In an African Minute

Community Mapping & Open Development in Dar Es Salaam

2011-09-26T14:49:00.004-05:00

Community Members Making Maps of Tandale Ward, Dar Es Salaam
photo via Mark Iliffe

In Dar Es Salaam, one of the fastest growing cities in the world, the local authorities, with support from the Tanzania-based World Bank urban and local government team, are working hard to improve urban services for the poor. Before they allocate scarce resources to building roads, streetlights, solid waste collection points or roadside drainage, Tanzanian officials must first understand how a community understands its own challenges and its priorities for the future.

In an effort supported through a unique partnership between The World Bank and Twaweza, a regional ICT NGO, an impressive array of civic actors are leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs) to create a new approach to this challenge in Tandale Ward, a vibrant unplanned community a few kilometers west of Dar Es Salaam’s city center. With facilitation from Ground Truth, the creators of Map Kibera, students from Ardhi University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) and residents of Tandale spent much of August using GPS units to collect a wide range of public data points, from school and public toilets to health clinics and trash dumps. Using free and open source software, these volunteers loaded these data onto Open Street Map (OSM), a freely accessible online map.

The effort in Tandale is an ongoing experiment in what Aleem Walji describes as the shift from open data to open development, where “citizen data and user generated content [can create] opportunities for Governments to listen better to their people and be more responsive to their constituents.” The easily expandable, interactive map is a new information resource for the community, as well as a powerful point of reference for discussion and decision-making in government about upcoming infrastructure upgrades.

The map’s granular, community-level open data provides new opportunities for what Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser characterizes as “self-protecting urban innovation, cities’ abilities to generate the information needed to solve their own problems.” On top of this data, technologists and issue experts can build tools to help both better understand and better respond to the most pressing problems facing the city. Within days of the initial mapping, Ramani Tandale, a website that allows residents to report flooding, broken street lights and other problems to online map, was launched. In the future, teams of developers and community leaders in Dar Es Salaam could build smart phone applications for tracking of solid waste collection, web visualizations of drainage catchment areas, or a dashboard to help public service providers better manage citizen requests.

As we continue to draw lessons from Tandale, it is clear that a network of civic actors, encouraged by local public service providers, can use low cost technology to create new opportunities for accountability, enable data-driven government policy making and create a more inclusive and open development process.

cross posted to the World Bank Group's IC4D blog.

What Patrick and I Might Have For Dinner

2011-07-30T18:03:00.010-05:00

topfentorte, a german delight

My old friend and co-conspirator @PatrickMeier and I are having dinner tonight at Kafe Leopold in Georgetown. Last week, he pointed out, quite rightly, how poorly I've been keeping up the blog. For inspiration, he gave me an ultimatum: if I don't blog by tonight, dinner is on me.

Since I am running out of time, I would like to share a few things we might enjoy tonight, suggested by @AlexBollfrass, my favorite Germanophile, ultra-running, nuclear weapons nerd:

(i) smoked fish platter;
(ii) smoked trout salad;
(iii) mussels
(iv) roasted chicken
(v) and for dessert, topfentorte

A Tragedy In Kampala

2010-07-12T04:53:00.008-05:00

Two bombs shook Uganda's capital last night in the middle of the World Cup finals match. While I was safe at home in Nairobi, the incident brought back fragmented memories of a peaceful, quiet town. I spent over two and a half years in Kampala, a place where I grew in many important ways.

The attacks are all the more dreadful when one remembers that Kampala is one of the few African capitals where it is safe to walk alone at night, where violent crime is nearly unheard of, and dreadful traffic is a relatively new (and not yet a permanent) facet of life. I spent a considerable number of nights at the Rugby Club and Ethiopian Village, where last night's tragedy took place.

Kampala's Rugby Club is a sprawling bar, adjacent to the pitch, where many of Kampala's college students come to hang with their buddies. If Uganda had fraternities, this is where they would throw their parties. Here the smart set drink Nile Special with reggae and hip hop blasting in the background. On weekend days the same crew watch rugby, collars popped to block the sun. Just last summer at the Club I saw Egypt pounded Uganda on a sultry Saturday afternoon.

Across town Ethiopian Village, down the road from the American Embassy, is in Kabalagala, the Las Vegas of Kampala. The restaurant, one of the half dozen or so Ethiopian restaurants in the area.

In the afternoon, Ethiopian dissident journalists pass their exile by chewing miraa and discussing the day's news. At night, the neighborhood lights up with bars and dance parties. I watched most of the 2006 World Cup on a large outdoor screen at Capital Pub, across the neighborhood from Ethiopian Village. At the time I lived in the neighborhood and took most of my meals at one of the down-market, though equally delicious, Ethiopian restaurants (which I review here). Kabalagala is where I wrote my first blog post.

According to a dear friend from The Fletcher School who was watching the game last night at Ethiopian Village (she thankfully survived unscathed), the bomb went off near the front of the crowd. Many there thought the disruption was some sort of electrical fire or technical difficult, not for a moment expecting a strike like this is the heart of Uganda's sleepy capital.

We are reminded, at moments like these, that we live in a tough neighborhood. The exciting and comfortable capitals are not as far as we think from the ungoverned spaces in the Horn of Africa. Indeed, they are too close for comfort to East Africa's own weakly governed regions (eastern DRC, southern Sudan, northern Uganda), where inter-related long wars have led too often led to voiceless suffering. I join those in the region who pray that the tragedy in Kampala is not a harbinger of things to come.

Correction: an earlier version placed Ethiopian Village on the other side of Kabalagala. Sorry.

Welcome to Apps 4 Africa!

2010-06-30T15:38:00.005-05:00

If you've spent time around the technology scene in East Africa over the last few years, chances are you've recognized that there is something special happening. Programmers, graphic designers and bloggers are creating new applications, content and the voices of a new generation of East Africans.

On behalf of the U.S. Department of State, the *iHub_, Appfrica Labs, and SODNET, we welcome your participation in Apps 4 Africa (@apps4africa) a competition that celebrates the idea that the energy, optimism and technical acumen of East Africa's technology community can help change the way we solve big social problems, amplify the voice of marginalized communities, and lower the barriers to public participation in the region.

From July 1st to August 31st, we welcome citizens to submit ideas that technology can help solve, and challenge technologists to build tools that lead to a better world. The top applications will receive cash, cool gadgets, and the chance to hob-nob with our judges panel of technology and civil society luminaries. Today, we are particularly pleased to have Under-Secretary of State Judith McHale and U.S. Ambassador Michael Rannenberger join a group of civil society leaders and civic-minded technologist to launch the contest at the *iHub_ in Nairobi.

This is only the beginning. Over the duration of the contest, we will host events around the region that address a variety of technology platforms and activist themes. We'll also be encouraging collaboration between mentors from around the world and coders in the region. Whether you are a citizen, civil society leader or technologist of any kind, we hope you will join us in the Apps 4 Africa challenge!

Thanks!

cross-posted from the Apps 4 Africa blog.

Kibera's Most Detailed Security Map

2010-06-28T02:02:00.011-05:00

link to detailed pdf version here

Over at Map Kibera, we are building out a dynamic website and report with the findings from the project thus far. As a sneak peak, this is what we believe to be the most detailed child protection, public safety, or girls vulnerability map of Kibera ever produced by and for the community.

As you look at the detailed map here, keep in mind that nearly every map of Kibera we've seen is simply satellite imagery, which doesn't give much insight into what is under the sheet metal roofs. There is an indisputable cost, quality and ethical advantage to community-driven mapping using consumer-grade GPS and an open-source software stack. This map was created using a two-step process, which involved data collection by 13 Kiberan mappers and community meetings with larger groups of young people. The methodology is detailed here.

In this map we've layered existing safe spaces and night lights atop bars and 'black spots' where young people should avoid. We've also paraphrased some of the most common points made by girls and young women who participated in our community map consultations. More detailed quotes and narratives will be available online in the near future.

This is only the start. Our main girls group partner, Binti Pamoja, was visibly excited to receive this map, and they will immediately put it to use for (i) planning new safe spaces; and (ii) using as a teaching tool about safety when girls meet in existing safe spaces.

Many, many thanks goes out to Primoz Kovacic, our volunteer Slovenian GIS expert, who donated quite a bit of his (very expensive) time to make this professional grade map!

What Open Data Means to Marginalized Communities

2010-04-14T01:49:00.003-05:00

via newbeatphoto's stream

Two symbols of this era of open data are President Obama's Open Governance Initiative, a directive that has led agencies to post their results online and open up data sets, and Ushahidi, a tool for crowdsourcing crisis information. While these tools are bringing openness to governance and crisis response respectively, I believe we have yet to find a good answer to the question: what does open data means for the long-term social and economic development of poor and marginalized communities?

I came to Nairobi on a hunch. The hunch was that a small digital mapping experiment taking place in the Kibera slum would matter deeply, both for Kiberans who want to improve their community, and for practitioners keen to use technology to bring the voiceless into a conversation about how resources are allocated on their behalf.

So far I haven't been disappointed. Map Kibera, an effort to create the first publicly available map of Kibera, is the brainchild of Mikel Maron, a technologist and Open Street Map founder, and Erica Hagen, a new media and development expert, and is driven by a group of 13 intrepid mappers from the Kibera community. In partnership with SODNET (an incredible local technology for social change group), Phase I was the creation of the initial map layer on Open Street Map (see Mikel's recent presentation at Where 2.0). Phase II, with the generous support of UNICEF, will focus on making the map useful for even the most marginalized groups, particularly young girls and young women, within the Kibera community.

What we have in mind is quite simple: add massive amounts of data to the map around 3 categories (health services, public safety/vulnerability and informal education) then experiment with ways to increase awareness and the ability to advocate for better service provision. The resulting toolbox, which will involve no tech (drawing on printed maps), and tech (SMS reporting, Ushahidi and new media creation) will help us collectively answer questions about how open data itself, and the narration of such data through citizen media and face-to-face conversations, can help even the most marginalized transform their communities.

We hope the methodology we develop, which will be captured on our wiki, can be incorporated into other communities around Kenya, and to places like Haiti, where it is critical to enable Haitians to own their own vision of a renewed nation.

cross-posted to the Map Kibera blog.

What's Keeping Africa's Craigslists from Scaling?

2010-03-13T12:02:00.025-05:00

From what I can tell, the dearth of East African craigslists (Google Trader in Uganda; N-Soko and others in Kenya) have not yet gone to scale, and few are utilized outside of capitals (I remember Google Trader having more SUVs than matoke listed).

Is it simply a matter of time before this applications reach scale, or is there a deeper structural problem? Perhaps some insight can be gleaned from the research described in Fletcher School economist Jenny Aker's Boston Review piece 'Africa Calling'.

Professor Aker writes about how mobile technology profoundly changed the Nigerien millet market:

In Niger, millet, a household staple, is sold via traditional markets scattered throughout the country. Some markets are more than a thousand kilometers away from others with which they trade. The rollout of mobile phone coverage reduced grain price differences across markets by 15 percent between 2001 and 2007, with a greater impact on markets isolated by distance and poor-quality roads. Mobile phones allowed traders to better respond to surpluses and shortages, thereby allocating rains more efficiently across markets and dampening price differences. Mobile phone coverage also increased traders’ profits and decreased the volatility
of prices over the course of the year.

While this is striking evidence for the economic utility of mobile phones, its notable that this is a story about vendors not consumers. To imagine what a similar transition might look like for the average wananchi, I thought back to last May, when I sat at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies, listening to a Googler talking about a vision of a more connected Africa. The vision involved individual consumers in rural villages, using mobiles, connecting with traders in surrounding villages to get the cheapest price for commodities, paying for them over the phone, and having the goods delivered.

Am I impatient or is there a deeper structural challenge keeping such a vision from reality? Is it a verification and trust issue (should M-Pesa users have ratings? should there be mobile-based escrow accounts? Is there some sort of credit card equivalent?), an application issue, a behavioral change issue or an SMS pricing issue? Something to ponder.

Saturday Links 2.27.10

2010-02-27T09:20:00.002-05:00

via Meg Rorison's photostream

In Washington, ICT Works writes about the ePayments puzzle in Africa. I'm exploring how law, code and trusted intermediaries can perhaps help mitigate this problem. More soon.

in Port au Prince, IEEE Spectrum interviews a leading Haitian engineer on why Haiti's cellphone network failed.

In Nairobi, Business Day reports that Kenya may cut 3G licenses to help smaller mobile providers compete better.

The Imagery of Universal Justice

2009-12-08T13:38:00.003-05:00

In The Atlantic, Adam Hochschild has a great piece on the story of Thomas Lubanga, a former DRC warlord who is the first ICC defendant to face a proper trial. When the ICC outreach team visited Bunia, the town in eastern DRC that has been ravaged by war, they realized that the scales of universal justice are quite similar to another set of scales more commonly seen in a town known for its gold deposits.

Nicolas Kuyaku, the cheerful, energetic Congolese who runs the ICC’s “outreach” office in Bunia, begins today’s session by showing 20 minutes of videos sent from The Hague. We see a brightly lit courtroom full of some two dozen people: solemn judges and lawyers in black robes and white jabots, an impassive Lubanga in a suit and tie in the dock, witnesses who testify about his use of child soldiers, plus a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and—an ICC feature loosely modeled after some European justice systems—a lawyer making statements on behalf of a group of victims. Something that must mystify the audience is the court’s logo, almost always in the upper right-hand corner of the TV screen: the scales of justice. To anyone in Ituri, they look like the small, handheld scales found in thousands of shops here that weigh little flecks of gold laboriously gathered from riverbanks by miners—a job some of those here today say they’ve done.

Mobile Web East Africa

2009-12-07T09:23:00.004-05:00

Mobile Web East Africa is a very cool conference taking place in Nairobi of Feb. 3-4. The event focuses on "harnessing the potential of the internet and applications on mobile devices," and could not come at a better time. The faster connectivity associated with the launch of the SEACOM cable is reaching Kampala and Nairobi, and the price point of new and smaller mobile devices is falling.

The conference has several key themes. To me, the most interesting questions relate to how consumers will experience the mobile web in East Africa, and what this will mean for social and economic innovation. For example:

What handsets, standards, networks and designs will allow consumers to successfully access the content and consume it?
How will the consumer be able to discover that content – through a portal, application, browser, search engine, advert, social network?

There are some fantastic speakers lined up, including Eric Cantor of Grameen Foundation, Vincent Maher of Vodacom South Africa, Agosto Liko of Pesapal, Jon Gosier of Appfrica Labs and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi.

