mSurvey CEO and Founder to Present at Wall Street Journal's Investing in Africa Conference

NAIROBI, Kenya, March 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- mSurvey, a global mobile-first research platform leveraging SMS and mobile messaging technology to simplify access to credible, on-demand data from the emerging world, today announced that its CEO and Founder Kenfield Griffith will present at The Wall Street Journal's Investing in Africa conference on March 7, 2017 at The News Building in London.

Griffith is scheduled to present as part of the "Data with Destiny" panel discussion, which will explore how African businesses are finding creative ways to harness data to fuel development and growth across the continent. He will be joined by Mansoor Hamayan, CEO Co-Founder of BBOXX and Alon Lits, General Manager of Uber Sub-Saharan Africa. Dan Keeler, The Wall Street Journal's frontier markets editor, will moderate. The panel discussion is scheduled to begin at 4:15 p.m. local time.

"Africa offers a vast opportunity for global enterprises looking to expand, but to do so they demand an understanding of the opportunities and challenges of doing business on the continent," said Kenfield Griffith, CEO and Founder of mSurvey. "I look forward to discussing the importance of accessing data for development and commend The Wall Street Journal for convening the leading investors, executives and government officials closest to Africa's role in the global economy."

mSurvey is an innovative, Nairobi-based startup whose mobile research platform is disrupting the global research market and bringing high quality, on-demand consumer data from hard-to-reach communities out of the shadows. By leveraging the growth in mobile messaging in emerging markets like Africa, mSurvey enables users to have direct, one-on-one conversations at scale - on any topic, at any time and with any local audience. This dynamic, interactive and unfiltered communication channel delivers incredible insights from real people – from the largest cities to the smallest villages – in real time.

"With reliable data, businesses, entrepreneurs, governments, organizations and researchers can relate to their customers, identify societal needs and opportunities, measure the impact of their investments and fuel transformation and growth," said Griffith. "But the traditional person-on-the-street method of collecting data was expensive, time consuming, unreliable and subject to low response rates. With mSurvey, users can push survey questions as chats to the mobile phones of targeted, local audiences or random, diverse populations, and watch as responses roll in within minutes into a visualized data stream that illustrates powerful trends and takeaways that can inform decisions."

The Wall Street Journal Investing in Africa conference will combine the knowledge and experience of individuals and firms investing in Africa's growth and development with the WSJ's editorial expertise to further explore how technology is propelling change and broadening the investment landscape in Africa.

Follow along and contribute to the conversation using #WSJAfrica.

About mSurvey

Launched in 2012, mSurvey is the only global mobile-first research platform leveraging SMS and mobile messaging technology to simplify access to credible, on-demand data from the emerging world. Leveraging the growing reach of mobile phones, mSurvey's robust platform enables users to engage in real time conversations at scale, connecting them directly to people anywhere and on any topic. Delivering elusive data from hard-to-reach communities, mSurvey is quenching the thirst for fresh, credible data that powers growth, ideas, and innovation. mSurvey's proprietary mobile-first research platform serves customers across the globe, providing unprecedented access to rich, real time data from select or random populations in Africa, Asia, Latin American and the Caribbean. Currently, mSurvey connects with communities in Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti, with plans for continued rollout across the globe. Headquartered in Nairobi, mSurvey continues to grow with regional offices in San Francisco, USA and Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

About Kenfield Griffith

Kenfield, a Caribbean of Bajan/Montserratian descent, was a PhD student at MIT when he created mSurvey. While there, he spent months experimenting with geometric models, computations and algorithms, trying to bring his building automation innovation to Kenya. After running into several roadblocks, Ken realized the problem wasn't the technology but a basic lack of contextual data. Proving that empathy drives innovation, the challenge inspired him to reinvent the way information informs decisions, solving a problem that he and most would-be entrepreneurs and businesses in emerging markets face – a lack of actionable, credible, contextual data.

Armed with an initial angel investment, a nascent, promising platform and a passion to solve a crippling problem, Kenfield set off to bring his idea to life. Rather than running the company from Boston where he was educated at MIT or the Caribbean where he was raised, Kenfield established mSurvey in the heart of his first target market in Nairobi, Kenya, pulling together a visionary team of home grown talent and fellow MIT alums with decades of combined experience in research, mobile telecommunications and technology.

SOURCE mSurvey