Yes, we Kenya

Recycled plastic bricks, phone payments, geothermal energy ...

Barely.a month goes by without a story of head-turning technological innovation in Kenya. We were taken last week by an interview with Nzambi Matee, who recycles waste plastic into paving bricks many times stronger than concrete ones. This isn't just shredded plastic bottles melted down and formed into oversized Lego. Matee has found a way of combining polyethylene, both high and low density, and polypropylene with sand to make bricks that look like masonry.

She set up her company, Gjenge Pavers, in 2017 because she was fed up, she says, with waiting for the government to deal with plastic waste. It turns out 1,500 bricks a day and has recycled about 20 tons of plastic so far. The slabs cost about £5 a square metre.

Now she wants to expand with a bigger factory, but there was one remark in the interview that particularly caught our eye: she told Reuters she hopes to break even by the end of the year. That means someone has backed her idea with no return for four years, at least. One might think this upends the stereotype we hold in our minds when we think of east Africa: poverty, corruption and a shortsighted outlook that makes progress almost impossible.

Clearly that's not how things are in Kenya -- not entirely, anyway. This is a country whose banking industry pretty much skipped the plastic stage: Kenyans went straight from cash to mobile payments. The M-Pesa system has been running since 2007. And just as texts were devised to help telecom engineers communicate, not to become a mass communication system, M-Pesa, developed by the Safaricom mobile network, was meant to help creditors pick up micro-loan payments. Human ingenuity turned it into something far, far more useful, and now if I were to lend XXXXX a tenner in Nairobi, I could just credit him in M-Pesa.

And then there's geothermal energy. We often think of Iceland when we hear the word geothermal, but it's America that leads the way in this sustainable form of energy. Then Indonesia, the Philippines and so on until we get to Italy and Iceland. Iceland is proportionally the biggest producer, and is apparently using it to power a carbon capture and storage scheme that is planned to make United Airlines a carbon net zero airline, according to National Geographic.

After Iceland, Kenya. The country has an installed capacity of 745MW of geothermal energy at plants in the Rift Valley area -- a small fraction of the 10,000MW thought to be available. What's even better about this: it means they don't have to use all the coal that's also in the ground there.