africa
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The Very Best are the New Face of Global Pop
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The Exceptional Story of the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
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Moving Windmills and Paying it Forward
The Jon Stewart Bump for The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Published October 08, 2009 @ 12:18PM PT
Stephen Colbert famously joked last election season about the "Colbert Bump" - the rise in the polls that politicians received after being on his faux-news show, The Colbert Report. For William Kamkwamba, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," there seems to be something of a "Jon Stewart Bump," as his book sales' jumped after appearing last night on the Daily Show.
The interview was great, as you can see above. I love the comparison of William to MacGuyver. After the appearance, William's book jumped from around #95 on Amazon's Best Seller list to #16 when I looked this morning. That's the power of distribution for ya.
To read more about why I'm so interested in this story, check out my post last week called "The Exceptional Story of the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" - or just go buy the book at Better World Books.
Maker Faire Africa and The Power of Tinkering
Published September 29, 2009 @ 01:23AM PT
In a summer filled with travel for Malawian windmill maker William Kamkwamba, one of the most important journeys was to Maker Faire Africa, an event for African tinkerers held in Accra, Ghana in August.
The Maker Faire Africa came after an off-handed comment by co-founder Emeka Okafor, in which he suggested that while ICT was starting to penetrate the continent, there had yet to be a real sense of a "Maker Philosophy," and a spirit of tinkering, trying that characterized the gadgetry on the continent.
From all reports, the event was a smashing success. The Maker Faire blog has a number of great posts about it, from which it's clear that the theme was not gadgets or African IT, but simply the spirit of creative entrepreneurship and engineering that are spread across the continent in droves for those looking.
Maker Faire is not the only event to celebrate this spirit. Barcamp Africa is an increasingly important part of the fabric of web and nonprofit collaboration both on the continent and beyond. The second Barcamp Africa to be held in Silicon Valley will be happening in less than a month.
Beyond events, groups like Maneno, Ushahidi, Appfrica Labs and others are providing new platforms to help communities form. This year's Maker Faire was kicked off with a speech from William, which seems appropriate. His message, and the message of the event, was that the spirit of tinkering - of trying, failing, and trying again - matters deeply, and with a little bit of luck, can lead to magic.
(Photo: Erik Hersman)
(A Change In) How To Write About Africa?
Published September 29, 2009 @ 01:18AM PT
"Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care."
So ends Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina's brutal satire "How to Write About Africa."
The piece, which first appeared in Granta a few years ago, viciously lampoons a particular way of seeing (and talking) that been has the dominant narrative about Africa since the days of imperialism.
Wainaina's harping was particularly satisfying for many because of the age of celebrity humanitarianism we've been living through, in which people like Angelina Jolie become spokespeople for the cause d'jour. All too often, this leads to the media's endlessly repetitive characterization of Africa as a dismal place, full of nothing but war, famine and disease.
Yet there is something happening right now, and a new narrative is forming. As more and more people actually spend time in Sub-Saharan Africa, and as the internet allows more and more voices from the continent to stream out, the counter-narrative of a continent bursting with talent and potential is slowly but surely taking hold.
This is the type of story that Malawian windmill maker William Kamkwamba embodies so wonderfully, but he is - thankfully - just one of the most prominent examples of a new generation of African success stories.
(Photo: geoftheref)
Great Africa + Technology Blog Links
Published September 29, 2009 @ 01:15AM PT
There are a number of essential blogs in the African Technology space. For those who are fascinated by William's story, here are a few must reads:
http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/ - William's blog is not just about the book, but also has his reflections on his travels and sharing his story.
Bryanmealer.com - William's co-author is Bryan Mealer, author of the Congo-focused All Things Must Fight to Live and one of my favorite journalists writing about Africa.
Appfrica.net - Jon Gosier's group in Uganda is not just a venture capital and consulting firm for web developers, but also one of the best sources of African technology news.
Maneno - Maneno is building a blogging platform optimized for low-bandwidth browsing in Africa
Afrigadget - Afrigadget is like Maker Faire Africa - but ongoing. A great resource displaying the ingenuity of people everywhere.
White African - Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman's blog is one of the most insightful resources for learning more about "where Africa and technology collide."
Global Voices Online - An incredible hub for local voices from around the continent, Global Voices is a must read.
