Last year the theme of the competition was Climate Challenge, which means all the entrants should have focused on solving climate change and adaptation issues that affect their local communities. Over the course of 7 months our teams are going to over 15 countries to support the competition, answering questions and hosting workshops. Since we’re now two thirds through the competition, I wanted to share descriptions of the 6 winners from the East Africa and West/Central regional competitions.

The East Africa winners were announced on January 14th, 2012 at Villages In Action in Kikuube, Uganda. The West/Central Africa winners were announced on December 8th, 2011 in Durban, South Africa at the COP-17 Climate Change Conference.

East Africa Winners

1st prize of $15,000 – The Grainy Bunch by Eric Mutta (Tanzania)
The Grainy Bunch is a national grain supply chain management system that monitors the purchase, storage, distribution, and consumption of grain across the entire nation. It was developed with the understanding that selling “the effects of efficiency” to actors in the grain supply chain is much easier than selling “the effects of climate change”.

Grain is nicknamed the “white oil” which lubricates the engine of Tanzanian growth. Even short-term disturbances in its supply chain adversely affects hundreds of thousands of people. To ensure both food security and economic security for all Tanzanians, a system is required to both monitor and facilitate the supply chain of grain, from the soil to our plates.

2nd prize of $7,000 – Mkulima Bora – Stepheno Maleche, Gerry Nandwa, Joseph Onginjo and Oliver Otieno (Kenya)
Mkulima Bora enables farmers to input the type crop they wish to plant into an app, then it cross-checks meteorological data to determine if the crop is suitable given the timing and location. Mkulima improves farmer yields, saves them time, and money

3rd Prize of $3,000 – Agro Universe – Oliama Brian, Daniel Mumbere, Nabuto Josephine, Bossa Alex, Sanya Duncan, Olwenyi Victor, Kato Charles, Masaba Kizito, Kalema Moses, Namuyiga Winfrey (Uganda)
Agro Universe allows farmers with agriculture products or livestock to alert the app’s community so that they can buy and sell goods from each other. It works on both mobile and the web. The aim of Agro Universe is to create a regional marketplace where products can be sold that may have no demand in the user’s immediate area but that might in areas farther out.

West/Central Africa Winners

1st prize $15,000 – HospitalManager by Victor Ogo Ekwueme (Nigeria)
HospitalManager is a web-based application that helps hospitals and health organizations prepare for disasters such as floods and storms. More frequent heat spells, rains, and floods are leading to heath emergencies, both due to the event itself, and later to water related disease. HospitalManager will help hospitals in Nigeria, and potentially throughout Africa, identify patterns in patient visits following rains and floods, so that staff can better prepare for these situations and save more lives. Hospitals can anticipate incoming disease and emergency patterns using real time climate forecasts. On longer time scales it will allow policy makers to plan locations of new hospitals.

2nd prize $7,000 – Eco-fund Forum by Assane Seck, Guillaume Blandin and Markus Faschina (Senegal)
Eco-fund Forum is a web-based community organizer and geo-localized data exchange tool to help individuals and communities working on sustainable resource management throughout Africa to share their own experiences on best practices. Thus they will better understand and respond to the climate change challenges impacting each specific local context. For example, coastal communities in Senegal that suffer from erosion can learn from neighbors that are successfully and durably overcoming the same problem by regenerating and preserving a littoral forest. Furthermore, the Forum will give those communities a voice which should alert political decision makers to address climate change challenges in time.

3rd prize $3,000 – Farmerline by Alloysius Attah and Emmanuel Owusu Addai (Ghana)
Farmerline is a mobile and web-based system that furnishes farmers and investors with relevant agricultural information to improve productivity and increase income. Lack of information about weather patterns and about which crops grow best in a changing climate hurts rural farmers’ yields. Cell phone use is growing rapidly throughout Ghana, including in rural areas. This mobile tool can help farmers in Ghana to get information about agricultural best practices down to the farm level, including choosing crops best suited for their specific location, and how to prepare for changes in the weather (including dry spells, changes in seasonal onset, and extreme events).

East Africa Honorable Mentions

CoHeW – Geno Juma, Nicholas Mugah
The CoHeW program is designed as an aid to the community health worker (CHWs). The program will have a two pronged approach; it gives stop gap solutions to the respondent and serves as an information gathering tool for the CHWs. The ministry of health and other health administration planners need a source of information on likely occurrences of diseases and projected disease outbreak periods.