The organizers are still looking for more attendees from the Tanzanian and Rwandan tech industries, so if you know folks who are interested, please send along this link. More information registration and attendance is here.

Mobile Phones and Customary Law in Afghanistan

2009-11-23T08:49:00.008-05:00

I 2006, I was working for USAID in northern Uganda as the 20 year conflict in the region was winding down. While negotiators in Juba were sorting out a lasting peace, our group was convening community leaders from the various regions to discuss tricky disputes around issues like land re-settlement and water supply. This was challenging because northern Uganda is a vast place, and getting leaders from disparate regions together was a logistical nightmare.

Can mobile phones make meaningful dispute resolution more efficient? Paypal's Mobile Phone Jirga, a project supporting the rule of law in Afghanistan, seems to think so.

The M-Jirga

View more presentations from Colin Rule.

I'm fascinated by this attempt to build process and code around customary law. The complainant initiates a jirga by recording a voice message, which is delivered to the respondent, who records his own rebuttal. Both arguments are delivered to the jirga elder panel, who hears the case, records their response, and delivers it back to the parties via mobile phone. I'm very curious to hear how this long standing Afghan tradition adapts to this experiment.

HT: Jessica Heinzelman

Feedback Loops, A Neuro-Scientist and western Kenya

2009-11-10T08:12:00.007-05:00

This summer in Kampala, in between hazardously driving a Benz and awkwardly singing Kenny Rogers with the vice president of Kenya, I had an amazing opportunity to research and co-author a paper with nuero-scientist cum philanthropy feedback loop expert Marc Maxson. Marc is manager of performance analytics at Global Giving, one of the most important 'start-ups' in the marketplace for aid. In his spare time, he does things like write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

To better understand feedback loops, we each visited Kisumu, in western Kenya, to hang out with SACRENA, a project that received both traditional feedback [external expert evaluator] and more informal, experimental, web and mobile mediated feedback loops [Global Giving visitor postcards, direct email links between project beneficiaries and funders].

The resulting paper, “Real-time technology aided feedback loops in international philanthropy” was delivered at the International Social Innovation Research Conference at Oxford by Mari Kuraishi, GlobalGiving’s president. The paper is an early step in exploring some of the qualitative differences in the two types of feedback. The next exciting step is to pilot new and better forms of feedback loops between donors and beneficiaries.

Thursday Links 11.5.09

2009-11-05T07:43:00.005-05:00

BikeStationDC, a stunning new facility at Union Station in DC, via BrooklynByBike

In Capetown, Kevin Donovan applies lessons from the U.S. net neutrality struggle to the Africa digital technology eco-system. I'm embarrassed that I only came across Kevin's blog a few weeks ago!

In Cambridge, John Clippinger and Oliver Goodenough discuss the legal, biological and cultural basis for Berkman's Law Lab.

In Portland, EcoVelo, easily the most beautiful bike blog, hosts an endless summer photo contest.

Also in Capetown, ITNews reports on coming explosion of the mobile content and apps market in the lead up to the World Cup.

Foreign Aid | From Planning to Markets and Networks

2009-11-04T13:51:00.004-05:00

The practical work of moving foreign aid away from the planning and towards markets and networks is only in its infancy. In his fantastic Center for Global Development paper on Markets and Networks for Better Aid, Owen Barder provides a vision of what a marketplace and network for aid would begin to look like. The most interesting challenge to me is finding a replacement for price in the market metaphor. Owen seems to agree:

...there is no obvious analogue to price. Markets work by simplifying large amounts of information about preferences, costs, and effectiveness into a simple, transparent price signal. In the aid system, there are rarely explicit measures of the price of each output which would provide signals to producers and consumers.

Improving the feedback loop between donors, project managers and aid recipients is the best way to create a proxy for price in aid projects. My friend and Fletcher colleague Chrissy Martin has a great piece about how groups are experimenting with informal, SMS-based feedback tools. In Put Up a Billboard and Ask the Community: Using Mobile Tech for Program Monitoring and Evaluation, Chrissy explores the experience of RapidSMS in Malawi, Global Giving and Twaweza in Tanzania, each testing SMS-based feedback mechanisms on various scales and in very different settings. The goal, she writes, is that "mobile technology can be integrated into M&E systems so that they are more participatory, useful, and cost effective."

The time-lag question seems interesting. There is an argument for using feedback mechanism(like on the billboard) to develop priorities before aid is distributed, but also in the aftermath of aid, in a more targeted attempt to evaluate a particular intervention.

Coded in Country | Stoking Local Innovation

2009-10-27T10:23:00.005-05:00

Can institutions [be they international organizations, companies, universities, foundations or governments] enable innovation in local technology industries? We explored this question on a rainy Saturday afternoon in New York at the 'coded in country' session of the Open Mobile Consortium's Open Mobile Camp in New York.

The challenge of 'coded in country' -- how to get more coders in the developing world working on mobile projects -- is in many ways a helpful proxy for thinking about the larger question above. In an energetic discussion, we developed something of an incomplete typology for developing the capacity of local programmers, each with its advantages and drawbacks.

Partner with Local Universities
Lucky Gunasekara of FrontlineSMS:Medic and Stanford University pointed to Nathan Eagle's Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles project that partners with African mobile engineering department to strengthen capacity. challenge: ensure knowledge reaches beyond university-educated classes.

Break Down Barriers with Local Tech Industry
Chrissy Martin of the Fletcher School mentioned that in Tanzania, the most inspired, engaged, and talented programmers all worked at value added services companies. These are companies that charge premium rates for sending and recieving sports scores, concert tips and other local cultural content. Chrissy argued that there should be more cross-pollination between private sector talent and those working on M4D projects. challenge: find an incentive for private sector programmers to engage.

Convince Donors to Adopt a 'Coded in Country' Standard
Similar to a fair trade stamp of approval, what if the Gates Foundation declared that any development project with a coding element must be 50% coded in-country. To be sure, some projects already feel a need to hire local developers. Stephen Miller of the Ujima Project | Investigative Reporting for Africa, discussed how the group hired Appfrica Labs to do the coding for the project. challenge: in places where local capacity is not established, balance project goals with local capacity building.

Give Space for Informal Innovation Labs
Christelle Scharff, professor of computer science at Pace University, discussed the mobile development boot-camps she runs in Senegal. The goal is to create space and an incentive for young people to spend a week intensely tinkering with mobile solutions to community problems. This is a similar approach to Appfrica Labs 10,000 Hours project, which urges companies in Kampala to open their space to young people interested in digital technologies. challenge: ensure that peer-education ensures learning of fundamental skills.

FairMobile | An African Telecom Research Agenda

2009-10-26T13:59:00.005-05:00

Over at Many Possibilities, Steve Song just introduced the idea of a Fair Mobile Index: a measurement, akin to the Economist's Big Mac Index, of what mobile pricing regimes mean both for the average African user and mobile innovators who benefit from a generative market.

Steve writes:

Evidence from the pan-African research network, ResearchICTAfrica, points to a remarkably high percentage of income being spent by the poor on mobile services. For low income earners across 17 countries studied, the average African is paying more than 50% of their disposable income on mobile services.

At the same time, mobile operators are posting impressive profits. Kenyan operator Safaricom generated over 900 million USD in revenue last year of which a staggering 40% was Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization ( EBITDA). Other operators are also posting impressive profits with most operators on the continent announcing year on year increases in revenue.

The startling contrast between the remarkable benefits of mobile infrastructure and the high price being paid for mobile services in Africa while mobile operators post record profits leads to the conclusion that more competitive mobile markets in Africa would lead to even greater social and economic benefit for all but especially the poor.

I'm incredibly excited to follow, and hopefully to contribute to, the FairMobile research agenda. The editor of my Venture Beat article on Africa's SMS Crisis cut a critical passage that alludes to the frustrations I felt amongst innovators while I was working in Uganda:

These [innovative mobile] services, however, represent a trickle of innovation where there should be a downpour. The source of this sluggishness is the “non-generative” structure of mobile phone networks. In The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain defines generativity as the ability for entrepreneurs anywhere, driven by any social or economic motivation, to quickly and cheaply create, test and deploy applications. Zittrain says that generativity is the key to the Internet’s rapid growth, and he worries that new web-based appliances, such as the iPhone, that can only be modified with the manufacturers consent, threaten this fundamental character. In other words, Zittrain fears that the Internet as a network is becoming more like the mobile phone: costly and closed.

Thursday Links 10.22.09

2009-10-22T07:58:00.004-05:00

Pigeon Sun, via Meg Rorison's photostream

In route to Geneva, Patrick Meier puts the wraps on the International Crisis on Conflict Mapping, an event that sounded exemplary in both content and structure.

In Conakry, Global Voices explores blogger reactions to reports that on Sept. 28th, 150 opposition party members were massacred by government soldiers while gathering in a football stadium to protest the Gamara government.

In Washington, the Google Public Policy blog reports that 'innovation without permission' is at stake today as the FCC discusses net neutrality.

In Geneva, the ITU approves a single phone charger standard! oh lord yes!

Harnessing the Power of Mobile 'Beeping'

2009-10-21T10:25:00.008-05:00

Parallel to my thinking about the prohibitive pricing of SMS in Africa [see my recent piece in Venture Beat], I've been thinking a lot about how to harness the pervasive and utterly free practice of 'beeping' [which takes place when a user places a call and quickly hanging up in order to send an (often) pre-arranged signal to another user such as 'come meet me now' or 'call me back'].

I'm curious to explore how 'beeping' can be used to collect information and serve as a platform for mobile services? Here are two good ideas.

'Beeping' as Instant Feedback and Poll-Taking
Imagine you are in Pader, one of the major towns in northern Uganda. During a drought, your community receives food aid in six different locations from six different donor agencies. As you walk into town, you see a billboard that asks: which of these six locations serves you best? Each location is tied to a mobile number. To vote, you just beep the appropriate number, and the votes are tallied by a simple piece of software on a computer attached to the six different phones. [the software would check for repeat numbers, ect] The same system could be used for conducting local elections.

'Beeping' as Coded Messages
Last night, I was re-watching Ashifi Gogo's talk earlier this year on GSM Networks at the Berkman Center. In his discussion of how asymmetric encryption is leveraged for his brilliant m-Pedigree project, he mentions that the next generation of such services may involve 'beeping.' For example, imagine you are planning your drive to work across central Accra in the morning and you wonder how much traffic is on the road. Gogo asks what if there was a short-code you could beep, and get a coded beep in response- one beep means the road is free of traffic; two beeps mean you better walk.

There is an open question as to whether mobile networks would actively push back on a high-profile 'beeping' project because it leverages their networks for free. It is important to note, however, tha most networks could probably handle over a million 'beeps' without significant use of their capacity.

The platform itself seems like something both development practitioners and entrepreneurs should be intensely interested in. What other 'beeping' innovations are possible?

Appfrica Labs Launches 10,000 Hours Initiative

2009-10-20T13:44:00.003-05:00

In college, when my thinking about communities first began to mature, I noticed the obvious discrepancy in Washington D.C. between the political elite who occupied a significant part of the northwest section of town, and remainder of the denizens, whose lower and lower-middle class communities lacked access to things like hospitals and super-markets. Since then, I've been a fan of community projects that put young people from communities with few resources in a new setting with a new vocabulary and a fresh take on the world. These shifts often provide the spark for new passions and new ideas to take home and expand.

For this reason, I'm excited about Appfrica Labs's new 10,000 Hours Initiative, described by Jon Gosier here:

Appfrica’s 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.

[...] 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.

I find this to be a remarkably creative act of sharing, and one that can be highly successful with few resources other than a willingness to be occasionally generous with ones time.

10.15.09 Thursday Links

2009-10-15T07:59:00.003-05:00

new orleans cyanotype, via meg rorison's photostream

In Porto, El Oso predicts that next to our digital malls like Amazon, "an artisan internet emerge around open standards like OpenID...led by digital natives yearning to express their individuality in a world of indistinguishable mass-manufacturing."

In Johannesburg, Rick Jourbert's presentation explores the trends of mobile web access in South Africa. He notes that only over 10 million South African's have accessed the web via mobile, and only 30% have access by means other than their phones.

In New York, Jan Chipchase stops by and takes notes at Clay Shirky's NYU course Design for UNICEF.

In the Kolda Region (southern Senegal), folks at the Jokko Initiative blog about the hard, experimental work of deploying a mobile social network to a class of women in a rural village.

Is Kindle the New Voice of America?

2009-10-14T08:11:00.001-05:00

In High Tech Diplomacy (Newsweek) Evgeny Morozov writes that Silicon Valley tech firms could be a good conduit for public diplomacy.

Distributing Kindles to the four corners of the world would not only be a good gesture from Amazon, it would also help promote free speech. Kindle could end an era when visiting foreigners have to smuggle samizdat books in and out of authoritarian countries. It is a dream device for dissidents, all for $299.

In 1963 Voice of America, the primary public diplomacy arm of the U.S. Department of State, translated and broadcast Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream Speech' behind the Iron Curtain, giving many people access to one of the most vivid narratives of the promise of democracy. However, American diplomats, and their counter-parts overseas, have yet to get public diplomacy right in a digital age.

Towards the end of the Bush era, a small amount of State money went towards studying the effect of Internet on democracy, including mapping of the blogospheres in repressive regimes like Iran and presenting narratives of moments when the Internet proved important for democracy. While this continues to yield a great deal of knowledge, its unclear that US government involvement in creating and distributing knowledge in repressive regimes will be effective. Cheap hardware could be part of the answer.

Technology is Easy, Community is Hard

2009-10-09T09:36:00.011-05:00

the view from downtown Salzburg, Austria

Sometimes conferences get in the way. Other times, especially when one is wrestling with an idea in progress, they can inspire. This week, the Salzburg Global Seminar, on new media in the developing world, held on a gorgeous lake at the foot of the Dolomites, was certainly the latter.

I've been wrestling with the question of where development institutions (widely construed) fit in the new media landscape in the developing world. I'm passionate about, and deeply involved, with the development of local technology industries in Africa. However, unlike many in this community, I do not feel the need to will away an international aid community that is working and succeeding on hard problems [to take just one example, how mobiles can become a tool that helps health workers in northern Zambia lower the death rate of babies born with HIV] that local tech industry can not yet serve. In fact, in the short to medium term future, these international institutions will continue to be the main client base for local tech.

One thought that I continue to ponder came from David Sasaki, Director of Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online.

