I'm really excited to showcase a new video on the East African mobile phone tech scene. We're launching the inaugural Pivot 25 startup competition and conference on June 14-15th this year. All proceeds to support the m:lab, an incubation space for mobile startups in the region.
25 startup companies from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda will pitch their application or service on the stage to investors, businesses and media. These pitching sessions are broken down into the following 5 categories:
This is your chance to see "What's Next" in East Africa's mobile space, the region of Africa (and the world) where some of the best innovation in mobiles is coming from.
TEDFellows and friends, please take 5 minutes to help the Global Voices team.
Global Voices is an international community of bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world.
See Ethan Zuckerman's TEDGlobal talk below about this amazing community that is carrying conversations across borders and languages. They are currently running at more than full capacity to cover the events in Libya, Egypt, Cameroon, Tunisia, Bahrain, and other places.
How you can help today:
1: Know someone in Libya?
In places like Libya GV is short on sources - helping us find sources and sending them to the people covering those countries is very, very helpful.
Point to GV posts on comments on mainstream media sites, encouraging those sites to use our CC-licensed content. Help us spread the stories via Twitter, Facebook... and encourage people to like, follow the site
Notes to GV contributors that let them know they're being read, thanking them for the work they're doing - most of these folks are volunteers. These could be comments on blog posts or notes to their GV emails. We're also featuring thank-yous on the site... Thank you!
Start the week with refreshing and inspiring TEDx talks from Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Be inspired by Yusuf Randera-Rees, the 27-year-old CEO of the Awethu Project, delivering with passion and vigor his big idea for a fellowship of entrepreneurs to lift less privileged South Africans out of poverty.
Learn critical insights about Africa's cellular cusp from Gustav Praekelt. Digital entrepreneur, obsessive technologist, and the CEO and founder of the eponymous company and foundation which develops mobile products for emerging markets to improve the health and well-being of people living in poverty.
There is nothing like watching these videos to bring back all the memories of the "making of", the Soccer World Cup, and the exhilarating event itself!
Check in later for talks from:
Nox Makunga : The Potential of a Medicinal Wonderland
Miller Matola : Brand South Africa
Peter Willis : Within every great story…
Marcel Mare : Food for thought: Improving the African stove
David Batstone : Not For Sale
Vibha Pinglé : Making Small Economic Worlds Big, and then Small Again
Mugendi M’Rithaa : Design With Africa (DWA):
Barbara Nussbaum : Sprinkling Ubuntu on Capitalism
Peter Willis : Within every great story…
Read more about the other speakers and upcoming talks:
Last week representatives from the U.S. State Department Elana Berkowitz and Bruce Wharton reached out directly to innovators in East Africa to discuss the Apps 4 Africa contest, and the role software developers play in solving civil society issues in their countries. They are funding this contest which is being organized and facilitated by Appfrica Labs (my company in Uganda), iHub (Kenya), and Sodnet (Kenya’s Social Development Network). The Apps4Africa website itself was developed by Ugandan web design company, NodeSix.
I found this interesting because it’s not everyday you have someone as high ranking as a Deputy Coordinator fielding ad-hoc questions from youth and entrepreneurs in East Africa. The hour long conversation took place at here and you can view the full transcript and video by clicking the link or the image below…
The other thing that I found admirable about this whole thing the way in which the State Department used social media to not only speak to Africans, but to listen and actually have a conversation with anyone who was in the room at the time. Some quick highlights and personal observations from the conversation:
One person in the room going by the name Tolo asked, “If you hold the competition and someone wins with a great new application who will hold a right to future profit?”
Elana and Bruce pointed out that most of the apps entered will be open source, but not all. This means developers of proprietary solutions can enter, keep their code private and would thus retain all the rights to their application. Winning the prize does not require the app to be open source although we encourage it.
Teddy Ruge (TMS Ruge) of ProjectDiaspora.org asked “With all the great innovation going on now in East Africa, what do you see as the bottlenecks to greater innovation and growth, especially in East Africa?”
The response from Bruce, “Secretary Clinton has often mentioned the barriers (tariff and non-tariff trade barriers) that exist between the countries of East Africa. Lowering those barriers is one thing that will help support innovation.”
I was also in the room and asked the following question, “Is this a shift in the US thoughts towards policy with Africa?”