AgriRight (Plant it Right) – Nyambura Muhia, Wamahiga Grace, Njeri Winnie, Harun Mwangi
AgriRight is a mobile app that helps farmers plant crops that are right for a particular area.Many farmers, plant crops which are not sustainable for a particular area, which leads to a waste of resources (time, money, energy). They often incur huge losses, reaping very little or no crops at all.

West/Central Africa Honorable Mentions

iProtect
An application that allows residents report issues like bush burning and deforestation in real time via SMS. It’s a citizen reporting and preparedness project that allows the public to alert the greater community of emergency events.

Mobile Agri Business
Mobile Agribusiness is an agriculture application for farmers to have information, skills and to connect them to available market in real-time in DRCongo. The project aims to create a mobile market place for farmers in Congo.

What’s next for Apps4Africa? Well it’s too soon to say but the Climate Challenge will begin in the Southern Africa region in a few short weeks. Bookmark this post and come back in early April to find out who the Southern Africa regional winners will be! If you’d like to get involved with Apps4Africa or the winners, please email us at info@apps4africa.com. Many of the entrants are choosing to open source their code which you can find here on GitHub.

In the American and European tech space there’s a growing problem. There’s so much funding available for early stage startups that everyone and their college dropout buddy is starting-up, leaving no one out there to hire.

It’s one of those first world problems: “We just raised 4 million dollars for our social network for redheads but we can’t find any developers…frowny face.”

If Silicon Valley is having trouble hiring top tech talent, then it means that there’s also a drought in the NGO space. Even the biggest non-profits are suffering from the same lack of technical resources.

If you’re an African developer, this is a huge opportunity. Focus on acquiring (or maturing) some of the following skills. Talent in these areas is elusive even in the U.S. and Europe, being good at them will make you far more employable (or fundable if you want to start a company), globally as well as locally:

For Technical People

• Ruby on Rails A lot of web startups use RoR because it’s a great language and it also impresses investors. However, they quickly realize that it impresses because Rails developers regularly command high salaries due to such high demand.
• Python and or Django The Jan Brady to Ruby’s Macia. Actually, Python is probably more in demand these days simply because more developers are competent in it. It’s also great for mobile app development which makes it useful for all those SMS apps local firms are dying to build.
• iOS – the iPhone continues to dominate the smart phone arena. It’s less relevant if you’re targeting a local audience (there go with Android or stick with Java), but if you are building apps that you want to sell internationally then there’s no app store with a richer economy for developers than Apple’s.
• Data visualization All that ‘open data’ out there is irrelevant. What’s relevant is data that can be used by anyone at any organization, with minimal fuss. Visualization makes it easy to relate complex datasets to those too busy (or too lazy) to analyze them. Data vis goes beyond any specific programing language, but it is a skill and it’s one that Africans can find a great deal of opportunity in.
• Math/Statistics Before one can visualize anything they need the components to visualize. If you’ve got a strong grasp of statistics and analysis, distilling information so that it’s actionable for others (who usually don’t share this skill) is a highly lucrative path to pursue.
• Semantic Analysis Despite what everyone thought, the semantic web is here to stay. It hasn’t become a ‘new web’ like some once thought it might, but semantic technologies (sentiment analysis, natural language processing, text parsing) have become the methods that are routinely used to power some of the web’s most popular applications. These skills are incredibly lucrative. The growth of the ‘Big Data’ industry is fueled by them.
• NoSQL & NewSQL Modern web apps require a great deal of backend engineering to deal with and keep track of all the byproducts of social, sharing, and content creation. There’s two schools of thoughts on this: one is that by doing more of the work on the application side (on request), applications can scale faster while handling more operations from more users. That’s the non-relational approach. The other school of thought is that there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things, which stores data with the values the application uses for retrieving them later. The challenge was that this created a bottleneck at the database level which often lead to slow or stagnant apps. The new thinking around NewSQL is to keep the relational model and simply build better database software that allows for more throughput. Entire companies are being built of each type of database (see: Cloudera, Vertica, 10Gen), pick the one that makes sense for you. Also, this is the fuel for the Big Data/Open Data rocket ship.
• jQuery/Javascript/Ajax Modern web apps do most of their processing on the front-end. As I mention above, this often means the application side is where most of the logic for the web app lives, while the database becomes a place to store and retrieve. For these types of web apps, front end logic is critical. Given the rise of the Jquery framework this is probably obvious, yet solid front-end developers are few and far between.
• Hardware Engineering The ‘maker’ movement amplified by Afrigadget and Maker Faire Africa highlights another opportunity on the continent, the localization of manufacturing. Whether it’s bicycles or mobile devices, companies local to the continent that design and build things are scarce.