Technology is Easy, Community is Hard
Too many projects focus explicitly on technology training, when in reality the technical skills necessary to create media, such as posting on a blog, become easier every day. Instead, these projects should focus on the difficult challenge of creating a lasting community of young people who are passionate about telling stories about their community and willing to experiment with new media tools.

Frequently, there are many individuals who care about community issues and are curious about technology, but lack a venue to come together and share both their story telling and technology skills. Media development projects can play this role. I believe they can provide 'scholarships' for ensuring that promising young people from dis-advantaged backgrounds have access to this community and the ideas that come out of it.

Africa's SMS Crisis- And How To Stop It

2009-09-25T11:21:00.002-05:00

An article I wrote this summer appears today on Venture Beat:

It would be easy to conclude that Africa is entering the golden age of mobile innovation. In Kenya, mPesa, a Safaricom service, allows users to send money anywhere in the country via mobile phone at very low rates. Next door in Uganda, rural users out of reach of the Internet can use a new SMS-based service from MTN, Grameen Foundation and Google to trade goods, search the Internet and query local reproductive health and agriculture information.

These services, however, represent a trickle of innovation where there should be a downpour. The source of this sluggishness is the structure of African mobile phone networks, which discourage entrepreneurs from quickly and cheaply creating, testing and deploying applications.

[read more...]

From the Fisherman to the Cloud

2009-09-21T12:25:00.006-05:00

I just moved to a fourth floor walk up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and started a job with the UNICEF Innovations group. The group aims to leverage affordable hardware and open source software to both improve UNICEF's operations (they purchase over 1/2 of the world's vaccines) and empower young people. For me, this is a fantastic opportunity to explore both big intellectual questions (To what extent can large institutions learn from the African Digerati?) as well as fun practical questions (What is the best way to ensure that youth in Africa can participate in UNICEF campaigns with only Nokia 1100 phones).

Also, I have the pleasure of helping to moderate a HUGE event on Wednesday at the Berkman Center. Yochai Benkler, Amartya Sen, amongst others, are participating in Communication and Human Development: The Freedom Connection?, a discussion on the future of the overlap between digital technology and economic and social growth in the developing world.

Amongst the great essays written for the Public Project in anticipation for this event, Benkler, with his usual alactrity, gets to the bottom of things:

If the first generation of benefits of ICTs for development was captured by the image of fishermen calling different ports and negotiating the price of fish before they pulled in to port, so as to capture greater returns for their families, the next generation has to be similar deployment of the much more flexible and dynamic affordances of more powerful computational devices, cloud applications, and social software or organizational tools.

Benkler recognizes this is not easy in the developing world setting, and goes on to present a clear dichotomy for action: either force the mobile networks to be more open, or figure out how to make more sophisticated technology more widely useful and available.

As the community focused on the use of digital technology in the developing world continues to focus on SMS as the killer-app, Benkler's view that SMS won't bring the advantages of the information economy to the poor is important to consider. I'm looking forward to a path-breaking conversation on Wednesday.

Telecom Providers Less Than Thrilled About SEACOM

2009-07-31T02:25:00.004-05:00

About to run to the airport to take that sweet, sweet direct Air Uganda flight to Zanzibar, but couldn't resist blogging my friend Joe Powell's recent piece in The Independent. Its simply an intrepid piece of journalism, helping us answer questions about how 'open access' SEACOM actually is. In my interview with SEACOM executives, they maintained that wholesale prices would be identical for Infocom and other providers. Joe's piece shows that the feeling in the telecom industry is that this is simply not the case.

Is Infocom's control of the SEACOM cable in Uganda fair?

Infocom's grip over Uganda's use of SEACOM cable is further strengthened as they have been appointed the hub provider for the country, what is known as the 'backhold provider'. This means that companies seeking to buy bandwidth will have to negotiate with Infocom, currently the only company to have a contract with SEACOM.

What thinks the competition?

Infocom has been fortunate that rivals such as MTN and UTL have invested in an alternative submarine cable EASSY, which is running behind schedule and will not go live for at least a year. Both MTN and UTL have a superior fibre and copper network countrywide buy without a deal with SEACOM are in danger of being left behind..

The third submarine cable, TEAMS, has docked at Mombasa and is now undergoing final testing. TEAMS has significant investment from the Kenyan government. Sources have confirmed that telecom companies in Uganda are now scrambling to buy bandwidth from SEACOM and TEAMS directly, with one senior executive telling The Independent anonymously that there is no way they would tolerate working through Infocom.

summer east africa fragments

2009-07-30T01:41:00.011-05:00

move 2 years of life in boston to a basement, flight to nairobi to conference with ministry of finance, ratty nights in downtown nairobi, lions sleeping fitfully after thrashing a water buffalo in nakuru, 3AM shadows at kenya-uganda border, the emaciated face of a police office is kisumu, a full mouthful of bujagali road dust while mountain biking, tattooed, nervous looking russians playing high stakes poker, sunset glints of the nile after running 20km.

the denouement: 10 days of good books, bad swahili, fishing and photo projects in zanzibar starting tomorrow, hopefully without the tropical illness-laden haze of last time.

SEACOM | This is What 'Open Access' Looks Like!

2009-07-24T08:35:00.015-05:00

At least the way they portray it in movies, whenever my parents generation got together to protest something, they would always been a drum and chant ‘This is what democracy looks like.’ At the SEACOM fibre cable launch last week in Kampala, I wanted to stand up and chat, a geekier tech policy mantra: “This is what 'open access' looks like!"

A few years ago, when plans for east Africa's first fibre cable were being put in place, technology policy geeks of all stripes starting beating the drums of 'open access' [I join in in a piece in Princeton's Journal of International and Public Affairs], a policy framework that ensures that every ISP, anywhere, will get access to the wholesale bandwidth at the same price, ensuring more competition and ultimately more options and better service for consumers.

Judging from my interview yesterday at the yesterday's cable launch with Uganda director Fred Moturi, project manager John Mathwasa and investor Kevin Kariuki, SEACOM is bringing 'open access' to Africa for the first time. What does SEACOM's version of open access look like in practice? I'm writing a piece for Africa Business Daily, but here some of the key points:

Wholesale and Retail Cost- SEACOM sells only directly sells large tranches of bandwidth, no smaller than STN 1 [155mb], presumably mostly to network providers, who then in turn sell it both wholesale to other ISPs and directly to consumers. While we don't know the price for consumers yet, the wholesale costs come out to $150 mb/month. Assuming a 100% markup for consumers, this comes to $300 mb/month. This price makes much of Kampala's bandwidth using population giddy, considering we are currently paying $900 for 192kb/month.

The 'PoP to PoP' Model- SEACOM is committed to delivering fair prices everywhere in the network. They are partnering directly with KDN [in Kenya] and Infocom [in Uganda] to build out the land fibre. However, they are offering the same price at their point of presence (PoP) in Kigali, Kampala and Nairobi. This means that, unlike SAT-3 in West Africa, SEACOM is not competing with its customers, and further, new ISPs can emerge to deliver more connectivity to more obscure places as demand grows.

Update: I learned from a colleague last night that the picture may not be as rosy as it seems. Apparently, the other telcos are worried about a possible Infocom monopoly until the other submarine cable touch land. I'm told they are refusing to buy from Infocom and want to deal directly with SEACOM. I'm on the hunt for more information.

Kung Fu Baby and the SEACOM Cable Launch

2009-07-23T06:05:00.002-05:00

The widely known technique for watching YouTube videos in Africa is to immediately pause the video when it starts, wait 20 minutes (or much more) until the video fully loads, and then watch. Today I’m at the ceremony launching SEACOM, submarine fiber cable stretching from South Africa to Mumbai and London, passing landing stations in Maputo, Dar, and Mombasa, and in land to Kampala and Kigali.

In the corner of a conference room, Peter Moreton, a procurement manager for SEACOM, beckoned me over to a display computer with YouTube queued up. We launched Kung Fu baby and for the first time in Africa, I saw a YouTube video load completely and play in 6 seconds. We ran a speed test and showed 1.8mbps, 10x what we have in the Appfrica office.

I also had the opportunity to do an exclusive interview Fred Moturi, Uganda director for SEACOM, and a couple of major investors. We talked about what the new international infrastructure will mean for competition amongst ISPs and what the cable will mean for rural users. I can't write that right now, because I'm waiting for the launch event to start, surrounded by a bunch of tech geeks, giddy as school girls, video-skyping friends in Europe for the first time.

When People Die of Hunger

2009-07-17T03:01:00.001-05:00

The Elephant in the Room, by Banksy

Its been a dry rainy season in East Africa. Traveling last month in Kisumu, Kenya, I read about a Kenyan women who died of hunger while giving birth to surviving twins. Last week, newspapers in Uganda reported that 35 people died of hunger in northern Uganda. Ken Banks asks us about the elephant in the room of global poverty. To me, this is it.

Technology, Obama and Rural Africa

2009-07-16T10:28:00.003-05:00

Tonight, I'm participating in a podcast organized by the Peace Corps Africa Rural Connect project, on how the Obama administration can leverage digital technology to deliver social and economic gains to rural Africans. I'm going to make two points:

Let Aid Recipients Tell Donors What They Want

Technology can change the foreign assistance industry by allowing recipients, via mobile phones, to tell donors what their need on their own terms. Philanthropic groups such as Global Giving are already experimenting with linking donors and projects via an online marketplace for aid. Further, Global Giving is experimenting with mechanisms to ask recipients exactly what they need from donors. One such experiments allows people to dictate donor funds in their community via mobile phone. The new USAID coordinator should put in mechanisms that allow recipients to tell us what they need.

Convince Telecoms of ‘The Economics of Abundance’

It may seem as though we are in a golden age of mobile innovation: Google is delivering farming information to rural Ugandans via SMS and Safaricom has a low-cost mobile money transfer service for Kenyans. However, the truth is that telecom companies are holding back to a trickle what should be cascade of innovation. The typical value-added SMS (anything besides person-to-person messages) costs 10 US cents in Uganda.

This means that new innovations that would contribute to economic or social growth will not be deployed, not because of engineering challenges, but because of artificially high costs. The truth is, lower SMS prices mean both more users and revenue for network providers and more access to services for rural poor. Luckily, the [unfilled] State Department Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy position exists to lobby foreign governments and telecoms on technology policy issues like this.

driving my (temporary) benz in africa

2009-07-14T01:14:00.006-05:00

"Welcome to K'la City, where the food is delicious but the roads are shitty."

Like Chris Blattman, I also recently learned the perils of driving on Africa's mean streets. Unexpectedly, one of our Ugandan friends loaned us his Benz. As I took the keys from him, I immediately had flashbacks of turning into oncoming traffic and driving over medians: the adventures of my first day driving in America as a 16-year-old.

That night in Kampala, I had to adjust to both the perils of driving in Africa, and the challenge of orienting myself, British style, on the left side of the road. Somehow we made it home, after rocking the chassis with a few deep pot-holes and almost knocking over a cyclist with a wide load of sugar cane.

The best part about driving in Africa? When you are lost, you just ask a few children playing on the side of the road for directions, and they will jump in the back of the car and drive with you there.

Dreams of His Father

2009-07-13T02:15:00.002-05:00

A president's first trip to Africa:

So I believe that this moment is just as promising for Ghana - and for Africa - as the moment when my father came of age and new nations were being born. This is a new moment of promise. Only this time, we have learned that it will not be giants like Nkrumah and Kenyatta who will determine Africa's future. Instead, it will be you - the men and women in Ghana's Parliament, and the people you represent. Above all, it will be the young people - brimming with talent and energy and hope - who can claim the future that so many in my father's generation never found.

A speech full of rousing rhetoric, unique in the directness of its call to hold African leaders responsible. Yet the mechanics of Obama's policy in Africa: USAID director and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, have yet to be put into place.

Why Bandwidth Prices Won't Fall Too Fast in Africa

2009-07-10T02:23:00.003-05:00

Engineering News reports on the SEACOM submarine fibre cable:

The increase in pirate activity during April and May 2009, in terms of intensity and geographical coverage, has necessitated a change in undersea cable system Seacom’s cable installation plans, which has  resulted in a delay in the ready-for-service date from June 27, 2009 to July 23, 2009.

Its hard to tell how much bandwidth prices will drop in East Africa with the arrival of the SEACOM. However, this article points to a more general problem: reliability. How often will outages occur, either due to cable cuts or other problems? Since no one knows the answer to this question, most ISPs will have to maintain their costly satellite connections (at least as back up) until the reliability question is answered.

Steve Song on the Philippines, SMS Pricing and the Economics of Abundance

2009-07-07T03:21:00.007-05:00

Last week I asked what arguments would convince network providers in East Africa to stop fixing SMS prices artificially high. Steve Song answered with the 'economics of abundance' argument, where carriers earn more by having more users at lower costs. This is a familiarand powerful argument in the telecom policy world. Steve explains how the argument worked in Phillipines, resulting in 1 cent SMSs (the global average is 10 cents):

Regarding what sort of pressure it would take to get operators to voluntarily drop their SMS rates, I think they need to be convinced of the economics of abundance. They need to believe that if they halved their SMS rates, that their SMS traffic would more than double. I have given the example of the Philippines where they send roughly a billion SMSes a day as compared to roughly 25 thousand per day sent in South Africa. The cost of an SMS in the Philippines is less than 1 US cent as compared to 7.5 US cents in South Africa. If you double South Africa's population (and resulting SMS revenue) to roughly match the Philippines, they are still generating more than 3 times the revenue at less than 1/7th of the price.

Amassing evidence that lower pricing leads to more revenue is the first step. The second step is finding someone in the Kenyan or Ugandan telecom sector with the gravitas and positioning to make the argument to the network providers

I'm an Appfrica Labs Fellow!

2009-07-07T02:36:00.002-05:00

Just over a month ago, when I arrived in Kampala via bus from Nairobi, I immediately started spending time with Jon Gosier, founder of Appfrica Labs, a for-profit incubator and software development firm in Kampala. Sensing that this fantastic company was growing both its bottom line and its international prestige (Jon was just named a TED Fellow), I immediately agreed when Jon offered me an opportunity to work on business development.

This week, we finally announced that I will spending the rest of the summer (at least) as an Appfrica Labs Fellow. I'll mostly be working on status.ug, a internet-mobile social network portal for Uganda (more on this soon).

Why Appfrica Labs? Since I left Uganda close to three years ago, both my research and private sector work has mainly been around two connected questions: What is the effect of digital technology on society; and, what communications policies will best promote innovation and growth in emerging market technology sectors-- both with a regional focus on Africa.

