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With smartphone use and web penetration soaring, Africa is set for a tech revolution – but only if its infrastructure can support it
Nicholas Laisné Associés and OXO Architectes teamed up to design a concept for a massive vertical city in the Saharan desert.
The telecoms industry is currently one of the leading growth sectors in the global economy for a number of different reasons, including the emergence of telecommunications as one of the most important components of business, social, cultural and...
The second part of my conversation with Erik Hersman looks at how Africa is becoming the nexus of the tech revolution
Areas that experience high temperatures and continual droughts make farming difficult, especially those that lack humidity. Roots Up has designed an innovative greenhouse that will irrigate crops with dew that it collects. This will make farming possible in the driest parts of the world. Roots Up is a non-profit organization that is based out of...Read More
Travelers are gaining access to places and experiences across Africa once closed off or just unknown to them.
New innovators can change the competitive landscape.
RT @dstgovza: Department of Science and Technology to host Africa’s first open Science Forum https://t.co/1QG2145Ngn via @dstgovza
Hacks/Hackers looks to help the refugee crisis, "Twitter for Journalists" webinar, and more from the Knight Fellows in this week's roundup.
Can the Freelancing model work in Kenya or Africa? The Freelance model relieves companies of having to pay employees a fixed salary every month
African Data platform launched to challenge Global development community for accuracy of Data: “The African continent deserves better and more accurate data”
He may be best known for his powerful music, but Senegalese-American singer Akon is getting into a different kind of power altogether which could improve millions of lives in rural Africa.
At age six, I ran away with my sister to escape the Rwandan massacre. We spent seven years as refugees. What do you want me to do about it?
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Targeted at about the cost of books for one year (2000-5000 KSH), the Afripad is priced to be affordable to even the poorest rural areas, while being designed to be upgradeable to provide performance suitable for private schools, universities, and businesses. When combined with free or low cost e-textbooks the Afripad could address the lack of availability of learning materials to make a revolutionary impact on learning outcomes. As a Kenyan designed solution the Afripad is uniquely suited to the African educational environment, with batteries that can be separately replaced while it is running, and with long battery life, as well as a modular tool-less design with end-user replaceable parts unlike laptops or tablets.
When Ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus's genome, learning how it mutated and spread. Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around the world could join in the urgent fight. In this talk, she shows how open cooperation was key to halting the virus ... and to attacking the next one to come along. "We had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together," Sabeti says. "Let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity."
The Gates Foundation - widely assumed to be 'doing good', is imposing a neoliberal model of development and corporate domination that's opening up Africa's agriculture to land and seed-grabbing global agribusiness, writes Colin Todhunter. In the process it is foreclosing on the real solutions - enhancing food security, food sovereignty and the move to agroecological farming.
Sharing and saving seed is a crucial part of traditional farming all over Africa, writes Heidi Chow. Maybe that's why governments, backed by multinational seed companies, are imposing oppressive seed laws that attack the continent's main food producers and open the way to industrial agribusiness. But Ghana's women farmers are having none of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrRXP1tp6Kw As a currency, bitcoin is an unmitigated failure, it is extremely volatile, and you will be hard fetched to to be able to spend it. Where though bitcoin does come into its own, is as a quick and dirty means of transferring between currencies, across borders. The banking crisis in Cyprus in 2013 created…
How Will a Population Boom Change Africa?
Help stretch the imagination of village children in Uganda through roleplaying and make this Christmas one they will not want to forget!
— “Many in position of power think the world has become overpopulated recently, and Africa takes the center of attention because of the constant increase in population” — “European countries are nowadays giving incentives to their women to give birth to more babies. Yet, an already underpopulated continent, Africa is crowded with Western ‘experts’ giving money to NGOs and governments to stop the population growth” — “The debate about the world overpopulation should not be about headcount, but about a single individual’s impact on the environment, and it is necessary to recalculate the ‘overpopulation factor’ based on those parameters” Last month in Paris, a conference gathered a panel of white people to think about more effective ways to reduce black population in Africa. One of the conference organizers, a historian and Associate Professor of African history, Bernard Lugan, said: “Population growth in Africa is a threat to European civilization … I’m not recommending to drop a nuclear bomb on Africa, but we can’t wait to see that population growth next to Europe. It’s a danger we have to take seriously.” Their plan is to syndicate more closely private and public organizations in Western countries to provide money and logistics for faster and more effective actions to curb the ‘frightening’ African population growth. This is just surreal, but let’s take a calmer road to answer the fundamental question behind such conferences and the numerous similar initiatives in Europe and the United States: is Africa overpopulated? First, what is overpopulation? Overpopulation is an array of negative social and ecological impacts caused by increasing competition between individuals or groups due to the increasing scarcity of resources. The scarcity could be caused either by decreasing resources of water, food and other life necessities because of a growing population, or by overconsumption of those resources due to unhealthy lifestyle or economical ideology. Put simply, overpopulation is caused either by limited resources not enough to sustain the ever-growing population, or by overconsumption due to unhealthy lifestyle. The debate on the world overpopulation has been ongoing for over 150 years. Many in position of power think the world has become overpopulated recently, and Africa takes the center of attention because of the constant increase in population. Often, the people behind the Africa overpopulation debate would produce shiny graphics and complex MBA types of matrix that look very convincing, and indeed would trick people not familiar with the issues …
A week before he died, Sankara said, “revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, but you cannot kill ideas”. And so, for us today, the final challenge rests not in finding more Sankaras, but in becoming them – in bringing these ideas to life
In Dakar, an Uber-like SMS service has reduced the cost of emptying pit latrines by nearly half – and now customers can sell their waste to be turned into energy
Addis Ababa University Libraries in collaboration with Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) have conducted a full day workshop on “Open research data” on 21, July 2015. The workshop gathered participants Researchers, Librarians, ICT professionals from Addis Ababa University and Consortium of Ethiopian Academic and research libraries. Zanele Mathe of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology Library, and Matthew Buys, the ORCID Regional Director: Africa & Middle East, both from South Africa, were among the invited speakers. There were also speakers from AAU who are all members of Open Knowledge Ethiopia.
As the deadline for the UN's anti-poverty targets known as Millennium Development Goals expires, the BBC's Mike Wooldridge visits a "Millennium Village" in Uganda to see whether a new approach to aid makes any difference on the ground.
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Scoop.it!