(Photo: Erik Hersman)
African Social Enterprise Forum: A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action
Published September 24, 2009 @ 12:48PM PT
African social enterprise in action at Appfrica Labs, Kampala, Uganda
On Saturday, more than $4 billion dollars worth of private capital, not to mention some incredible innovators and leading thinkers, will gather for the first Africa Social Enterprise Forum. Convened by apparent force of nature (and Catherine B. Reynolds Fellow at NYU) Magogodi Makhene, the gathering is designed to help highlight the pulse and power of innovation and enterprise humming across the continent.
One of the most fascinating things about the event is that it arose in direct response to a conversation that started online. In May 2009, ClearlySo founder Rod Schwartz asked if the only social innovators were Anglo-Saxon? He was responding to the demographic homogeneity found in so many major conversations about social entrepreneurship. The question sparked a lively debate that carried on through dozens of comments and many months.
Magogodi, herself born in Soweto and working to help invest in and enable Africa's middle class, saw a chance to not just answer the question, but to bring the conversation offline. With the help of friends who came together as an organizing committee, the Africa Social Enterprise Forum was born.
The day long event goes down on Saturday, and has some great speakers. It will be bookended by keynotes from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Pop!Tech curator Andrew Zolli. In between, phenomenal folks representing Samasource, Ashoka, the Acumen Fund, Endeavor and many others will take the mic. For those of you in NYC, it appears to be a can't miss event.
EntrepreneurBait: Africa, Awesomeness, Imperialism
Published September 17, 2009 @ 03:46PM PT
After a few months of experimentation, "the daily entrepreneur" is no longer daily. I found that while many people appreciated the links, it was difficult to get people excited and interested day after day. While a feature like this may eventually return, for the time being, I'm going to be experimenting with some other forms of semi-regular links.
With that said, welcome to EntrepreneurBait, a bi-weekly post that features and puts some context around some of the most interesting and provocative posts. Thanks to @tactphil, @socialedge, @beunreasonable, and lots of other folks on Twitter for many of these links.
There have been a lot of great posts about Africa, social media and startups in the last couple days. A blog post on This Magazine makes the argument that the use of Twitter in rural areas - the case in question is the recent riots in Uganda - is not about the immediate availability of news as much as the "personal microphone" effect. African blogging platform Maneno's Director of Technology Miquel Hudin wrote a recap of the Maker Faire Africa event held last month in Ghana for the PopTech blog, and
There has also been a lot of conversation recently about Innovation. Today, the ever provocative Umair Haque wrote "The Awesomeness Manifesto," which is all about how we need to shift our thinking away from "innovation" - a broken, 20th century economic concept that relies on destruction, in Umair's mind - and instead talk about "awesomeness," which includes pillars like love, value, sustainable creation, and being insanely great. Sean over at Tactical Philanthropy also wrote about innovation, connecting articles about Six Sigma (efficiency management practices) with design thinking of the sort practiced by firms like IDEO.
There have also been some just Generally Interesting Things. William Easterly has been writing about the relationship between imperialism and state-led development (an interesting counterpoint to the argument that imperialism is always directly related to free-markets). From the organization side of things, I've been hearing more and more buzz about "Kiva for education" nonprofit startup Vitanna. And the Feast Kitchen has announced their final roster of startup finalists.
Carrier Pigeons, Competition, and the Need for Technological Infrastructure
Published September 10, 2009 @ 07:08PM PT
Some days I get a single story sent to me from everyone I know, and today's Mashable article "CARRIER PIGEONS: Still Faster Than ADSL" was one of those stories.
The premise of the article is about an "experiment" in South Africa where a company called the Unlimited strapped a 4GB memory card to Winston, an 11-month old pigeon, and sent him from their office in Pietermaritzburg to Durban. The trip took the pigeon around 3 hours, at which point only 4% of that data had transferred over South Africa's Telkom DSL service.
Part farce, part sorry reminder of the state of quality broadband service in Africa, the article has been streaming around the web today. While it's important not to look to glib stories as the only source of information about a place, the piece highlights how detrimental slow access is for people on the continent, a theme often riffed on by folks like Erik Hersman and Jon Gosier.
This is what I talk about when I mention the "ecosystem" of social entrepreneurship. Is the technological infrastructure for coordinating business available? Are their payments systems? Communication systems? Are government policies enabling ease of business? Are their training programs to better help people translate ideas to action? These are the sort of questions we have to answer if we want to unleash the power of social entrepreneurs to change the world.
(Photo: Fiona MacGuinty)