Bruce answered, “There is a general recognition that the aid and development programs we’ve pursued in the last few decades have had mixed results. So we are all looking for ways to improve the model. President Obama has laid out a model of ‘let’s be partners and not patrons’.”
Visit Apps4Africa.com for more or to find out your next opportunity to participate.
Recently I've been working alongside the U.S. Department of State to help them engage grassroots innovators and entrepreneurs. While I'm not involved with government at all, I think it's important that the local private sector support such experiments as they may help to shape foreign policy decisions in the future.
It's Cesar Harada TED Fellow 2010 Long Beach. Right now I am at the IHub in the vibrant Nairobi Kenya, building the prototype of the World Environment Action (WEA) website (soon on-line). The idea is to "Puts every local initiative and its global impact on the same map". Based on Ushahidi, we want to create a powerful crowd-sourcing database to empower the transformation of theUnited Nation Environmental Program (UNEP) based here in Nairobi, into the the World Environment Organization (WEO, that doesn't exist yet) and re-think global environmental governance in a more distributed and efficient way, a bottom up approach, for people, for nature.
I just made the concept video draft above, it is very sketchy : I NEED YOUR FEEDBACK -> PLEASE COMMENT.
I am not presenting you something finished, I want to know how you feel about the idea, the system, the interface, your comments will greatly shape the proposal.
In about 10 days I will present a more detailed proposal, a mockup and a business plan to the head of the UNDP and at the UNEP. I need the sharpness and creativity of the TED community to put together "IDEAS WORTH SPREADING", for a purpose.
It’s been almost a year since Madagascar was turned upside down by political turmoil. Please, forget the kids' movies with crazy penguins and lions for a minute, the situation is particularly worrying in here.
Presently Madagascar is sitting without any legitimate government and on the verge of anargie !!! This is the Africa that we are trying to change.Criminal politicians and Criminal gangs are stripping our poorly-protected country and it's peoples.
According to a Mail & Guardian Online report, 'Timber traders in Madagascar have effectively bought the right to pillage the country's protected forest area with impunity. They are extracting up to $800 000 a day worth of timber,' said Reiner Tegtmeyer of Global Witness. Some reports announce a figure of $460 000 a day.
In the other side, farmers reaction is immediate: loggin but also Slash and burn agriculture ...
To get an idea of the phenomenon, my friends and I developed a system based on Google Earth 3D map plug-in, which lets you see the fire overnight. Fires are detected by NASA satellite, so it's fairly accurate.
What we can do is to replant the trees and restart again and again ... with more attention on the human need (reforestation for food, reforestation for energy ...)
I want to share a small organisation that we have started named VAKANALA (NPO). Vakanala aim to act for nature and contribute on the reforestation and the conservation of the planet .
Earth's Christmas is one of the vakanala project.
Earth's Christmas
The idea is simple: When you buy your Christmas tree, please consider Madagascar. with a small contribution of $1, we plant a tree for you and you are offering a tree to the world.
May be a "classic idea" for you but IMPORTANT for the planet.
The tree (for this project) will be planted in the south-west Madagascar; to restore the cleared space between forest fragments of virgin forest still exists.
Halting forest degradation and forest restoration are on the agenda in Copenhagen. We also need to protect our intact ecosystems, which is by far the least expensive of all the solutions for climate change.
Bellow is the design of the project (fr)
Our ultimate goal is to preserve the most valuable ecosystem in the worldand what they contain, restore missing forest tree species endemic to the region, and also restore ecologically (through the trees that produce organic fertilizer ) specific areas included in the future complex forest for agriculture.
We have created earthschristmas.org to receive the beautiful gift you will give to our planet. Please also look at our Earth's Christmas Facebook Application to Get trees planted in honors of your Facebook friends. On this application, a Google Maps can show you where the trees will be planted and we will us this technology to monitor your gift as the trees grow.
We have a few hands and we can plant trees for all "flying" TED conferences Attendees and all Technology Entertainment and Design lovers who mind their CO2 footprint.
Twenty-Five percent (about 1.73 billion) of the world’s population is currently online, largely in developed world countries. Challenges for bringing the other four billion online include: investment in regional infrastructure, reducing individual poverty, offering multilingual content, engaging mobile web users, producing local content and reducing the wholesale costs of bandwidth and computing equipment. It’s incredible to consider that even with all the amazing content available on the internet right now, three fourths of the planet have yet to even join the global conversation. The above graphic illustrates how far we’ve come as well as how far we still have to go.