For Less Technical People

• Design Look at the majority of African websites. Most websites made by African developers still look like they were made in 1999 using the GeoCities default templates (translation: Fugly). Blegh. There is a bounty out for good African designers. The mistake a lot of programmers make is they assume design is about technical know-how. It’s not – it’s about a sense of aesthetic and attention to detail. If you are a lazy designer, you’re not a designer. If you are a programmer who thinks design is superfluous to your application, then you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a dearth of design talent in the U.S. and Europe and a good designer can command the salary of a top programmer. Where are the African designers?
• Writing You would be surprised at the number of people who can’t string together a well-written, cohesive, consistant thought in written form. Coupled with the rapid proliferation of social media (which, by the way, consists of mostly written messaging) the ability to write and write well has become incredibly important. I say this because you are not at a disadvantage if you are a non-native speaker. Example: Ariana Huffington is a non-native english speaker and she built a highly influential and powerful new media outlet that rivals old-school powerhouses like CNN and FOX on the web. It’s about being able to convey your thoughts cohesively and convincingly. It takes practice, so keep blogging!
• Project Management Being the person who can cultivate the best traits from your team of peers is a huge asset that has always been rare. Many people manage, few excel at it.
• Videography – We’ve all heard that there isn’t enough local content being produced for African audiences. One of the reasons is the lack of local producers. However, this is changing. More countries are becoming home to an African creative class who are producing film, television, and web shows locally. Can this be lucrative? I think so. As bandwidth falls in cost, eventually the demand for local content may not come from international viewers but the pan-African audience.
• Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Deductive reasoning. The ability to deduce conclusions and the reasons why they have occurred. To do this, you have to be able to consider all sides and all aspects of a problem…even the ones that you don’t like. You have to be able to challenge assumptions, this includes your own. It is a skill to be able to analyze the intricacies of why things happen or if someone’s argument isn’t grounded in reality, and to be able to explain your conclusions to others. This will make you a better anything.

There are companies all over the world looking to hire people with aptitude in these areas, but being in Africa puts you in a position of power because there will be as great a demand for you at home as there is abroad. Does this mean you’d have to relocate to another country? Not necessarily, many of these skills can be outsourced to you or your company.

In 2012 learn the things that are in demand so you can build firms (or offer services) that capitalize on these global trends.

Photo Credit: Ahmed Maawy & Apps4Africa.org

// The Future

The first of these themes is ‘the future’ itself. To be exact, predictive technologies that are being used to improve decision making.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson

This is a favorite quote of mine.  It sums up so much about the post-60’s world we live in. Why the 60’s? Because that was the last time, as far as I can tell (because I wasn’t alive then), that man’s wildest dreams were more sci-fi than reality.  In 1960, even astronauts still dreamed of one day walking on the moon like it was a fantasy. By 1970 it was history. But I digress…

I want to update this quote to read…

“The future is here…and you can buy it!” - me.

What we’re talking about is predictive technologies.  Algorithms that take massive amounts of historic data and analyze it for trends that can be projected outwards.  This is not new science, it’s statistics, but it’s statistics when applied to prediction that is the exploding business.

How effective are predictive technologies?  Well, if you want to see this type of technology in action, go to Google.com right now.  Activate Google Instant and type one or two letters, Google will offer suggestions based upon previous searches by all the people using their search engine and what they type after those two letters. This increases Google’s ability to make an educated guess about what you will type next.

There’s real science behind all of this. It’s not magic. It only works so well, but it does work.

So the future is available for sale from a few companies. To mention a few…Recorded Futures, Palantir, PAX.

Recorded Futures is a good example. They offer their ‘future’ as a service. That’s right, The Future is for sale as a restful API! You can use this API to get your future hand delivered as JSON or XML for the low price of $150 a month! Power your app with the future!

All kidding aside, how is this relevant to Africa?

