Microsoft Corp has announced plans to open it’s first development centers in Africa and Nairobi will be home to one of them.

The plans were announced by State House, Nairobi following a meeting between President Uhuru Kenyatta and a delegation from Microsoft led by Executive Vice President for Gaming Phil Spencer.

“The  Microsoft’s Africa Development Centre in Nairobi will leverage the diversity of the regional landscape to build world-class talent capable of creating innovative solutions for global impact,” State House said in a Tweet.

President Kenyatta called for openness in the partnership and challenged the American tech firm to ensure intellectual property rights of Kenyans involved in their projects are adequately protected.

Microsoft had earlier in a statement announced plans to set up two Development Centre in Nairobi and Lagos, Nigeria.

According to Microsoft, the firm will hire 100 full-time developers at the two sites by the end of this year and increase the pool by 500 by 2023.

Microsoft Launches First Cloud Data Centers in South Africa and Cape Town

Early this year, Microsoft made good its promise to open data centers in Africa with the opening of new cloud regions in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.

The data centers are serving up Azure and plans are underway to add office365 by the third quarter of 2019 and Dynamics 365 fourth quarter of the year.