Appfrica Labs gives me a perspective on these questions from one of the leading innovators in East Africa. Not to mention, after meeting the amazing Ugandan developers that Jon works with [check out the great list of ongoing projects], I'm confident that he has the right business model to succeed. I'm happy to be on board!

Should Governments Force Providers to Lower SMS Prices?

2009-07-03T05:00:00.006-05:00

Earlier this week, Google, Grameen Foundation and MTN Uganda launched a premium SMS service aimed at delivering health tips and critical agriculture tips to the poor. A debate erupted when it was mistakenly thought that MTN was charging users 220UGX to use this service.

nota bene: In Uganda, sending a person-to-person SMS costs 110UGX. Sending a premium SMS (primarily when businesses target potential customers) costs at least 220UGX.

When it was clarified that the service costs only 110Ugx, the debate turned to whether network providers are fixing prices artificially high, and if so, whether the government should set a price ceiling in order to both stimulate innovation and lower the prices for the poor.

Two thoughts:

(i) This is the lowest price ever for a premium SMS service in Uganda.

I was talking about this debate to a director of one of most prominent software companies in Uganda. He reminded me that this is the first time in the industry's history that a premium service has gone for less than 220UGX. This is a good first step, but most likely not a deal that anyone besides Google could get immediately. Many of the premium SMS services [usually targeting the rich] are adding their own fee (usually around 60UGX) onto the 220UGX base and making a killing

(ii) What kind of pressure would it take to get network providers to lower SMS rates voluntarily?

In Uganda, the best things are done without government intervention. Think about how amazing it is that an NGO, an Internet company and mobile company got together to launch this program without government intervention (contra programs run by, say, USAID or UNDP). Often when the public pressures an industry to reform, the industry comes together to create voluntary restrictions. This recently happened when the Internet industry came under fire for violating human rights in China. Is this concievable with the mobile industry in Uganda? If so, it would have to start with pressure from companies that are innovating in the SMS information space.

I'm Back!

2009-06-24T23:37:00.010-05:00

A few weeks ago, I made my way from Nairobi to Kampala, stopping to see a family of lions sleeping soundly after ravaging a water buffalo on the banks of Lake Nakuru. When I arrived in K'la, I wasn't sure how long I'd stay or what I would do. Some interesting work has come about. More details soon, but here are the themes: (i) the Africa internet infrastructure; (ii) mobile software; and (iii) internet & democracy. And, of course, the latest news from these three fronts.

In London, the Economist covers SEACOM, the first submarine fibre cable to be lit in East Africa, raising the hopes of cheap and fast internet across the region.

In Boston, my colleagues at the Berkman Center write in a WaPo op-ed on the limits of reading Twitter in Tehran.

In Orlando, Hash writes about the keys to running a successful mobile social networks.

M-Banking Progress in Kenya

2009-06-14T08:22:00.005-05:00

It's not every day that you put on a conference [in Africa or anywhere else] and see immediate results. Last month, I help organize in Nairobi, along with my colleagues from The Fletcher School and the Central Bank of Kenya, the M-Banking 2009: Balancing Innovation and Regulation. The idea behind the event was to get banking regulators, network providers and bankers in the same room to talk about how mobile phones can be leveraged to bring more access to banking services to more people.

Last week, Finance Minister and Deputy PM Uhuru Kenyatta, who opened our conference, published a bill to allow branchless banking and open the door to more appropriate mobile banking regulation. Today's Sunday Nation (Kenya) reports:

Mr Kenyatta noted that despite of the progress the country had made in the banking, many Kenyans remain unbanked due to deposit-taking institutions’ limited reach. “ In this regard, I propose to amend the Banking Act to allow banks to extend their footprint through agencies with wide distribution networks,” he said. Recent innovations like mobile telephony firms Safaricom and Zain’s M-Pesa and Zap have deepened the banking services while expanding the outreach to the previously unbanked population.

However, the expansion of the services have been held back by the lack of a legal and regulatory framework to monitor and arrest crimes like money laundering and terrorism. Players in the banking sector last month held an international conference in a bid to draw experiences and expertise from the various parts of the world in order to craft relevant laws.

It feels good when conferences help lead to useful outcomes.

Kenny Rogers, Kenya's VP and Me

2009-05-26T01:53:00.006-05:00

The Scene:
Kenya School of Monetary Studies, Central Bank of Kenya, Nairobi
Candle Lit Dinner by the Pool

At the Table:
Kalonzo Musyoka, Vice President of Kenya
Njuguna S. Ndung'u, Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya
Professor Kim Wilson, The Fletcher School
Your Humble Blogger

Professor Wilson, turning to the VP: "Your Excellency. I'm doing some work on the effect of gambling on poverty in Haiti. Is gambling amongst the poor a big problem in Kenya?"

VP: "Do you know Kenny Rogers?"

Professor Wilson: "Yes, I do."

VP: "As Bwana Rogers says, 'You've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run.."

Me: "Your Excellency, it turns out I sang that very song at a karaoke bar in your country only two nights ago."

VP looks me, pauses, : "...you never count your money, when you're sitting at the table, there will be time enough for counting, when the dealings done.

Timidly at first, then with rising cadence, the I join the VP in song: "Every gambler knows, the secret to survival, is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep, because every hands a winner and every hands a loser, and the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

Later in the evening, in his public remarks broadcast on national television, the VP remarked on the intelligent conversation he had had with a young American and his professor.

Should the Foreign Aid Industry and the African Digerati Work Together?

2009-05-16T07:18:00.007-05:00

The foreign aid establishment and the African Digerati are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to Africa. USAID, the World Bank and other anchors of aid are consolidated, lethargic and rooted in a command economy that Breznev would be proud of. The Digerati: engineers and entrepreneurs solving problems via the medium of mobile phones and the Internet, are decentralized, innovative, energetic and generally suspect of any bureaucracy.

One line of thinking says that getting these communities to even talk to each other is a waste of time. I'm not so sure. I've made the argument that the Obama Administration should think carefully about concrete ways to leverage technology in international development.

I just wrote a short article called Searching for Innovation in Foreign Assistance in the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. Its a review of the economist Bill Easterly's most recent book, but its also a first attempt at introducing the reform minded flank of the aid industry to the dynamism and energy of the Digerati. I'll be on the hunt for anecdotes of the Digerati as I romp through Kenya and Uganda this summer.

On Blogging in the Classroom

2009-04-21T14:23:00.005-05:00

I'm leading the last session of Patrick and my Digital Democracy course tonight. To prepare, I was sifting through the fantastic set of student blog posts from throughout the semester. The diversity of topics, opinion and writing style reminded me of Andrew Sullivan's piece from November 2008 in The Atlantic. Andrew writes:

...as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that's enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral and sometimes brutal.

I think assigning blogging in college (or high school) classes helps students develop their voice, not just within the bounds of formal writing, but by encouraging the exploration of the relationship between themselves and the content they are exploring.

Here are a few excerpts from some of the students in my class. They are representative of breadth of content we discussed in the class, but perhaps more importantly, they embody the wide range of voices we all take on when blogging.

Matt writes on Nerding Out on Undersea Cables:

The fact that a huge part of Africa relies on satellite to connect to the internet completely blew my mind, and when I found that even our connection to the internet here in Boston tenuously relies on the well-being of a few bottleneck points I decided to do some more research into the history of the backbone of the World Wide Web.

Sam reflects on the role of the Internet in the larger activism narrative:

“Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine; I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.” Bob Dylan said that in 1965. The midpoint of an era that shook, like a withdrawn junkie, with political unrest. And to put it lightly, ain’t shit changed — just the names, faces and places….oh yeah, and now we have this thing called the internet. Once upon a time, the markings of a true activist were physical action and the robust will to stand in harm’s way; bottles broken in streets, sit-ins, Molotov cocktails and marches. Today the political landscape has changed. Concurrently, the weapons we use to fight injustice on this terrain have evolved. After all, who wants to sit in a Humvee with paper thin siding when the freedom fighters* come?

Aaron critiques the DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism:

A DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism” gives a concise overview of how to best use Facebook to achieve a successful campaign. While I believe the advice given in the guide is fairly helpful, I believe it grossly overestimates the power of digital tools for grassroots movements looking to achieve substantial reform. There are three criticisms of the guide that I have which concern accountability, sustainability, and results.

Hui discusses jailed bloggers:

jailed bloggers = violation of human rights = repressive government = INJUSTICE

The above is a primitive expression of the thought process most individuals seem to take on when the subject of jailed bloggers is broached. Yet, for me, the subject of jailed bloggers immediately brought to mind the two Singaporean bloggers who were jailed for their offensive racist remarks. Here, another formula is proposed:

jailed bloggers = due punishment for action harmful to other persons/society = enforcement of law + maintenance of civil society = JUSTICE

Why this difference? Are they mutually exclusive?

Digitally Doing Business | A Hypothetical

2009-04-15T09:54:00.008-05:00

Imagine two teams of engineering students, the first in Silicon Valley and the second in Nairobi. Each of the these teams develops an equally sophisticated and useful SMS-based mobile phone software application that will allow health clinics to create automated responses to reproductive health questions submitted to them via SMS. For example, women in the developing world who send SMSs about HIV/AIDS, pregnancy or condoms would automatically receive detailed information about these requests. They often have no other source of reliable information. Each group believe this product can be profitably marketed to health clinics and aid agencies around the developing world.

It is well understood that entrepreneurs in the developing world (the Kenyans in our example) face significant legal and institutional barriers from reaping the benefits of their good ideas. Measurements such as the World Bank Doing Business Index, as well as the management, political science and economics literatures have addressed these barriers in detail. They include, but are not limited to, the ability to secure seed capital, incorporate and legally protect a business, transfer money both domestically and across borders and efficiently and flexibly find employees well-positioned to perform. In short, much of the developing world suffers from a poor institutional ecosystem for doing business.

This post marks the start of a series of blog posts that ask the question: to what extent can new digital institutions help entrepreneurs circumvent poor institutional ecosystems and privately re-design their incentives landscape? As more of the machinations of global commerce go digital, new tools are emerging that would help the Kenyans in our example lower some of these barriers. The Digitally Doing Business series will explore new opportunities ranging from digitally registering as a US company regardless of physical location to securing previously unavailable venture funds and low-cost payments from abroad to distributing work to employees via mobile phones.

Contrarians of Philanthrocapitalism

2009-04-13T20:34:00.007-05:00

A few months ago I drafted a technology for international development proposal for the Obama Administration. This was one piece in a broader effort to get the official foreign assistance community to embrace the values of the Africa tech community: experimentation, low cost innovation, local solutions and flexibility.

This largely tracks with Matthew Bishop's notion of Philanthrocapitalism:

While hopefully some of the world's problems will be solved using for-profit business models, many will not. But that does not mean they can not be addressed in a businesslike way, in the sense of serious focus on results; understanding where to use scarce resources to have the greatest impact through leverage; a determination to quickly scale up solutions that work and a toughness in shutting down those that do not; backing entrepreneurial, innovative approaches to problems; forming partnerships with whoever will get the job done soonest and best and taking big risks in the hope of achieving outsize impact.

In the latest issue of Dissent, Alix Rule offers one critique of philanthrocapitalism from the Left that can not be ignored:

The 'sensibility of giving a damn' isn't really much to commit to; conveniently, most everyone's already committed. But mere possession of a moral pulse doesn't provide much of a basis for decision-making. Yet, when good is like money, individuals do not need coherent approaches to it any more than institutions do; there are no trade-offs or hierarchies or conflicting loyalties here, either. In place of a critical moral framework, we're furnished with a sort of cabinet of curiosities, the decontextualized contexts of which are presumably to be enjoyed as peculiarly shaped artifacts of good...Absent the semblance of context- we're ill equipped to judge.

Any marketplace for good risks being overtaken by possible oligarchs (Gates, Soros), falling prey to glossy marketing at the expense of accuracy and context (Save Darfur) or simply continuing to exclude the recipients of aid. Overcoming these dilemmas is the challenge of foreign assistance community in our time.

Net Effects in Moldova

2009-04-09T10:03:00.003-05:00

via b|zzare's photostream

One of the great things about teaching about digital democracy is that every week there is a new story about the effect of the Internet on global politics. This week was no exception. 10,000 students emerged in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau to protest the communist government. One of my favorite new blogs, Foreign Policy's Net Effect, hosted by my friend Evgeny Morozov, has a great overview of the role Twitter played in keeping the Moldova protests popular online [for a while the Twitter handle #pman, short for the biggest square in Chisinau, was listed as one of Twitter's Trending Topics].

As he notes at the start of the post, Evgeny seems to find my Berkman Center paper on the role of technology in Ukraine's Orange Revolution to suffer from a bout of cyber-optimism. This is certainly not the case. My thesis of the paper is to challenge those like Michael McFaul who argue that "the Orange Revolution may have been the first in history to be organized largely online." I argue that:

In the case of Ukraine it is evident that pro-democracy forces used the Internet and cell phones more effectively than the pro-government forces, such that in this specific time and place these technologies weighed in on the side of democracy.

The successful revolution in the Ukraine was the product of really good organizers who leveraged technology to be more effective than they would have otherwise been. A few hours after his original post, Evgeny provided a great bit of follow-up analysis by pointing out the different role that technology played this week in Moldova and those five years ago in Ukraine.

mBanking 2009: Balancing Innovation and Regulation

2009-04-02T14:27:00.004-05:00

Mobile banking in Africa has everyone's attention. Mobile companies are realizing a new revenue stream, banks furrow their brows over possible new competitors and NGOs hail a new venue for the poor to access capital. The Fletcher School's Center for Emerging Market Enterprises, along with the Central Bank of Kenya, are hosting a conference on May 25-26 in Nairobi to address how central banks and regulators should respond to the explosion of mobile banking:

“M-Banking 2009: Balancing Innovation and Regulation” conference is:

a student-led initiative that seeks to bring together more than 100 key stakeholders in the mobile banking sector—regulators, financial institutions, telecoms, customers, and mobile service entrepreneurs—in an effort to shift the dialogue around mobile banking from the risks it presents to the social benefits and business opportunities it provides. The conference will focus on the identification of tangible m-banking policies that strike a balance between increasing access for the underserved and controlling misuse of these new systems. The current nature of the m-banking sector and potential future developments will be explored.

The announcement of this conference also marks a new focus on mobile finance on this blog. In the coming week or so, I'll be writing about the best ideas in both the industry and regulatory space of mobile banking. My writings have addressed the industry and civic implications of more and cheaper Internet on the continent. In parallel to this discussion of a freer exchange of ideas, I'll also be discussing about a freer exchange of capital.