Well, I can tell you as someone who’s company does work for Governments, Defense contractors, NGOs large and small, these technologies are in use to try to enhance decision making. These predictive technologies are being used all over the continent. To predict conflict & uprisings, crime, the affects of climate change…it goes on and on.  To decide where to spend budgets, enact military action, where to distribute medical resources.

The CDC has been in the business of predicting the future for decades. For them, spotting an outbreak before it spreads is essential.  More and more businesses from marketers, to law enforcement, to medical facilities have grown to appreciate these methodologies.

Heritage Provider Network is offering a $3 million dollar prize to any team who can develop an algorithm that can accurately detect within a year, using only patient and public data, when a patient will need to return to a medical facility.  It’s like the Netflix Prize for medicine.

This is all fascinating, but what happens when prediction goes wrong?

Right now, in Italy, six scientists (seismologists) and one elected official are on trial for not being able to sufficiently predict the future. You read that correctly.

Given their resources, their expertise, and sufficient historic data, the expectation is that something more could, or should, have been done to protect the public from a wrong.  That’s the precedent being set here. It’s not good enough to be an expert, you also now have to be a genie.

If this sounds strangely like the premise of the Minority Report, then you would be correct.  Again, this is William Gibson’s future that we’re living in.

// Data 

The future of data is in everyday things. Networked Objects. Internet of Things. Nanotechnology. These are all names for this type of innovation.

It is important to note: information exists, and has always existed everywhere. Atoms, molecules, DNA…these are all types of information.  What’s changing is our ability to imprint human generated data into the everyday objects around us, and to extract that information using technology.

Medic Mobile from Frontline:SMS aims to be able to allow patients to be photographed using mobile phones, using those photos for the basis of remote diagnosis.  Right now this is a manual process, with actual doctors trying to make diagnoses, but one day this might be done by matching incoming photos with a database of  pre-existing photos. When this becomes a mostly algorithmic process for diagnosing ailments, we’ve arrived at an incredible future.

So being able to extract meaning from every day objects using devices, that’s the future of data.

There’s groups here who are working on it. CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) has researchers in South Africa exploring the Internet of Things.

But this, too, comes at with huge price.  The easier it is to do things for good with these technologies, the easier, and more tempting it becomes to do harm.

There will come a day at some point in the future (and it’s arguably already here) that genocide could come at the click of a button.  A group of people who aren’t liked could be annihilated with the ease of tapping backspace. Parents will soon be able to go to a medical facility and request more or less of certain types of gene in their children. These are great advancements in technology that can equally become disturbing examples of innovating our way to atrocity.

// Diplomacy

Diplomacy is being disrupted as well.

Even the crudest of technologies is being used to reshape the way government works, both positively and negatively.

Ushahidi is an example of a positive disruption.  In essence, it’s a way to collect information from the public, and put it on a map.  But, as I’ve frequently said, the innovation isn’t the technology. The innovation of Ushahidi lies in the fact that anyone, no matter how amateurish or well-trained, has access to the same tools as professionals.  More importantly, those tools can then be used to deliver services more effectively than the people who are traditionally expected to.

That’s the disruption, service delivery that bypasses Government organizations and Non-Government Organizations, and to be frank, makes them look silly by being faster, more efficient, and scalable.

This type of disruption puts pressure on governments to engage the public, less they appear to be ineffective.  This represents a good exchange.  Positive disruption.

Besides, when governments have too much authority, they tend to ignore public demands.  When the public have too much authority, it leads to anarchy, or they self-organize into communities which later require governing.

The current trend is in what I call equalizing disruption, tech or methods that undermine the power of government authority. The Ushahidis of the world, the WikiLeaks, the Anonymous groups.  In different ways, each of these has out-maneuvered the power or ability of government to exert power.

This doesn’t always play out reluctantly.

Last year the U.S. Department of State began sponsoring an innovation contest where they rewarded African innovators for solving local problems. They have no interest in owning IP, recruiting these individuals, or engaging them in any other way.  They simply wanted to experiment with new ways of reaching out to countries and people.

This competition, Apps4Africa, is one example of a new type of diplomacy.

// Education

In Uganda, Benge Solomon King is teaching basic and advanced robotics to youth across the country – in urban centers and in remote villages. What’s fascinating about Solomon is that he’s entirely self-taught, learning from tutorials and instruction from the internet.

This isn’t rural California where there are a number of places even the poorest will have available to learn (libraries, public schools, experienced adults). This is someone who learned basic electronics, programing, circuitry, and engineering in what is essentially a vacuum.

