Written by David Malingha Doya and Mike Cohen  | From Bloomberg

On the top two floors of a five-story building on Strathmore University’s campus in Nairobi, students with tablets and laptops are gradually changing the face of the East African economy.

As part of the university’s master’s program in mobile telecommunications, they spend their days developing computer apps tailor-made for African markets.

Their creations include Valuraha, an app that simulates trading on the Nairobi stock exchange as a teaching tool, and Henga Systems, which tracks activity on a mobile phone owner’s M-Pesa bill-payment account.

A research academy at Strathmore, @iLabAfrica, has helped nurture such ideas with financial backing from about 20 companies, including Google (GOOG), Samsung(005930:KS), and Safaricom, a Kenya-based mobile phone service provider. The academy has produced 36 startups since 2011, more than half of which are still operating.

The success of such initiatives is being fueled by a 540 percent increase in mobile phone connections across the world’s poorest continent since 2005, says research firm Gartner (IT).

Read more at Bloomberg