Market Access at the Expense of Democratic Ideals?

2009-03-31T16:36:00.009-05:00

This is a stylized version of the question facing a handful of corporations, including Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Cisco, who have to figure out how to do business in Internet-censoring markets like China.

How corporations and policy makers in the United States navigate this thorny landscape was the subject of our Digital Democracy class last night (session description here). The first half of the class provided an overview of the state of censorship globally: how states marshal moral, political and security reasons to censor content through IP blocking, DNS blocking and proxy servers tactics.

via Robert Faris and Nart Villeneuve, Access Denied (MIT Press: 2008), Ch. 1

The second half of the class was a simulation of a House of Representatives debate on H.R. 4780- The Global Online Freedom Act, a rather Draconian measure designed to impose export controls on the sale of any item "to an end user in an Internet-restricting country for the purpose, in whole or in part, of facilitating Internet censorship." We were joined for the debate by Sarah Labowitz, my colleague at the Fletcher School, and the first hire at Yahoo!'s human rights shop. Some in the class showed libertarian tendencies, arguing that it was not the prerogative of the US Government to legislate on issues related to domestic politics abroad. Others objected to the legislation for pragmatic reasons: government is too slow to keep up with the technology industry.

Regardless, the class seemed very willing to trust corporations to make the right decisions. This, to a large degree, is how the issue has played out in the real world. Last year, a group of corporations and NGOs, in consolation with Harvard's Berkman Center, started the Global Network Initiative, "a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector."

Updated | 36 Hours in Kampala

2009-03-25T14:48:00.006-05:00

Back in 2007 I wrote 36 Hours in Kampala, a guide for discerning travelers who found themselves with a weekend to spare in Kampala. With fresh eyes, my compatriot Rebekah at Jackfruity recently returned to our old stomping grounds to investigate how Kampala has changed in the aftermath of the Beijing-esque sprucing the city received in the lead up to the Commonwealth Heads of Summit event. Her update, 36 Hours in K'la City, points us towards Kampala's new best cup of coffee, bowl of queso and view of the frightening storks that stalk the city.

Heading to Bogota

2009-03-11T11:19:00.002-05:00

Wet Bogota, via Aku Ma's Photostream

Teaching Digital Democracy @ Tufts

2009-03-09T09:42:00.007-05:00

The Tufts homepage (article here) is featuring an article about the course I'm teaching at Tufts with my collaborator Patrick Meier. I've been thinking about the intersection of the Internet and politics for several years, and its been a joy to learn from students who live with these tools, care deeply about communities and are not afraid to think critically about the status quo. You can see the thoughtfulness of the students clearly in their weekly blog posts here.

ISA2009: Panel on ICTs, Human Rights, Activism and Resistance

2009-02-18T08:36:00.003-05:00

The study of the effect of the Internet on democracy is really in its infant stages. One reason the Berkman Center's Internet & Democracy project initially focused on creating a set of narrative case studies is because we felt there simply was not enough data for a larger quantitative study.

This is why when I gave a paper at the International Studies Association Conference (ISA2009) yesterday in New York I was happy that my colleagues were presenting what is really the first shot across the bow in studying quantitatively the effect of the Internet and mobile phones on outcomes such as protests and human rights. It was also fun having the always snappy Daniel Drezner as the discussant for this panel.

My friend, and the panel chair, Patrick Meier has a great set of summaries of these papers, including my piece of the the effect of Internet on democracy in Kenya's 2007-08 presidential election crisis.

Africa Tech News Roundup 1.03.09

2009-02-03T17:05:00.003-05:00

three feet and rising, via Meg Rorison's photostream

mBanking | Nigeria Shaping Up to Become the Next Big M-Money Market [Balancing Act, 2/1]
http://is.gd/c5g4
"Nigeria's seemingly slow uptake of mobile payment presents a huge opportunity that can revolutionize the payment world, create new set of mobile entrepreneurs and new business models in a market of 54 million mobile subscribers and an addressable market of 140 million people."

Privatization | New Government to Review Ghana Telecom Sale [Balancing Act, 2/1]
http://is.gd/iaG6
"Ghana's new Government has decided that it will re-open the terms of the contract made under the previous Government with Vodafone International. This is the worst kind of nightmare for an international investor: you've paid the price, you're in the hole but there's no control over the cost of the political risk incurred."

ISPs | Ugandan Consumers Get ICT Lobby [East African, 1/9]
http://is.gd/iaGd
"Dissatisfied ICT consumers in Uganda can now seek redress from the Uganda ICT Consumer Protection Association, in case of bad service, substandard products and general unscrupulous practices by data and voice service providers."

Earth | Google Earth Reveals Hidden Environment Treasure in Mozambique [Afro News, 1/26]
http://is.gd/iaGh
"Using Google Earth to identify a remote patch of pristine forest, scientists on an expedition to the site discovered new species of butterfly and snake, along with seven globally threatened birds, in the area that they acknowledge to be the locally known, but unmapped, also adding that scientific collections and literature also failed to shed light on the area."

OLPC | Laptops, Not Mobile Phones, Are the Means to Liberate the Developing World [The Gaurdian, 1/13]
http://is.gd/fP1Y
Responding to news of OLPC's scaling down of operations, Corey Doctorow make the case for laptops in the developing world. At White African, Hash reminds us that the choice between mobiles and laptops becomes less stark every day.

Blogging Culture | Why I Blog About Africa [Global Voices, 12/28]
http://is.gd/iaGT
For the last few weeks a 'Why I Blog About Africa' meme has spread across the Africa blogosphere. GV collects the best, from both Anglophone and Francophone Africa.

Africa Tech News Roundup 1.21.09

2009-01-21T08:33:00.000-05:00

contour sketch, via Meg Rorison's photostream

Apps | Google Launches New Services for SME's [Africa Business Daily, 1/20]
http://is.gd/gwLf
"Small Kenyan businesses can now access cheaper software and customized Web products following the launch of several new solutions from Internet firm Google."

Mobile | Are Mobile Companies the New Treasuries of Africa? [ICT for Development, 1/15]
http://is.gd/ghNa
Adam Denton, of GSM Association, argues that "mobile phone companies are mediating – and could mediate – fiscal relations between governments and citizens." Mobile companies provide 7% of the tax base in Africa. For the first time, a fiscal decision will have a direct impact on citizens in Africa, since the tax burden of phone companies directly affects millions of citizens.

Infrastructure | Ethiopia's ETC: The Elephant in the Room Slows Down Economic Development [Balancing Act, 1/19]
http://is.gd/c5g4
Ethopia's incumbent telecom provider ETC was one of the first adopters of fibre networks in Africa. However, today it offers the worst quality and highest cost on the continent. This is holding back Ethiopia's many talented tech entrepreneurs.

Finance | Safaricom Weighs Debt Option in Tough Market [Africa Business Daily, 1/20]
http://is.gd/gwLl
"Kenya's top mobile phone service provider Safaricom is weighing its financing options as it seeks new cash to power its growth in a market where competition has intensified with the entry of new players."

Politics | It's a War of Attrition [Daniel Kalinaki's weblog, 1/19]
http://is.gd/gwLr
Two weeks ago, Daniel Kalinaki, one of Uganda's most important journalists, was summonsed to police headquarters for publishing a certain story about northern Uganda. His narration of his interregation displays the tenuous state of press freedom in Uganda.

Politics | Advice to Obama's Africa Team: Don't Change Much [CDG Blog, 1/15]
http://is.gd/gwLy
"Rather than shy away from the continent's problems, [Bush] launched several major new initiatives that recognized Africa's significance to America. The aid budget to Africa more than tripled on his watch and the pipeline has been sufficiently filled to put the U.S. well on its way to meet President Bush's pledge to double aid to Africa again by 2010." At her confirmation hearing, Susan Rice, the next UN-Ambassador signaled that she would help Africa help itself through supporting regional bodies like the African Union.

Culture | Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century [Zimbabwe Int'l Book Fair]
http://is.gd/g6xE
"To mark the beginning of the 21st century, and encouraged by Professor Ali Mazrui, the Zimbabwe International Book Fair launched the international compilation of 'Africa's 100 Best Books.'"

Shaping Young Minds

2009-01-20T14:05:00.001-05:00

Tonight I start my teaching career. Alongside my frequent collaborator, Patrick Meier, I am creating a teaching a course to Tufts University undergraduate course entitled Digital Democracy:

In the last five years, text message campaigns, online social networks, and citizen media have played a major role in world events including a democratic revolution in Ukraine, a humanitarian emergency in Kenya and the election of the first African American President of the United States. This course explores how digital technology changes both the mode and the meaning of democratic participation. We will conduct this inquiry through the exploration of case studies and by putting an experimental social networking application to the test, exploring its use in civic projects throughout Boston.

Patrick posted the syllabus here (pdf). I'm incredibly excited, not least because no one has really figured out the effect of the Internet on politics yet. Andrew McLaughlin, my boss at Google, once said: "We are only in the most vague sense conscious of what the Internet's disruption means in the real world." There really is no better way to attack these unanswered questions than by getting a bunch of smart, open minded people together in a room to talk about it. This will be fun.

Darn, No Kayaking to Inauguration

2009-01-19T12:24:00.002-05:00

historic map of Washington D.C., circa 1916

During my senior year of college, an intrepid local entrepreneur asked me start a kayak touring company on the Potomac River. I loved the idea. It combined my dream of being paid to be outside (I had worked at the climbing wall and bike shop at the Outdoor Rec center for several years), with my urge to geek out on political and natural history. A few weeks into my research, my financial backer bailed for unrelated personal reasons, and the project never got off the ground.

If our company were alive and well today, we would be forced to miss out on significant business opportunity. According to DCist, the Coast Guard has banned kayaking as a form of commuting to the inauguration:

Well, so much for the bright idea of utilizing local waterways to break through the Inaugural gridlock on Tuesday. According to WTOP, 40 Coast Guard vessels will be stationed south of the Wilson Bridge, in part to patrol the waters for intrepid paddlers who thought that they could beat the congestion by kayaking to the ceremony.

Wanted | More Internet Without Wires

2009-01-15T08:31:00.003-05:00

Working on technology policy satisfies the aspiring polymath within me. To be really good at tech policy, you need a significant grasp on engineering, law, economics, as well as the current political zeitgeist. While I generally write about African tech policy [here is my draft white paper on infusing the new USAID w/ the values and competencies of the African Digerati], I've also been thinking about how President-Elect Obama can choose regulatory policies that bring Americans more and cheaper Internet without wires.

This winter term, I took Yochai Benkler's Harvard Law School winter term course Communications and Internet Law and Policy. The goal of the course is to write a series of white papers to the new Administration on tech issues.

Our first white paper, directed to the FCC, presents a practical guide to expanding America's spectrum commons [the part of the airwaves that any wireless device could use]. Specifically, we analyze the FCC's recent white spaces order, and propose guidelines for managing the D-Block and AWS-3. Executive summary is below:

Across the Airwaves: Policy Initiatives for Expanding Wireless Opportunities Through Unlicensed Spectrum

Building on the momentum of the recent white spaces ruling and other resurfaced discussions about wireless, the FCC has a unique opportunity to designate the vacant 700MHz D-Block and the AWS-3 spectrum bands for unlicensed use, sparking a new generation of wireless innovation and creating new jobs while building out critical infrastructure to underserved communities and public safety officials across America.

This paper presents a practical guide for expanding America's spectrum commons. Part 1 situates broadband access as a critical input into a competitive and innovative economy, and describes the pressing need for America to reverse the slowing rate of broadband subscriber growth. This section describes wireless as a potential "third broadband pipe" to compete with incumbent providers and argues that transitioning from a property framework to a commons framework for spectrum management will lead to increased innovation, broadband penetration and consumer choice.

Part 2 offers a substantive analysis of the recent FCC white spaces order in light of the goal of using this spectrum to support low-cost rural access, advanced mesh networks and wireless distribution of in-home content. While applauding the ruling as a critically important step, this section recommends policy changes that will further the success of this spectrum, including increasing the frequency of testing new white spaces devices to increasing the fixed 40mW power level and changing the private-sector approach to geo-location database.

Part 3 argues that the recent D-Block and AWS-3 auction processes are built around special interests and are thus fundamentally flawed. This section recommends that the FCC drop the auction process entirely, and designate the bands for unlicensed use, subject to strict device testing, designed to limit the likelihood of interference. The D-Block should be converged with the adjacent public safety band, and the FCC should help create an interoperable standard that would maximize the use of these bands while ensuring that public safety communications are afforded priority during an emergency. Further, the FCC should work with Congress and the Executive to provide grants and bonds to local governments and private companies to build-out networks for the public safety community. Similarly, federal bonds should support municipalities that seek to use the AWS-3 band to build out and subsidize wireless connectivity for underserved communities.

In conclusion, the purpose of this white paper is to summarize the debates of three major opportunities available to build a spectrum commons in the United States, and to offer concrete policy solutions to the FCC that are immediately actionable. It aims to bring a non-partisan and academic perspective to the discussion, on topics that are of great interest and importance both to the FCC and the new Congress and President, and offer clear roads to achieving their stated goals.

Africa Tech News Roundup 1.14.09

2009-01-14T14:57:00.003-05:00

Baltimore, via Meg Rorison's photostream

Infrastructure | How to Survive in a Low Growth Year [Balancing Act, 1/11]
http://is.gd/c5g4
Southwood explores what this year may have in store for fixed and mobile operators. "Defending revenues is only half of the game and probably not the important half. The other part is driving down costs."

Spectrum | Broadband in the White Spaces Going Global [Google Policy Blog, 1/9]
http://is.gd/fN7W
"The FCC is taking its work on "white spaces" global. This morning FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced the "White Spaces Fellowship and Training Initiative," giving the Commission a new platform to share advice and insights into "white spaces" with international regulators and spectrum experts." Will this lead to more unlicensed spectrum in Africa?

ICT4D | Fund Loss Staggers Group Giving Laptops to Poor Children [Boston Globe, 1/9]
http://is.gd/fN84
"[OLPC], the Cambridge foundation that sought to transform developing countries by giving free laptop computers to poor children suffered a devastating loss of revenue last year and has been forced to slash its staff in half."

Mobile Innovation | Ugandan Ministry of Health Introduces Telemedicine [Balancing Act, 1/11]
http://is.gd/fN88
"The ministries of health and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are introducing telemedicine to extend quality health care services to rural areas. "Telemedicine is an important tool for providing healthcare services," said ICT minister, Dr. Ham Mulira."