In Malawi, William Kamkwamba built an electricity producing windmill by reverse engineering its construction from a photograph.

In Nigeria, Muhammed Abdullahi builds working helicopters from scrap metal, with no prior knowledge of aviation or access to resources.

What do all these three stories have in common?  They may well be example of genius on display, randomly spread across the world.  But, I actually think what’s occurring is evidence of how education is broken, and three individuals who circumvented this broken system. Some of the aforementioned individuals have gone on to study engineering formally, but lacking formal education didn’t prevent them from learning in the first place.

It’s clear that the organizations we’ve put in place to deliver a service (education) are ineffective, perhaps even failed.  Replicating this Western model of education in Africa hasn’t scaled beyond urban capitals and is highly ineffective where it has. These individuals may represent what the alternative looks like.

Khan Academy, Kiip, Teach for America…all of these programs have arisen to patch holes in a broken system in the United States, some completely flipping the old education model on its head. Thus, self-instruction, open courseware, and remote video instruction are the technologies that seem to be winning the future of education.

// Disparity

Finally, we can look at the present, and we can look at the past, and with no special prediction technology, conclude that the future will be grossly unequal.

We have to be cautious that we aren’t building a future where the aforementioned technologies and others aren’t only available only to the highest classes of society.

In “A Cultural Thought Experiment”, a post from blogger Charlie Stross, he argues that if and when interplanetary space travel and colonization become a possibility, it will only be a possibility for the wealthiest among us.  In other words, the future will be awesome if you’re in the right class.  Much like the 14th Century being fantastic if you were royalty in Europe.

The people who discovered new lands hundreds of years ago, the explorers that shaped the modern world, were also either rich or had rich financiers.  The future will be as defined by disparity as the present is, and the past was.

Charlie Stross is not being paranoid in the least. If you have a spare $350,000 to $1 million lying around you can go to space tomorrow.

It goes without saying that if there is a race to get tourists to space, it will likely echo the rate at which countries were able to get to space in the first place. If that’s true, then African countries would be among the last to go – they ever went at all.

So as I conclude, I want us all to think about the future.  Let’s make our own predictions so that we can correct for mistakes yet to be made.  Let’s strive to make it trend towards the positive. For all of these innovations and disruptions have great implications…as well as implications for great evil.  This is our future in the making and it’s we who will decide how, and if, it’s evenly distributed.

For the past several months I’ve been working on a project for moving data around when there’s no internet.  I talked a bit about this at the Power of Information conference earlier this year in London, but I thought I’d share more here.

Abayima applies cold war tactics to mobile data storage and distribution.

Abayima targets anyone living in oppressive, restrictive, societies around the globe. It was inspired by the information networks during the most recent Uganda elections and the Arab Spring — both situations where electronic communication networks were compromised (or complete shutdown) by authorities.

As a strategy it will work in any country where there are low-end mobile phones, the most accessible communication technology on the planet. As a technology, it works for groups who wish to disseminate messages discretely in a way that mimics one of the oldest forms of communication,  pen and paper.

The History

Two recent events inspired the development of Abayima. In 2011 the internet in Egypt was shut off, preventing activists and dissidents from communicating with each other or the outside world. A few months later, in Uganda, during the reelection campaign for President Yoweri Museveni, the mobile carriers were compromised and monitored for voices of dissent. This allowed for the filtering of text messages that were deemed unacceptable, while the same networks were used to spread electronic propaganda in the form of SMS and MMS messages to the public.

As a Strategy

This conversation shaping using communication technologies for propaganda echoes the intimidation and propaganda techniques used by the German and Soviet governments during World War II and by many other oppressive governments since.  Anyone with two phones and a sim can do this right now but to do it more efficiently we’ll be developing an application to support this type of message storage.

Abayima is largely a strategy for moving messages sans telecom infrastructure. It’s also a toolkit which assumes electronic communication via internet or mobile carrier has been compromised completely and allows activists and journalists to use the SIM cards themselves to publish or distribute information freely.

As a Product

Rather than rely upon high-tech infrastructure, Abayima relies upon centuries old information networks inspired by the Jewish resistance, the underground slave escape routes in the United States, Navajo code talkers, the war scouts of Sparta etc. There is a long lineage of using no or low technical means of encryption to protect sensitive information.