The Grameen Foundation shares some of the findings of their pilot with us (TED Fellows Rose Shuman and Jon Gosier) at Question Box in Uganda. You can find similar data at our sister website http://worldwantstoknow.com.
Between April and September, the hotline received almost 3000 calls from CKWs and our analysis of the questions provides great insight into the questions that are of greatest importance to rural communities. Roughly 2/3 of all questions asked focused on agriculture, with health, education, and news being the next most popular subject areas. Diving deeper into the data we are able to learn more about what, specifically, farmers are asking about agriculture. The following table provides a breakdown of the agriculture-specific questions:
Content area
Percentage of calls
Example
Crop problems related to pests, nutrients, and diseases
42%
“What is the cause and control of spotted leaf disease?”
“What type of fertilizer should I use in my coffee garden, which is one year old?”
Crop production techniques
15%
“Is it OK to intercrop coffee and maize?”
Agricultural product prices
12%
“What is the price of rice in Bushenyi?”
Health problems related to animal husbandry
17%
“What is the cause and cure for diarrhea in goats?”
I'm pleased to annouce the first TEDx event I'm organizing as a Fellow, and what an a way to start! The man credited with inventing the web itself is speaking at TEDxKampala! Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and founder of the World Wide Web Foundation will visit the East Africa region in late November, stopping by TEDxKampala as our esteemed guest. Mr. Berners-Lee will join prominent members of the Ugandan IT space as we discuss the future of the web and the future of mobile in general (as well as in Africa) and other 'ideas worth spreading'.
TEDxKampala will be held on November 23, 2009 in Kampala, Uganda. Other scheduling details and venue TBA. For those interested, this site will have the details as soon as they are available.
Confirmed sponsors and facilitators include EACOSS (The East African Center for Open Source Software), LUG (Linux Users Group Uganda), and UNICEF. Other interested sponsors can reach me via email at j.gosier@appfrica.org
The 10,000 Hour Initiative is aimed at offering a space for younger people to pursue their passions alongside professionals working in the field. The concept is very much inspired by the 826 National Project, which offers kids in the U.S. an after school hours community center where they can work alongside professionals who act as tutors and mentors. The name comes from Malcom Gladwell’s OUTLIERS, where he theorizes that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice for anyone to become truly exceptional at doing something. Of course we want to help offer those hours.
In Africa, prior to (and even at) University there’s a lack of this type of voluntary mentorship. Which is unfortunate because it’s not what we learn in school that makes us great, it’s what we learn by using that knowledge outside of school. That’s where ideas are born and that’s where students find the motivation to do more than what’s asked of them
Fostering a Culture of Apprenticeship
Instead of attacking this problem with my limited resources as most institutions would, my goal has always been to approach Education by maximizing existing resources. Instead of creating institutions from scratch that require enormous resources and high overhead (rent, security, staff etc) the 10,000 Hour Initiative would identify talented individuals and create co-working and co-learning spaces (dubbed 10K Spaces) for them at existing institutions and businesses. The program would allow youth to interact with other peers as well as trained professionals who could tutor and mentor them, helping them to improve their skills, while exposing them to new technologies, ideas and fields they may not have been aware of.
The goal is to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship, apprenticeship and creativity prior to attending university. Hopefully this will ultimately result in students who are even better prepared to be the leaders of tomorrow. Likewise, it allows working professionals to take these kids under their wings to show them what’s possible.
Anatomy of a 10K Space
This is my own wish for the Africa’s education system, and as such I intend to devote my own resources to it. The first space will be at my office in Kampala where I’ll encourage students interested in programming, new media and blogging to come by after school hours to spend a bit of extra time either working on their homework or learning new things from myself and my staff. Here they’ll have access to our staff, our internet connection, books, our computers and other resources that they can experiment with.
Other institutions who wish to get involve would mentor these kids in their particular area of expertise. The mission is not to ask for money to do this. Anyone can do this with what they’ve already got. Any office suite or company can put in extra hours allowing their staff to participate as time permits, without any support. We’ll start with our facilities and encourage more to do it as we go.
If you want to know more about Appfrica’s 10,000 Hour Initiative or to get your company involved please email me at j.gosier@appfrica.org
Inspired by TEDsters Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Eggers, the 10,000 Hour Initiative's goal is to offer time, resources and mentoring to students while exposing them to their future careers.
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