Politics | Letter from Zimbabwe [World Bank Blog, 12/11]
http://is.gd/fqxr
"It is just after midnight in Harare. I have just returned from a midnight tour of the ATMs in Harare with a cousin. There are queues of people still waiting to get their weekly cash withdrawal limit of $100,000,000,000 (US$2.50)." See photos of the queues on Chris Blattman's blog.

Africa Tech News Roundup 1.06.09

2009-01-06T21:52:00.001-05:00

side street language, via Meg Rorison's photostream

Ads | The Google SA Certification Controversy [IT Web South Africa, 1/3]
http://is.gd/eK8d
"Google South Africa set the cat among the pigeons when country manager Stafford Masie revealed intentions to moderate SA's search industry, saying some e-marketing companies were committing "fraud" against customers."

mBanking | Big Banks in Plot to Kill M-Pesa [Nairobi Star 12/23]
http://is.gd/dc9g
"The unexpected M-PESA probe ordered last week by acting Finance minister John Michuki may have been influenced by an informal cartel of local banks unhappy with the threat posed by Safaricom's mobile money transfer service poses to their business."

Infrastructure | Ericsson Parters With 21st Century Technologies (On Fibre-to-the-Home) [IT News Africa, 1/6]
http://is.gd/eK7Y
"Apart from bringing the much needed Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to the West African nation, the Ericsson-21st Century Technologies partnership will also see Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks being put in place."

Innovation | ngBot.com - Nigeria's First Real Mobile Community [StartupsNigeria.com, 1/6]
http://is.gd/eK7W
"A Nigerian mobile 2.0 community for mobile downloads (mp3s/ringtones, videos, apps, games)and discussions about anything mobile, ngBot...is a user powered community where anyone can contribute to every part of the site..."

Politics | Opposition Leader Declared Winner of Ghana's Presidential Election [NYT, 1/3]
http://is.gd/eK8k
"John Atta Mills of the opposition National Democratic Congress party narrowly won a runoff vote for the presidency of Ghana, one of Africa's most stable and prosperous democracies, electoral officials announced Saturday. " At this time last year, Kenya was smoldering. Its gratifying to see a peaceful transfer of power in Ghana.

Quoted in Foreign Policy on Ushahidi

2009-01-06T09:06:00.003-05:00

Juliana Rotich and my recent Berkman Center Kenya paper was quoted in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

Money quote:

With Ushahidi, information is available within minutes, and Okolloh says censorship isn't a problem because governments "are more interested in what's in newspapers than what's online." Kenya was the first testing ground, and now Ushahidi is jumping into other conflict countries as well. As of November, the group was already receiving an average of four reports a day from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This growing breadth could make Ushahidi something like the Wikipedia of conflicts, wrote Harvard researchers Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich in a recent paper. "They are tools that allow cooperation on a massive scale." Ushahidi hopes to become a history worth contributing to.

Preparing for Dystopia

2009-01-01T17:11:00.004-05:00

Ben Kunkel has a great article in Dissent about recent dystopian and apocalyptic literature and film.

Money quote:

Now we are forced to admit that our own children's capacity to love and flourish may be undermined by the multiplication of new threats. Through the forty long years of the cold war it seemed that civilization might not be long for this world. Now it can seem to us again that we and the people we love (or would wish to love) will have to live with an anxiety every bit as pervasive as the old fear, though perhaps less acute. With luck some novelists will be able to reveal—and not only by accident—what this atmosphere of dread is doing to us.

In an age when no policy maker can claim to predict the result of changes in our weather system and few economists can claim to understand what is needed to calm a turbulent economy, fiction seems uniquely useful for imagining what might be to come. Some of the novels mentioned in the article include The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houllebecq, Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Vouyeristic Routines

2008-12-23T11:16:00.003-05:00

that summer before we grew up, via Meg Rorison's photostream

In high school, whenever I went to a friend's house, I would find out where they sat when they were on the computer. I always liked to explore where people spent their time and how they organized their days. I was thrilled when I came across the link to Daily Routines, a blog about how "writers, artists and other interesting people organize their days."

Charles Darwin would work in the morning, and then make his wife read to him for several hours a day. Franz Kafka, on the other hand, would start writing at 11PM, after a day of work at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute:

And then "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning." Then "every imaginable effort to go to sleep," as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse.

Obama's Tech for Int'l Development Agenda

2008-12-22T10:16:00.007-05:00

How would you suggest the Obama Administration leverage technology to improve the international development agenda?

With a reluctance to innovate, little flexibility to react to conditions on the ground and central planning that Breznev would be proud of, the development establishment often seems hopelessly out of touch. Unfortunately, while many groups are recommending changes in policy, too many of these ideas are centered around bureaucratic re-shuffling or funding increases [here is my take on the 'state of play' on ideas from the Dupont Circle think tanks].

What if the aid community embraced the values of the African tech community- experimentation, low cost innovation, local solutions and flexibility? This would be an unprecedented opportunity to leverage new tools to reach economic development and poverty alleviation goals.

Here is a very quick first cut at recommendations to the Obama Administration foreign assistance team. I'm open to recommendations on re-organizing headings, but three priorities I see now are innovation, private enterprise and collaboration & accountability. Suggestions most welcome!

Technology and U.S. Foreign Assistance
Priorities for a New Administration

The Obama Administration has an unprecedented opportunity to promote sustainable development, fight global poverty and rollback disease around the world. New technology can encourage more good ideas, provide opportunites to sustain and scale ideas that work, and make the funding and planning process more transparent and inclusive.

Innovation
Mechanisms for collecting more good ideas

Provide Seed Funding for Start Ups
More tranches of seed funding should be available without significant bureaucratic and administrative restraints. This will allow new solutions to practical challenges to emerge from anywhere instead of only from centralized experts. Y Combinator and GlobalGiving provide an online prototype for how the Internet can be used to lower transaction costs and utilize the wisdom of the crowds.

Provide more ‘Pull’ Incentives
While push incentives provide funding for research or project implementation, pull incentives provide rewards if results are achieved. Similar to market forces, pull incentives encourage recipients to use efficiently utilized resources and stay results oriented. Pull initiatives range from advanced purchase commitments (APCs) for developing a vaccine to implementing a cash-on-delivery scheme for school enrolment.

Collect and Share More Information
Internal blogs, Wikis, chat, email groups and other basic tools should be available to staff around the world. Data should be easily accessible and searchable, allowing a staff member who has implemented a farming project in Guatemala to share tips with a colleague gearing up to do a similar project in Kenya.

Create Diaspora Committees
Business leaders in the Diaspora often have a useful understanding of the policies that lead to growth and innovation in their home countries. Foreign assistance communities should leverage the intelligence of this community to advise development policy.

Private Enterprise
Opportunities to sustain and scale ideas that work.

Catalyze Pro-Poor Enterprise
By serving the poor while creating new jobs, pro-poor enterprises play an invaluable role in promoting growth and fighting poverty. However, supporting these enterprises has been continuously sidelined. Aid agencies should make pro-poor enterprise growth a critical component of a poverty reduction strategy.

Engage Local and Global Private Sector in Business DNA Transfer
Business practices can be injected at every level of the aid value chain. Aid agencies can promote alternative funding by encouraging the business community to focus more resources on business solutions at the bottom of the pyramid. Also, hiring more staff with business experience is likely to result in better enterprise-oriented interventions.

Increase Internet Penetration
Just as oil is the driver of the manufacturing, access to digital technology is the driver of the information economy. Delivering connectivity to universities, as well as rural and urban regions should be considered alongside funding other public utilities ranging from power, sanitation and irrigation.

Facilitate the Emergence of Development Clusters
Throughout the developing world, local entrepreneurs are experimenting with agriculture, logistics and mobile phone solutions that are generation jobs in their communities. Aid organizations should support the 'clustering' of research institutions, access to capital and markets that are necessary to transform ideas into profitable businesses. The African Rural University for Women in Uganda, Ghana's University of Development Studies, and the Pontifical University ofRio de Janeiro are already fostering these innovations. Aid organizations could stimulate growth by incorporating the best innovations into their development programs.

Openness & Accountability
Getting more people involved in the policy-making process

Hire a Technology for Development Czar
Thinking carefully about the use of technology in development can lower overhead costs dramatically and improve effectiveness. A technology czar, reporting directly to the Director of Foreign Assistance, could choose the appropriate mobile software for field reporting and develop mechanisms for better information sharing within the U.S. foreign assistance community.

Place More staff In-Country
Along an increasingly de-centralized funding process, more staff in-country with more autonomy will allow for more creative solutions to emerge. These staff should directly contribute to the planning and project implementation process.

Support Flexibility and Autonomy for Aid Recipients
Aid recipients are often left sidelined in the foreign aid decision making process. Working with industry partners to develop an experimental voucher system, where aid recipients can choose amongst many donors, will enable recipients to vote with their feet.

Africa Tech News Roundup 12.10.08

2008-12-10T18:30:00.003-05:00

worn saturday wall, via Meg Rorison's photostream

Regulation | Minister Orders Audit of Safaricom's M-Pesa Service [Business Daily Africa, 12/10]
http://tinyurl.com/62l6xc
A day before Zain re-launched their own money transfer service, Finance Minister John Michuku ordered an audit of M-Pesa.

Apps | Africa Tech Year in Review 2008 [AppAfrica, 12/8]
http://tinyurl.com/6y6xuc
Jon ranks Google's push into the continent as the number two Africa tech story. Sign up for Jon's podcast, which discusses the use of Twitter in the Ghanaian election, here.

Mobile Internet | Mobile Internet Usage on the Rise in Nigeria [Balancing Act, 12/7]
http://tinyurl.com/33n85
During Q2 and Q3, the percentage of Nigerians accessing the Internet via mobile phones rose 25% while the percentage accessing via a PC grew only 3%, according to a Nielsen survey.

Infrastructure | Nigeria's Suburban Set to Operate a Lagos-Abidjan Regional Terrestrial Fibre Link [Balancing Act, 12/7]
http://tinyurl.com/q7yc8 "As the west coast of Africa prepares for cheaper international bandwidth from three possible contenders (Glo One, Main One and WACS), the race is now on to provide terrestrial fibre links to take traffic to the cheapest landing station."

Politics | Ghana's Elections Go To a Runoff [BBC News, 12/10]
http://tinyurl.com/69yx6p
"Ghana's presidential election must be decided in a second-round vote, the electoral commission has announced." An in-depth analysis is here.

Politics | Why Somalia Matters [Vanity Fair, 12/5]
http://tinyurl.com/6b6wt3
Hartlay argues that if America is not careful, Somalia will become the next Afghanistan.

Tuesday Links 11.25.08

2008-11-25T13:02:00.003-05:00

via Meg Rorison's photostream

Mauritanian Dictators Prefer Botnets (Strategy Page, 11/18)
http://tinyurl.com/6658r7
"Mauritanian generals apparently hired several botnets to smother the anti-dictatorship websites with DDOS attacks."

O3B Networks Introduces Bundled IP Trunking Solution for Telcos and ISP's (O3B, 11/18)
http://tinyurl.com/58cgzw
"O3b Networks Ltd. today introduced its first turn-key offering. 'Quick Start Africa' is a, Carrier Managed Service designed for Telcos and ISPs on the African continent who need a high capacity, ultra low latency, carrier class IP trunking solution."

Mobile Finance- Indigenous, Ingenious or Both? (Kiwanji, 11/21)
http://tinyurl.com/5qv8yk
"In Ghana it's popularly known as susu. In Cameroon, tontines or chilembe. And in South Africa, stokfel. Today you'd most likely call it plain-old microfinance, the nearest term we have for it. Age-old indigenous credit schemes have run perfectly well without much outside intervention for generations, although in our excitement to implement new technologies and 'solutions' we sometimes fail to recognise them."

Troop Deployment to DR Congo Good First Step; Immediate Action Still Needed (Refugees International, 11/20)
http://tinyurl.com/5qglk3
While the UN Security Council authorized 3,000 new peace keepers in DRC, "Refugees International continued to call for the European Union to immediately deploy a short-term rapid reaction force that can defend strategic towns until UN reinforcements arrive, and allow the UN peacekeeping mission to reorganize itself."

What's Next

2008-11-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

Rod Dreher:

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain -- who took Goldwater's Senate seat upon his retirement -- in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago's Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago's Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

Closing Argument

2008-11-04T11:15:00.003-05:00

Rochester NH, via nhlinux's photostream

“The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

--Albert Einstein

It's a gorgeous day. I'll be canvassing this afternoon in Rochester (pop: 28,000) on New Hampshire's seacoast region. Know hope.

Can OLPC Strengthen Local African Technology Sectors?

2008-10-23T14:04:00.012-05:00

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has revolutionized the way the computing industry thinks about the developing world. However, I fundamentally disagree with OLPC's business model. Founder Nicholas Negroponte (NN) spoke at the Fletcher School last night, so it gave me occasion to sharpen my thoughts on improving the project.

via curioslee's photostream

OLPC sells laptops in two ways. First, at the head of state level, and second, at the individual level [the 'Give 1 Get 1' (G1G1) program]. Selling mainly through heads of states is a strategy that Breznev would have been proud of. Just as US food assistance ruins the livelihood of farmers in the recipient countries, OLPC ruins the nascent technology industries in these countries. Instead of surpassing these industries, OLPC could help strengthen them.

(i) Hardware Distribution and Maintenance Industry
OLPC should develop a strategy to integrate local hardware distribution and maintenance providers into the value chain. They could identify five such companies in each country, and allow them to compete with one another to distribute the laptops and provide support. While OLPC should be agnostic about where sales happen [nat'l gov, local gov't, individual], local partners would add value by adding local intelligence on political hurdles, logistical issues, ect.

NN is against this because it would add cost. I don't see this as a liability for three reasons: (i) b/c this would likely lead to more volume over time; (ii) it would better reflect the true cost of the product [w/ maintenance, distribution, ect]; and (iii) it would likely still significantly undercut the cost of the competition [OLPC costs $187, and from what I understand, Intel's Classmate is still well over $200].

(ii) Hardware Production Industry
A bolder idea would be to freely license the hardware design and allow any hardware designers to manufacture and sell the product to schools, businesses, distributors or anyone else. Instead of wealth flowing from national treasuries to one factory in Shanghai, other factories, not only in China, but also in Nigeria and Brazil, could produce the product. [HT: OLPC News]

OLPC would continue to be an educational project, but the technology could be re-branded and sold around the developing world. NN's response is again cost. He legitimately points out that he would lose economies of scale. I wonder if over time, however, freely licensing the hardware designs would lead to laptops in the hands of more children.