As a technology Abayima is a way of storing information on SIM chips which can then be placed in a mobile phone on the other end to be read.

Examples:

• A journalist writes several sensitive details and stores them to a SIM that isn’t used for texting, but to share the message with only a designated party whom they would hand deliver it to. Because the SIM isn’t used for calls, the only way to intercept the message is physically.
• A group of activists could send messages between two locations using a ‘runner’. When the runner arrives he hands off the SIM which will contain messages for the recipient.
• SIM cards are as ubiquitous as mobile phones and its generally understood how to use them across most populations. Thus, the SIM card itself could be a publishing/distribution mechanism for content of all types.
• For advanced users with access to higher-end technology the messages could be written using a computer and our software, encrypted with software, and stored on the SIM. The receiver would need technology with a key to decrypt the message.  This adds a layer of protection against interception as it becomes necessary to crack the encryption algorithm first.

F.A.Q.

Why not use thumb drives?

Because thumb drives require two computers on either side, a level of infrastructure that exceeds the means of the poorest. The number of people with low end mobile phones, globally, far exceeds the number with access to computers.

Can’t these messages be intercepted?

Yes. Electronic communication like SMS can be ‘sniffed’ while passing through the air.  Paper with notes can be stolen.  People can be tortured to extract information.  There will always be a way to intercept communication.

That said, SIM cards are small, easy to destroy or swallow, and can’t be read without some sort of assistive device. Abayima (the product) can be used to encrypt whatever message is contained, adding another layer of protection.

Aren’t there better ways to distribute information?

Yes. This publishing method is more akin to pen and paper communication. By design, it is inefficient. But it’s highly practical if you have limited resources as it leverages local infrastructure. This is intended to be carried out in ‘last ditch’ scenarios where the more efficient methods of delivery like email, instant messaging, text messaging, VOIP or others have either been compromised by hackers, are being monitored by authorities, or completely disabled.  It’s a work around when the alternative is no long-distance communication at all.

What is a sneakernet? 

It refers to using your feet (sneakers) to move information around, particularly data storage devices. The implication is that though there are clearly other ways to access that information, the sneakernet is the fallback.

Visit the project at http://abayima.com

Shanta Devarajan recently pointed out this ‘statistical tragedy’ of Africa:

To show that this is not an arcane point, consider the case of Ghana, which decided to update its GDP last year to the 1993 system. When they did so, they found that their GDP was 62 percent higher than previously thought. Ghana’s per capita GDP is now over $1,000, making it a middle-income country. The “tragedy” is that we were happily publishing GDP statistics and growth figures for Ghana over the last decades, when in fact the national accounts were understating GDP by 62 percent…. The tragedy is that donors, including the World Bank, undertake statistical activities without ensuring that they are consistent with the NSDS. Why? Because they need data for their own purpose—to publish reports—and this means getting it faster, with little time to strengthen the countries’ statistical capacity. But just as Africans turned around their growth tragedy, they can turn around their statistical tragedy.

It’s no secret that high-level skills in the areas of science, technology, and the maths are rare. This is inevitable in an environment with sparse resources for good education or in countries that have been too politically volatile for education to be possible. For instance, Liberia, where two generations essentially had no access to any sort of modern education due to civil war and ongoing conflict.

But if data is truly the new oil, then mining it, understanding it and building on it is essential to the continent’s future. How do we solve this problem? Education, for teaching basic and advanced maths are one necessity. Building more technical skills like programing is another. Open data initiatives, like the one launched in Kenya earlier this year, are also important. But the more critical need is to build capacity for the conceptual, abstract, and analytic disciplines made up all of these skills combined. This problem is being addressed by a growing number of institutions like the African Leadership Academy.

Where these skills already exist, it’s also necessary to help to surface and distribute the results to the international community. From the Database of African Theses and Dissertations (DATAD):

For many reasons, African research results are rarely indexed in major international databases, a problem that is further exacerbated by the inaccessibility of theses and dissertations completed in the region, many of which contain local empirical data that is not available in international literature. This inability to learn about and access African material is frustrating to students and scholars–both on the continent and overseas.

That said, there are a lot of great resources for quantitative research and analysis related to African countries. Most of them from international NGOs, local governments, or passionate foreigners (like myself), as well as resources like Afrographique, OAfrica, The World Bank, and too many open data initiatives to list here. Hopefully, these resources and others are serving to help build capacity for Africa to craft its own data narratives…refineries for new oil.

