Kenyan Soap Opera Creator Featured on BBC Show

Alison Ngibuini

Alison Ngibuini owns a communication company that aims to make engaging Kenyan soap operas to compete with dominant foreign imports - and put Kenyan television firmly on the African map.

She launched Al Is On Productions in 2003, after having studied marketing and hotel management, and worked in advertising.

"I started off working as an assistant in an ad agency. At the time we were just doing TV commercials and I thought 'I want to go into this a bit more,'" she told the BBC series African Dream.

Ms Ngibuini said that she started with a very small capital that she had saved from her previous employment.

"I've been that person who was taught to save, even a shilling put it aside," she said.

Many of her initial clients were people who knew her from the advertising agency.

"I had a mobile phone and a computer. Those were the two basic things that I felt I needed at the time," the entrepreneur explained.

"I used to run my company from home and now we've grown and currently I have a studio running with over a hundred people who go through he doors every day."
'University challenge'

Ms Ngibuini says it was not easy at the beginning, but she was determined not to go back into employment.

"It's hard but you've just got to have the resilience of focusing on what it is that you want and getting it, and I'm that sort of a person. When I focus on something I get it," she said.

Her company, which is based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, still makes commercials for it is a quick way of making money and keeping the company going.

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