--
Last night, NN told the story of when former Nigerian President Obasanjo gushed over the project but failed to make a real commitment before he left office. His successor, President Yar'adua, was not interested in Obasanjo's pet projects, so the deal fell through. This alone shows the problems with head of state approach.

I have yet to see actionable plans for (i) and (ii), but I'm wondering if there aren't some earnest business school students out there already working on them.

Africa Tech Weekly Links | 10.21.08

2008-10-21T08:30:00.002-05:00

Its autumn. Via Boston.com

MobileActive08: An Idea Whose Time Has Come [Balancing Act, 10/19]
http://tinyurl.com/q7yc8
"As the old Hollywood saying goes, there are only really 5 stories at MobileActive08. Mobiles are now being used to: send out bulk mailings to key target groups (nurses); mobilise supporters; poll people and gather data; to provide answers to inquiries; to offer information support for activities; and raise funds. The majority of this activity is based on the 160 characters available in SMS."

The Problem With Seed Capital in Africa [White African, 10/20]
http://tinyurl.com/55co52
If African entrepreneurs can find seed capital, local funders usually want b/w 40-80% equity stake. "I'm interested in seeing some Y-Combinator style venture funding companies AND communities developing around different regions in Africa. Groups that only fund the very early stages of development ($5000 - $15000) for very short periods of time (3-6 months)."

Innovating From Constraint [My Hearts in Accra, 10/17]
http://tinyurl.com/5ge9sd
Ethan presents 7 rules that help explain how the developing world innovates: (i) innovation comes from constraint; (ii) don't fight culture; (iii) embrace market mechanisms; (iv) use existing platforms; (v) problems are not always obvious from afar; (vi) what you have matters more than what you lack; (vii) infrastructure begets infrastructure.

Banking Crisis Will Be Felt in Africa [CDG Blog, 10/13]
http://tinyurl.com/667jdq "After the Nordic crisis of 1991, Norway's foreign aid fell 10%, Sweden's 17%, and Finland's 62%--from peak to trough after adjusting for inflation."

head of the charles regatta

2008-10-18T16:59:00.002-05:00

via cperfetti's photostream

Back in Boston, the crispness of the air and the changing leaves is perfect.

Where I Belong

2008-10-15T09:00:00.003-05:00

On the last day of exams last spring, I flew with a buddy and my bike to Amsterdam. With no map or place to stay, we biked south to France. In Paris, we did a day trip by bike to the Loire Valley, and decided to picnic on this farm.

BarCamp Africa

2008-10-15T08:43:00.002-05:00

My wrap-up on BarCamp Africa, post on the official Google Africa Blog:

Over 100 technologists and social entrepreneurs descended on our Mountain View campus last Saturday, October 11th, for BarCampAfrica, an event designed to help strengthen Silicon Valley's ties to our continent. The event contributed to the 'Africa: Open for Business' narrative that gained prominence at TEDGlobal and at this year's BarCamps in Nairobi, Kampala, Mauritius, Madagascar and Johannesburg.

As participants set the agenda for the day, a clear consensus emerged that digital technology has a major role to play in addressing Africa's interconnected business and social challenges. Throughout the day, discussions of laptop distribution models were followed by conversations on the state of democracy on the continent, and talk of the future of mobile payments was followed by insights on mobile solutions for human rights monitoring.

Googlers Matthew Stepka and Andrew McLaughlin jointly opened the event and set the tone for the day. They discussed the challenges and opportunities of Google's work in Africa, and how both policymakers and philanthropists can pave the way for business leaders to succeed. A major theme on the morning panel was the return of centers of excellence to the African continent. Several panelists touched on the encouraging trend of "Re-aspora": Africans returning to their home countries. Others explored the model of the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African university dedicated to developing the next generation of African leaders.

Read more...

Africa Tech Monday Links 10.13.08

2008-10-13T23:35:00.001-05:00

Barcamp Africa Panel: Technology and Education
http://tiny.cc/Pv41b
Watch the video of one of the hottest panels at BarCamp Africa (hosted this weekend at Google Mountain View), featuring Guy Kawasaki (Garage Tech Ventures, Entrepreneur Magazine), David Kobia (Ushahidi), Martin Fisher (KickStart), and Jon Gosier (Appfrica).

Kelele- The African Bloggers Conference [White African, 10/12]
http://tiny.cc/nMftP
One of the announcements at Barcamp Africa was Kelele- The African Bloggers Conference, set to take place in Nairobi on August 13-16.

Africa: Communications Technologies Transform Elections [IHT, 10/1]
http://tiny.cc/NVuOp
Wonderful aggregation of incidents where technology played a role in keeping African leaders accountable.

Reframing Brand Africa (Tech) [White African, 10/6]
http://tiny.cc/ssZ6z
'If it works in Africa, it will work everywhere.' Thats why Africa exports technology to the world. Success stories include Fring, Ubuntu, FrontlineSMS, Ushahidu, Softtribe and Qik.

Opportunity Knocks [Economist, 10/9]
http://tiny.cc/izs50
"Despite the litany of problems, the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are, by several measures, enjoying a period of unparalleled economic success. And despite the turmoil in the world's financial markets, international investors still think they can make money there."

Palo Alto Running

2008-10-12T21:05:00.006-05:00

'The Dish-Stanford', via Calvin Lee's photostream

Sunday morning I ran with an old friend. I hadn't run with him since, after a long run through East Jerusalem , he passed out from dehydration during a shabbat service. Today was no such case, as he took me to town on the rolling hills of Stanford's Dish. A happy diversion from a blurry few weeks on both coasts. Overnight flight back to Boston tonight, and back to class in the morning.

barcamp africa

2008-10-11T09:31:00.002-05:00

Just watched the sunrise at Google Mountain View before the start BarCamp Africa. Its always fun to be at an event like this in so many roles. Here are some of them.

scholar- writing my thesis (PhD, book?) on the dense confluence of technical skill, policy and other contingencies that allow technology sectors to explore in emerging markets. How can Nairobi become the next Bangalore, Tel Aviv or Hong Kong? How has IT changed the nature of economic growth such that these recent models are less relevant.

google public policy team member- one thing I learned this summer is the best way to influence governments to take up better technology policies is to know the best entrepreneurs on the ground, who can help guide the process.

entrepreneur- for some time now, I've been interested in getting involved on the financing and management side of a nascent tech venture. I'm working with a group of international business students in Boston to find the right venture to support [not connected w/ Google]. Maybe I'll find it today.

A New Center Emerges

2008-10-06T12:45:00.003-05:00

Had a great opportunity to train down to Princeton last Thursday to give a Thursday lunch talk at the new Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). CITP is a brand new research center with expertise at the overlap between policy (Woodrow Wilson School) and engineering (Computer Science Department). I love this approach, because I've been increasingly cognizant of the effect that tech entrepreneurs in developing countries are having on public policy.

The talk gave me a chance to reflect on two of the big projects I've been working over the last year, and what is to come (more soon on that scheming). The abstract:

How can policy makers in developing countries craft information technology policies that will drive economic growth? How do mobile phones and the Internet change how citizens participate in democracy and the political process? While a rich and varied discourse has emerged around each of these questions, these discussions has largely excluded Africa, perhaps due to a paucity of evidence. However, this trend is changing as Africa becomes one of the world’s fastest growing markets for information technology. Through the lens of two of my recent research papers, I will discuss the promise the Internet holds for economic and political development in Africa.

Critical Elements of an African Internet Economy (forthcoming), co-authored with Google’s Head of Global Public Policy Andrew McLaughlin, presents public policy components for African governments that recognize that bandwidth is a fundamental input into the information economy. While African governments are in very different stages of developing their Internet economies, each must address a common set of policy issues including fiber infrastructure, spectrum, competition and local content.

The Role of Digital Technology in Kenya’s 2007-08 Presidential Election Crisis, part of Harvard’s Berkman Center Internet and Democracy Case Study Series, illustrates how digital technologies were a catalyst to both predatory behavior, such as ethnic-based mob violence, and civic behavior, such as citizen journalism and human rights campaigns during the recent violence in Kenya. While this paper is a first cut at history, it is also an attempt to bring the African experience into the sociological and political science discourse on the Internet’s effect on democracy.
Joshua Goldstein is a masters candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, studying development economics and information technology policy with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He currently conducts research with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Google Inc. Before attending the Fletcher School, he worked for USAID in Uganda. Notably, he recently published Embracing ‘Open Access’ in East Africa: A Common Internet Infrastructure Policy Agenda for Human Security and Economic Development” in Princeton’s Journal of Public and International Affairs and Harvard’s Berkman Center Working Paper Series. He blogs at In An African Minute.

Mobile Phones, the Internet and Kenya's 2007-08 Presidential Election Crisis

2008-10-01T09:24:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, Harvard's Berkman Center published a case study I co-authored with Kenyan technologist and activist Juliana Rotich. The case, entitled "The Role of Digital Technology in Kenya's 2007-08 Presidential Election Crisis," is part of Harvard's Berkman Center Working Paper Series.

Abstract:

Written largely through the lens of rich nations, scholars have developed theories about how digital technology affects democracy. However, largely due to a paucity of evidence, these theories have excluded the experience of Sub-Saharan Africa, where meaningful access to digital tools is only beginning to emerge, but where the struggles between failed state and functioning democracy are profound. Using the lens of the 2007-2008 Kenyan Presidential Election Crisis, this case study illustrates how digitally networked technologies, specifically mobile phones and the Internet, were a catalyst to both predatory behavior such as ethnic-based mob violence and to civic behaviors such as citizen journalism and human rights campaigns. The paper concludes with the notion that while digital tools can help promote transparency and keep perpetrators from facing impunity, they can also increase the ease of promoting hate speech and ethnic divisions.

'People Will Work on Their Mobiles in Africa, We Just Don't Know How Yet'

2008-09-15T15:20:00.010-05:00

As I mentioned in a recent post, one of the most striking aspects of the African Internet economy is that we don't know what the mobile Internet will look like when it is proliferated in Africa, much the same way we didn't know that banking would like M-Pesa.

My best glimpse yet of the future came yesterday at Nathan Eagle's talk at the Kennedy School. To be honest, I was somewhat embarrassed that I hadn't come across some of the brilliant work he is doing.

He started off the talk by saying "people are going to do work on their mobile phones in Africa, we just don't know what it is yet." However, three of his projects give some hint of what is to come.

Entrepreneurial Research and Programming on Mobiles
A program to support computer scientists and other engineers in their efforts to create mobile applications for the developing world context. They host an SMS Bootcamp, mobile phone programming for entrepreneurs, and mobile web apps. The program is now in 10 countries with 15 local computer science professors and lecturers.

These workshops have spawned a dizzying array of companies, in the fields of MDSS, mobile medicine, SIM-based application development, reality mining [w/ Christopher Waranga at Univ. of Nairobi], SMS bloodbank, Boonanet [commodity pricing], SMS gateways, air time regulator, stolen car alerts, business directories, pre-paid electricity, weather forecasts, MoKoSo [craigslist] and crush lists.

txteagle
A start up based on three premises: (i) there are 1.5 billion poor literate mobile users in the developing world with time on their hands; (ii) corporations would benefit from 'crowd-sourcing' millions of tiny tasks that will always be done better by people than by computers; (iii) mobile phone networks have tons of underutilized capacity.

Txteagle "enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe." Say, for example, that Mozilla needs a Luganda language version of Firefox. They would ask people who speak Luganda to translate some of the key words. The machine parcable nature of text responses means that algorithms can identify talent and weed out those gaming the system.

The project is in a very early stage of identifying which tasks are best answered by SMS, and at this point 'they are throwing ideas against the wall, and seeing which ones stick.'

Reality Mining
Nathan's more academic work is on behavioral inference of complex systems in the developing world. At the Santa Fe Institute this summer, he built a super computer that can map, for example, where all of Rwanda's international phone calls in go in a single day.

This could be useful for understanding human patterns and affinities in outlier events like earthquakes, financial networks, urban planning, housing management, and movement dynamics. The most fascinating measurement of the economic influence of mobiles is a study that compared graphs of fish prices in three different regions of India before and after mobile base stations where installed. Before the base stations, the prices were erratic and subject to the whims of the larger buyers. After base stations, the data flat lined, showing that the ability to communicate has a profound effect on the price of tradeable goods in the developing world.

The Psychology of American Political Choice

2008-09-11T07:30:00.003-05:00

Liberals are dismayed that Republicans can be 'duped' into supporting a vice presidential candidate with so little policy experience. Turns out this has nothing to do with being duped, but instead is about the disparate ways Republicans and Democrats make decisions. While liberals rest on John Stuart Mill (autonomy is sacred, therefore cruelty is the worst thing we can do), Republicans rests on sociologist Emile Durkheimer [here described by Jonathan Haidt]:

Durkheim...warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups.

Obama should describe liberal goals through Durkheimian principles if he wants to get swing votes.

Information Technology Business in sub-Saharan Africa

2008-09-08T10:47:00.005-05:00

At the Berkman Center last Tuesday, Ethan Zuckerman and Eric Osiakwan gave a talk on The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in sub-Saharan Africa. Here is my summary of Eric's portion of the talk. [Ethan's is here]

----
Eric tells two stories of innovation in Africa.

The ONE Network
In 1997, Sudanese Entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim was running MSI Cellular, at a time when there were only 2 million mobiles on the African continent. His goal was to develop a European quality mobile network without paying a bribe. He developed a model called incremental infrastructure, where instead of building out a national network, you invest in a single base station, get handsets to many people, and develop the network once more capital becomes available. He used this strategy to build a substantial network in 14 countries. In April 2005, Celtel bought MTC for $3.4 billion, which later rebranded as ZAIN's ONE Network.

The TEAMS Submarine Cable
Eric is a believer [and an investor] in SEACOM, one the major submarine fiber cables [slowly] racing to bring connectivity to East Africa in the coming few years. He predicts TEAMS will bring costs down from $7000 to $500 for a 2mbps connection. This will be critical to meeting the pent-up demand for Internet connectivity, driving both economic and social growth.

What do these stories say about the state of innovation in Africa? The main take away is that while projects like this seem like 'slam dunk' investments [earning 40%/year at some points], they are not getting the type of attention from the capital markets that they deserve. The TEAMS cable, for example, has the Government of Kenya as a major investor, which is a fine enough stop-gap measure, but prevents interest from others who are concerned with nationalization. Investors continue to be unfamiliar with Africa, and thwarted by major disasters like the one in Kenya.