Photo Credit: Jon

I’m really excited to be one of the keynote speakers at Tech4Africa this year in South Africa. I’ll be there discussing Apps4Africa among other things. If you’re interested in going but are intimidated by the price of admission, here are a few different options for tickets…

Tech4Africa runs from 27-28 October 2011 at The Forum in Bryanston, Johannesburg. The event is targeted at business professionals and technologists from businesses of all sizes, from entrepreneurs and start-up owners through to professionals working at large organisations.

Samsung is inviting all mobile app developers to take part in this month’s Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg and has made available 50 discounted tickets, representing a R4000 saving each, to facilitate their participation. Samsung is the Tech4Africa Ignite partner and has extended this offer in a bid to attract and help grow the local developer community, a key part of Samsung’s mobile business strategy.

Ignite is an initiative that will allow African startups to pitch their products to a panel of angel investors, mentors and business leaders during the two-day Tech4Africa conference taking place at The Forum in Bryanston, Johannesburg from 27 – 28 October. Samsung will also be running Samsung HQ Developer Support Sessions. These specialist app development workshops, hosted by leading international Samsung developers, will highlight global trends and best practice.

“Samsung aims to promote co-operation, innovation and the exchange of new ideas in technology across Africa so that our innovative products and technologies continue to respond to the real needs and conditions on the continent. It is with this premise in mind, that we are so excited about offering the discounted entry to developers who will undoubtedly benefit from participating in this year’s conference,” said Brett Loubser, B2C Apps Development Lead at Samsung.

“We’re using our partnership with Tech4Africa Ignite to inspire new directions and provide the technologies and gadgets that Africa requires. It’s about listening to the market, building partnerships and really committing to Africa and its people by providing them with relevant content and apps – for a smarter life.”

These objectives are closely aligned with those of Tech4Africa, and specifically its Ignite programme, which aims to highlight innovative new ideas and allow African startups to use Tech4Africa as a platform to gain valuable exposure, and even early stage investment.

Gareth Knight, founder and MD of Tech4Africa, said Samsung’s subsidization of the tickets was a show of its commitment to both Africa and app developers, who do not have the same levels of market access available to their counterparts in the US and Europe. “Our vision has always been to create a local platform to which international experts and leaders are invited to share their knowledge and insight,” he said. “The partnership with Samsung is evidence of how that vision is being realised and how we can make a real impact in Africa. We hope to attract and uncover exciting talent through this unique opportunity.”
Developers who are interested in taking up this offer can find further details here.

The discounted tickets are available to qualifying developers for R1 500 excluding VAT. Applications for the discounted tickets are open until 21 October.

Tickets for Not for Profit (NFP) organisations are available at up to 25% discount off current ticket prices. For a quotation, please send your organisations details (including registration number) as well as number of tickets you would like to purchase to nfp@tech4africa.com

Student tickets are available at 10% off our Early Bird rates, provided that students can provide valid student identification. To apply, email a scan of your student card to students@tech4africa.com

The other day I responded to a student who was seeking advice on relocating to start a venture in East Africa. I thought I’d share the email here since it’s likely relevant to others.

The first thing I’d recommend when starting a new business out of the country is to try to find a local business attorney who comes highly recommended from other professionals in that country. You want someone who can help you register your company in a timely fashion, but you also don’t want to get ripped off by paying too much.

The reason to do this is because doing it yourself will likely be incredibly frustrating. You’ll have to learn the intricacies of the local legal system and that can prove challenging, so finding a good (reasonably priced) attorney goes a long way.

Secondly, learn the local labor laws before hiring anyone. You’ll need to know what’s required to hire someone (paying local taxes and benefits) and, if it comes to it, how to terminate employment.

Whether you are based in-country or not, spend time on the ground with the people who you will be working with or who will be working for you. It’s hard to judge people’s character in only a short time but the best way to do it is to work with them while you’re there face-to-face, to build a relationship.

Finally, make connections with the management of other local businesses. For the most part, the business community looks after each other and will be keen to make friends. To accomplish some of the above tasks (like finding a lawyer), you may have to do a bit of networking anyways. Whenever I have a problem in business, it’s usually other business owners who are the most sympathetic because they’ve likely had to deal with similar challenges.

