Evans Kiragu
Evans Kiragu, Kenyan game designer has shown that a laptop in Nairobi can set the pace for the global app charts. A self-taught coder who once freelanced on endless-runner clones to fund data bundles, he founded Mekan Games in 2019 and has since shipped more than 80 mobile titles. The studio’s watershed moment came in 2022 with “The President,” a tongue-in-cheek, Donald-Trump-inspired hyper-casual game that rocketed to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, racked up 20 million downloads, and banked roughly US $1 million, enough to underwrite three years of payroll and new IP experimentation.
Kiragu now leads a 25-person team that prototypes, user-tests, and releases games in sprint cycles measured in days, packaging Kenyan humor and fast reflex loops for a global audience addicted to one-hand play. He mentors local devs through Nairobi Game Dev meet-ups and lobbies mobile carriers for lower data costs so home-grown studios can test as aggressively as their Silicon Valley peers. Next up: a hybrid-casual title built on a sharable level editor, and an accelerator program that will seed capital into East African indies. Kiragu’s trajectory argues a simple point: with the right blend of creativity and analytics, the next app-store sensation can just as easily emerge from Ngong Road as from San Francisco.