattered dictionary.
And when the teacher brings back the pieces of work, his piece stands out.
Today
what Evanson Nthiga a 24 year old does is search the internet for web masters
and website designers who require properly formatted text content for their
websites. He then negotiates a deal to research and develop the required
content and even format it for easier uploading on the already created
websites.
Since
web content development is similar to blogging, Evans also does blog writing
for professional bloggers, besides running two blogs of his own. Since part of
his work involves formatting text for direct uploading on website, he has
learned quite a lot about HTML, the language used to develop websites.
This
gave birth to a new passion and has evolved into a new company all together;
Kenya Webs. With Kenya Webs, Evans develops websites for individuals, organizations
and institutions, his main focus being on schools and churches.
There
are many other writing platforms in the internet where people get paid after
writing articles depending on the employer’s specifications. Evans puts his
hand on these once in a while and gets his pay in dollars. The composition
experiences have finally proved worthwhile.
Talk
of job creation rather than employment. He also runs several other companies
despite being a holder of an Education degree acquired from Maseno University.
One of them is DigiWorld Company which was born
when he was in his second year of university. This is a computer services
company that provides a wide range of services from printing to computer
maintenance. It has two main branches: one in Narok and the other in Naivasha
town.
The other
company he runs is called DaSo Motors which he started after the motor bike
business underwent a boom in the country. It is a higher purchase company that
enables the youth acquire motor bikes without any collateral, guarantors or
down payment. The plan is that within the first twelve months of owning the
bike, they are expected to make as much money as they can but deliver ksh.300
or ksh.400 on a daily basis. The company today has close to 20 bikes and each
of them raises a minimum of ksh8, 000 per month. This adds up to Ksh160, 000
per month.
He
has also tried his hand in agriculture which is still his passion and now has a
project underway that will see his first farm become operational, probably by
the end of 2012, on a 1.5 acre land recently acquired in Embu County.
Turning
major stumbling blocks into stepping stones is what Evans has learnt as the tip
to success. He did not let his background affect his future. Today it is a different story altogether. The
multicolored shorts are no more and the smoke of the fireplace only exists in
his memory.
