My Beauty Best Teacher

Ethan Zuckerman writing about his recent visit to iHub Nairobi:

Kenya’s not just part of the narrative behind Ushahidi, a platform used globally but developed by Kenyans to respond to a domestic political crisis. Kenya matters because it’s one of the places where the future of technology is coming into focus, where a generation of creative people are building the future, one experiment at a time. iHub makes sense because it’s the physical manifestation of the creative collaboration that took Ushahidi from idea to project to platform within months. I had to go to Nairobi before I really got it. And now I don’t want to leave.

Ethan Zuckerman reports on Lindaba Ziyafika a sms news creation and dissemination project:

Harry Dugmore of Rhodes University is working on a pioneering project to provide news and information into urban neighborhoods in South Africa via mobile phones. The project – Lindaba Ziyafika (the news is coming) – is designed to create and distribute news in the context of the “techno-social flux” that South Africa is experiencing...The journalists behind the Lindaba Ziyafika project are largely unemployed adults in their early 20s. They’re producing content that’s ending up in the 140 year old newspaper that serves Grahamstown. The content is distributed first via online media – SMS, messages through systems like MXit (an incredibly clever hack that uses the cheaper data connectivity available on African cellphones to evade the huge expenses of SMS messages)

Building cultural bridges and xenophilia etc. Ethan Zuckerman at BIF:

Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery centre, Noma Children's Hospital Sokoto
Energy in Africa – time to think across borders?
Jaynii StreetWise festival and Cultural Troupe via Kadmus Arts
Nigeria's history of violence Omotade Aina speaks via Opal Tometi
NGOs should let aid recipients decide how money is spent
Notes on Abuja's recent digital bridge conference-Ethan Zuckerman
The Infrastructure Consortium for Africa...What do they actually do?

An architect of Singapore's astounding economic growth-via Ethan Zuckerman
Investing and empowering farmers-Guardian
Nurturing an industrial renaissance in Ghana.
Africa,Business destination-TIME
Favoring poor governments over poor people-Aidwatch

Image by Rachel Smith via Flickr

You’d think that the passing of a man who systematically looted his country for four decades would be the cause for celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon. Several African big men have passed on in the past decade, and the situation hasn’t improved much for their beleaguered subjects. When Togo’s Eyadema Gnassingbe died in 2005, the military installed his son, Faure… who was “elected” soon after. Lansana Conté died in December 2008, and within six hours of the announcement of his death, a military government voided the constitution and took over in a coup d’etat. No one’s predicting a coup in Gabon - the minister of Defense is Ali Ben Bongo, Bongo’s son and almost certain successor

Image via WikipediaEthan Zuckerman writes about the Global version of the Afropolitan-Xenophiles:

Xenophiles are people who are fascinated by the whole world, by things other than their ordinary experience. They’re people who want to connect with people who see the world very differently. Some of these people are born this way, lots more are made - a good recipe for xenophilia is to raise a child in a culture deeply different from that of her parents - people call these kids “third culture kids”. Third culture kids have one foot in each of two cultures - the culture of the country they grew up and the culture of their parents, and as a result they don’t really live in either, but a little bit in both. Some kids hate this - many love it, and they end up bridge figures, natural xenophiles who can help translate cultures for other people. Barack Obama’s one of them...[continue reading]

The Big picture photo-journal reports on unregulated mining in Madagascar.One wonders if there are local efforts to organize the participants into local cooperative mining bodies of a sort?
(photo courtesy of ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

Update: Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging profiles the "Mines of Ilakaka"

Ethan Zuckerman reports on Sokwanele's mashup of electoral fraud in Zimbabwe:

Sokwanele announced..: a Google maps mashup of election-rigging incidents. Each icon on the map corresponds to a media report of an incident that controvenes SADC standards for a free and fair election. Clicking on an icon will take you to the issue of Sokwanele’s Zimbwbe Elections Watch newsletter, which summarizes media report on the elections, and to a database record, where each instance is coded as to which SADC rules it violates.

Ethan Zuckerman builds on his Incremental Infrastructure concept:

[T]he idea is to build essential facilities -- telephone networks, power grids, roads -- in small pieces using private investment, instead of relying on large, centrally planned, government-run projects.The rise of mobile phone networks linking more than 100 million Africans across the continent and the blossoming of cybercafes from Cape Town to Dakar are evidence that incremental infrastructure is already transforming the continent. But Africa needs go beyond telephones and computers. Many nations lack roads, electric power, schools, hospitals, clean water. If the lessons learned from building telephone and Internet systems can be applied to other types of African infrastructure, African entrepreneurs could find themselves wiring villages, paving roads, and perhaps even building airports -- building the new Africa while turning a profit in the process.

I’m wondering whether he’s too quick to extrapolate the mobile phone phenomenon to other areas. I’m especially thinking about big ticket items like roads and power generation/transmission that don’t have the same option of being subsidized by the consumer. Also the incremental and even moreso the “pico” approach does not address needs on a macro-level that most countries in Africa need to address, having power in the village is great but if factories / business can’t operate at an optimal level because of power shortages or costs there’s still a big conundrum that needs be address (and unfortunately the role of government can’t be wished away).

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Blogs and online communities are great channels for information and citizen media dissemination, events organization, and fundraising, but they are popular, more prevalent and accessible in the developed world. In the developing countries the Internet is less present, while the mobile technology covers unexpectedly great areas and counts much more users comparing to landlines or Internet use. Mobile communications are still expending in a fast pace: by 2010 it is estimated that 50% of the world population will become mobile users (3.3 billion people).

Shortly put, when talking about social activism goals and means, mobiles have the following advantages: pervasiveness and accessibility, anonymity, viral connectivity and message propagation, personal authorship of citizen media content.

Ethan Zuckerman reports on Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala's presentation at TED that received a standing ovation,he states that:

She tells us about “a different Africa”, not the Africa we hear about all the time: poverty, hiv, malaria, conflict, disaster. “It’s true that these things are going on, but there’s also an Africa you don’t hear about very much, an Africa that’s growing and reforming itself....“We have to help Africa transform by creating jobs.” That means we don’t have to concentrate on making drugs cheaper - “We allow people to buy the antimalaria drugs themselves,” because they’ve got high-paying jobs.

Rainer Chr. Hennig writes about the emerging 'green' protectionist policies of developed world:

Populist solutions that are to satisfy customers, politicians and the European industry alike are therefore surfacing all over Africa's neighbour continent and the main market of its products. And the solutions seem neat and nice - easy to understand and with the potential of creating more work locally. Even the industry starts propagating these solutions.
The victim mainly is Africa, because the message is that, as longer as a product or person is transported, the more energy is wasted unnecessarily. Worst of all is airborne transport, having the highest emissions of climate gases such as CO2. Unluckily, Africa is far away from European markets and poor transcontinental infrastructure puts most products and travellers on an airplane.
All over Europe, therefore, home-grown campaigns are being promoted, attacking Africa's newest and most successful export products. Anti-globalisation activists, "green" politicians, local industry and even occasional experts and scientists head these "buy local" campaign

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

For Africa to succeed economically, Birdsall(director of the Center for Development Economics) suggests, nations need to trade with each other more, creating larger, more attractive markets and reaping economies of scale. It makes very little sense for each state in Africa to build their own garment industry… and even less sense for each country to protect their industry against their neighbors with tariff barriers - if trade between countries was easier and cheaper, nations could specialize in sectors of the economy, begin trading to neighboring states, then grow and trade with the wider world. But at present, Sub-Saharan African nations levy tariffs on average of 17% on trade with each other; OECD nations have dropped these tariffs to an average of under 4%.