Here are a few blog posts I and others have written on the subject –

Capacity versus Competency – http://appfrica.com/2010/05/13/capacity-versus-competency/
Reaction to the NYTimes Profile on African Startups – http://appfrica.com/2009/09/10/reaction-to-the-nytimes-profile-on-african-startups/
Keep the Fish (ProjectDiaspora.org) – http://projectdiaspora.org/beta/2007/12/08/keep-the-fish-ill-take-the-fishing-pole/
The Experience of Starting a Business in Africa (VC4Africa) – http://www.vc4africa.com/profiles/blogs/the-experience-of-starting-a

Photo Credit: Sarah Mccans

The press release from this morning:

As part of our engagement with emerging African partners in addressing the challenge of climate change, the U.S. Department of State will sponsor Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge, a public diplomacy program comprised of three African regional competitions to address local climate change challenges through the use of mobile technology.

In coordination with software developer Appfrica International, the U.S. Department of State will bring civil society, academia and private sector organizations together with African technology innovators to develop applications that address local climate change adaptation challenges. In doing so, we seek to raise African public awareness of climate change adaptation and U.S. involvement in Africa on these issues; support the development of civil society and private-sector networks; and highlight African solutions to local climate change adaptation challenges.

The 2011 competitions are linked to three African regional climate change workshops organized by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State. The workshops are part of the broader Adaptation Partnership, which brings together practitioners and policy-makers to address key adaptation challenges in their region. Climate change issues identified at these workshops will be used to inspire ideas for mobile applications for the competitions.

The Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge builds on the success of the 2010 Apps4Africa: Civic Challenge in which civil society challenged program developers to find innovative technological solutions to everyday problems on issues ranging from transparency and governance to health and education. The 2011 competition begins in Western and Central Africa in September, with Eastern and Southern Africa to follow. Winners will receive prizes, including cash awards. Private partners, including TED and Indigo Trust, are contributing technical assistance, prizes, and follow-on support for the new partnerships created by this platform.

For more information please visit http://apps4africa.org or contact Marissa Rollens, U.S. Department of State, Bureau of African Affairs, at 202-663-0531 or RollensMK@state.gov.

This is really exciting for us, as with this contest, Appfrica and HiveColab members will visit a huge portion of the content, to answer your questions and help facilitate local events. Plus we’ll get to meet many of the great minds out there doing great work! Regional outreach events will be held in the following countries.

In West Africa/Central the outreach area will include: Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, DRC and Ghana. In East Africa the outreach area will include: Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. In Southern Africa, the outreach area will include South Africa, Botswana, Madagascar and Angola.

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In 2008, when I started about blogging about African technology, I had no idea where it would take me. I was just hoping to help draw attention to a number of inspiring stories and individuals I was learning about around the continent. Eventually, I was able to scrape up enough of my own meager funds to launch Appfrica as a physical place to incubate young technologists in Uganda. That went incredibly well, we evolved several times and eventually spawned several spin-off projects including the awesome Hive Colab and Abayima (which you’ll be hearing about soon).

Over the past few weeks I’ve been inundated with questions about what what’s going on with my own work, as well as Appfrica, Hive and my new venture, metaLayer. Well, I’m happy to say not much has changed. I had the dream opportunity to work with one of the world’s most revolutionary companies for a while leading the SwiftRiver project. What I learned from working with Ushahidi over the past few years is that my passion is technology, startups and big data problems. Eventually the pursuit of those passions was too strong to ignore. Again, it was a dream opportunity, a dream job, and they have a fantastic team so I’m really grateful for that period of my career.

I also had the opportunity to turn down several other dream job offers. But I had to ask myself why I was turning down opportunities I’d sort of waited my whole life for. The reality is, the only opportunity that I’ve been waiting for is the opportunity to control my own destiny and to empower others to do the same. I’m really grateful to still be able to do this. I’m also grateful for our team and friends in Uganda, who have all worked tirelessly in varying capacities to keep our in-country work going smoothly.

I no longer live in Uganda, Appfrica has evolved into an organization that funds HiveColab through its consulting work for enterprise companies and international NGOs. Our goal is to build capacity by engaging tech talent on the continent for the software projects we work on while directly financing philanthropic tech initiatives like Hive Colab. The more things grow and evolve, the more they remain the same.

Thanks for supporting us over the last few years so stay tuned, we’ve only just begun! =)