Networks and Tech Entrepreneurship in Africa

2008-09-05T14:01:00.010-05:00

At the Berkman Center last Tuesday, Ethan Zuckerman and Eric Osiakwan gave a talk on The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in sub-Saharan Africa. Here is my summary of Ethan's portion of the talk.

--
In the 1990's, the physical location of all the critical elements of a successful tech venture [programmers, sys admins, sales, content, management] mattered a great deal. Analee Saxenion's 1998 classic "Regional Advantage" discusses what made Silicon Valley successful than Boston's Rt. 128 Tech Corridor.

The key is choosing the network model over the autarkic model. In Silicon Valley, changing companies frequently was encouraged, allowing talented employees to change jobs frequently and promote new innovation. In Boston, everyone tried to build everything in-house, which was a recipe for failure.

Today, the model has become more decentralized, to the possible benefit of African economies. The need for the critical elements still exists, but they can be in Orlando or Cape Town or Toronto, all working on a project based in Accra. This is promising.

One can see this evolution in social as well as economic ventures. In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Kenyan Presidential Election Crisis, one saw these networks emerge in six distinct ways, demonstrating the sagacity of these networks [Nota Bene: I'm co-authoring a paper on this topic w/ Juliana Rotich to be publish later this fall in Harvard's Berkman Center Working Paper Series']

1. SMS used to promote violence;
2. Mashada.com- a popular Kenyan message board shut down after many violent messages, and the subsequent creation of Ihavenotribe.com
3. Blogs became Newspapers, 48 hour period where broadcast journalism was not reporting live, pretty common to read blogs over radio;blogs as mass media
4. PR Campaign Globally- a group of writers who wrote in major publications to change the narrative away from genocide,
5. Mama Mikes- alternative remittance, send $100 as a voucher for petrol, mobile phone minutes, with far less overhead than Western Union
6. Ushahidi.com- a platform for reporting incidents of violence via mobile and posting them online.

--
The decentralization is promising for both social and economic entrepreneurs. It would be great to see a study of how these networks are contributing to wealth in African economies. A possible idea for Fletcher's Center for Emerging Market Enterprises.

Ushahidi and the Era of Participatory Human Rights Campaign

2008-09-04T08:38:00.008-05:00

Today, the new Ushahidi site launched, marking the era of the distributed human rights campaign. Just as Wikipedia allows for the wide-scale participation of collecting the world's knowledge, Ushahidi now allows for anyone, anywhere, to participate in reporting violence, atrocities and human rights violations. Internet scholar Yochai Benkler calls this phenomenon 'commons-based peer production', but what does it really mean?

Until now, campaigns for northern Uganda or Darfur relied on tiny elites in those places to speak for those facing violence. Today, with simply a mobile phone, anyone can actively report incidents of violence to a truly global audience, making it harder for perpetrators to face impunity.

I've written and spoke about Ushahidi before. The project started in the chaotic and sad days following the 2007 Kenyan Presidential campaign, when violence escalated out of control in Kenya's Rift Valley. Then, Ushahidi was an ad hoc tool to allow Kenyans to use mobiles to report incidents of violence, which would then be published on a Google maps based website.

Today, Ushahidi released a platform for use whenever and wherever the next human security disaster erupts. As one of the lead develops, Erik Hersman, recently told me, "Just like a blacksmith, we want to make the hammer, not tell people how to use it." It is exciting to think that whatever the next emergency may be, decent people will be empowered to both spread the word globally and and keep the perpetrators accountable.

Congrats to Erik the whole Ushahidi team!

Racing Bikes in Wine Country

2008-08-12T15:25:00.006-05:00

via Boston.com The Big Picture

The morning had all the makings of a disaster. It was cold and hazy. I got two flats before even leaving the starting area, I got stung by a bee under my jersey, and I accidentally did the first loop an extra time, adding an extra 11 miles to a 100 bike race. By 10AM however, the sun broke out over Sonoma, lighting the vineyards brilliantly as we built up a strong pace. We stopped at farms throughout the route for snacks. Figs are the new Clif bar.

The Future of Internet in Africa, and How to Build It Pt. I

2008-08-12T11:20:00.004-05:00

Spending this summer at Google thinking about how African policy makers can create conditions for more and cheaper Internet in Africa [paper on the subject forthcoming], one thing continuously struck me: we really don't know what the Internet will look like [device and app-wise] when it is plentiful in Africa, much the same way we didn't know that banking in Africa would look like M-Pesa. The solution will certainly be mobile, but the big winners in African entrepreneurship often come up with unique, creative solutions tailored to Africa needs, not simply imported from abroad.

In 'Mobile Broadband Internet in Africa, Hash talks about the importance of mobile data. Money quote:

While it's good to talk about mobile phone penetration, I was a lot more interested in seeing the discussion going on around mobile broadband internet and how that is the next big move in Africa for the operators. Passing data, not just voice, is the battleground of the future in Africa - and all the carriers are fighting to position themselves to win.

Suskind on Iraq

2008-08-11T00:57:00.008-05:00

My good friend Greg Jackson was the researcher for Pulitzer prize winning journalist Ron Suskind's new book The Way of the World. If what Ron and Greg wrote in this book holds up under grand jury investigation, the President of the United States could be impeached.

The book claims that the CIA, on orders from the President, forged a letter between a former Iraqi intelligence chief named Habbush and Saddam which stated that Iraq and al-Qeada colluded to get uranium from Niger, and that 9/11 hijackers trained in Iraq. Suskind alleges that Habbush actually explicitly told CIA that Iraq had no WMD several months before the invasion of Iraq, and while publicly a wanted man, was actually a US-paid informant living in Amman.

Not only would this be the most outrageous government lie in modern history, but it would also be illegal. A 1991 amendment to a 1947 law governing the CIA forbids disinformation campaigns aimed at United States public opinion. There are no listed penalties for breaking this law, but one assumes it is an impeachable offense.

Suskind's main source, a CIA agent named Robert Richer, now denies his account. Others are speculating that the letter was forged, but it came not from the CIA, but from Doug Feith's Defense Intelligence shop, which would not be governed by the same laws.

By the way, the book is haunted with 'what might have been' if the Administration had actually finished the job in Afghanistan, focused on keeping America safe from loose nukes, and supported Bhutto and democracy in Pakistan.

San Francisco 1/2 Marathon

2008-08-03T23:08:00.005-05:00

via Dizzy Atmosphere's photostream

We left the house at 4AM. The race started at 5:30AM. I crossed the Golden Gate bridge at dawn. Stunning. I was done by 7AM. Most fun race I've done in a long time.

Bandwidth is the Oil of the New Economy

2008-08-01T13:41:00.003-05:00

In the often legally and technologically complicated world of technology policy, metaphor is often the best weapon. My summer rock climbing buddy Tim Wu recently published an op-ed in NYT entitled OPEC 2.0, arguing that "Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth."

Later Tim writes, "In an information economy, the supply and price of bandwidth matters, in the way that oil prices matter: not just for gas stations, but for the whole economy." I think the comparison of oil and bandwidth is remarkably powerful, especially in the policy battles in Africa, where the essential challenge is actually convincing politicians they have more to gain from promoting innovation through cheaper Internet then from continuing to side with anti-competitive incumbent telecoms.

The Best Thinking About Fixing America's Foreign Aid

2008-07-30T16:04:00.011-05:00

I've had the chance to view America's foreign aid machine from a few different angles. First, hustling appropriations with a large lobbyist on K Street, then on the ground with USAID in Uganda. It didn't take me long to pick up on the truism that our approach to foreign aid is broken.

Fixing this process is really important. Last week in Berlin, when Barack Obama said “The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow,” he was drawing on the now widely accepted notion that to strengthen our national security, we need to do a better job promoting development around the world.

Today, there are 50 agencies involved in the foreign assistance process [check out this mind-numbing chart], the earmark process is dreadful and there is no single strategy that guides the aid process.

What is to be done? This is a big question, and this blog post is an effort to identify who is thinking about fixing America's approach to foreign aid, and what their best ideas are. To me, this question seems critical to the next Administration, who will have an opportunity to drastically change America’s interactions with the developing world for the first time since the 1960’s.

Nota bene: It is important to make a distinction between development economists, who use econometric analysis to make important generalizations about growth, and policy folks, who think about managing the US institutional approach to aid.

The Brookings-CSIS Task Force for Transforming Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century
Lael Bainard of Brookings, in recent testimony in front of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, summarized the findings of all 3 of the recent high profile committees on re-shaping foreign aid [HELP Commission, 2006 Task Force on Transforming Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century, and the Smart Power Commission].

All of these efforts call for greater U.S. engagement on development—not less. All call for elevating development on a par with diplomacy and defense-not subordinating it. All emphasize the need for stronger civilian operational capabilities for development, humanitarian, and post conflict missions. All call for coordination of aid with other soft power tools such as trade and debt relief. And all emphasize the urgent need to modernize an aid infrastructure designed for the challenges of a different century—not tweak the status quo.

The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network
A group of high-profile policy thinkers, most based out of center-left Dupont Circle think tanks such as Brookings Institution, Center for Global Development and Academy for Educational Development. Interestingly, the group also contains leading democracy academics, including Michael McFaul, Frank Fukuyama and Larry Diamond. On June 1st, 2008, the group published a short general proposal calling for the ideas in the quotation above.

The HELP Commission
The HELP Commission, the most recent high profile commission on re-vamping aid, published its report in December 2007. The Commission, in addition to hitting the points above, has a strong emphasis on the private sector. The report calls for more assistance to help build private sectors around the world, and the creation of a new business model to engage NGO's.

The Center for Global Development's Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance Initiative
A great initiative that attempts to capture the best in analysis and advocacy on U.S. foreign
assistance reform. The most important paper is Steve Radelet's Modernizing Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century: An Agenda for the Next U.S. President, which has one of the strongest presentation of the above points.

The Spence Commission Report
This isn't about the management of foreign assistance, but I couldn't help myself. Published in June 2008, the The Spence Report represents a new Washington Consensus, the best new thinking about growth. Economist Dani Rodrik sums it up best:

It is to Spence's credit that the report manages to avoid both market fundamentalism and institutional fundamentalism. Rather than offering facile answers such as "just let markets work" or "just get governance right," it rightly emphasises that each country must devise its own mix of remedies. Foreign economists and aid agencies can supply some of the ingredients, but only the country itself can provide the recipe.

I would love to find out if I'm missing anything that is out there.

On California

2008-07-23T11:17:00.005-05:00

Serpent Mother's Egg, via Ioupiote's photostream

As the Notorious B.I.G once said, "If I gotsta choose a coast, I gotsta choose the East. I live out there, so don't go there. But that don't mean a brother can't rest in the West."

That's how I feel. While the East Coast is my home, a summer in Cali will do just fine. Take, for example, the Oakland Fire Festival, which recently took place on a warm night a few weekends ago. Dozens of metal workers constructed strange machines that lit the abandoned parking with a noir, Tim Burton-esque light.

I've got a decent line up for my last month in California. A half-marathon in San Francisco, a weekend on a San Diego beach and a 100 mile bike race in Wine Country. And, lots of writing on Africa, technology, and their confluence. More soon on what I've absorbed in this heady summer.

What's Next?

2008-07-11T11:41:00.002-05:00

My boss at Google, Andrew McLaughlin, has a striking line in a talk he regularly gives to external audiences about the power of the Internet. He says, "We are only in the most vague sense conscience of what the Internet's disruption means in the real world." Understanding this disruption, in all its forms, strikes me as a remarkable idea to shape a career around.

Google Launches Africa Blog

2008-07-07T13:54:00.002-05:00

Towards the end of last week, Google launched it's official Africa blog, in recognition that Google can be a thought leader in the African Internet space. Also, Hash wrote a post about Google's Nairobi office, which is the center of much of Google's work in sub-Saharan Africa.

Should I Move To China in Sept?

2008-07-06T12:27:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I was offered a Boren Fellowship, in which the Federal government would pay for my to live in China and learn Mandarin in the language program of my choosing for one year. In exchange, after finishing Fletcher, I would promise to work for two years wherever I want in the government.

My original motivation for applying was that at age 24 I should aim for breadth instead of depth. While I am working in a rich new world where int'l development meets tech policy meets political science, expanding that narrative to include the China-Africa connection would be an added feather, and surely a great year of travel and exploration on someone else's dime.

On the flip side, while government service is certainly one good option of many after graduation, an a priori limitation of my options is difficult to accept.

I have to give my answer by Monday. A tough choice.

East Africa 'Open Access' and Beyond

2008-07-02T13:40:00.004-05:00

My paper, "Embracing Open Access in East Africa: A Common Internet Infrastructure Policy for Human Security and Economic Development" was published last week in Princeton's Journal of Public and International Affairs. The paper is available here.

Abstract:

In East Africa, development practitioners, economists, and
local entrepreneurs believe the Internet can be a catalyst for
economic growth and human development. However, these
three communities lack a common agenda to make increased
access a reality. This article attempts to find common language
among these communities, and suggests they support a policy
framework called Open Access, which aims to provide Internet
access to the most people at the lowest cost through marketbased
solutions and limited public financing.

It's a fact that East Africa will have fiber in the next two years (see cool graph from White African). My next research question is how governments around the continent can promote competition, innovation, local content and ultimately more and cheaper broadband [regardless of the fiber situation.]

Homeless World Cup in DC this Weekend

2008-06-27T15:53:00.004-05:00

A deep breath after a busy few weeks. Home in DC to go the wedding of a close friend. She is the first of any of my friends from high school or college to get hitched. Weird.

If you are in DC this weekend, check out the Homeless World Cup action. My great friends Jeremy and Pat are very involved in the 'sports for social change' movement in Uganda, and have organized the Ugandan delegation for the past few years, bringing young leaders from Gulu and Pader to Capetown and then Copenhagen.

From Friday, June 27 – Sunday, June 29, the Homeless USA Cup, a program of Street Soccer USA, will take place in Washington, D.C. at the Old Convention Center site at H and 11th Street, NW. More than 100 players representing 11 cities from across the United States will play for a chance to win the Homeless USA Cup, and the opportunity to be selected to the US National Team that will represent the United States at the Homeless World Cup in Melbourne, Australia in December. Admission to the event is free and open to the public.

The Mind on Fire in San Francisco

2008-06-10T20:20:00.003-05:00

The only book Thoreau had at Walden Pond was Homer's Iliad. I just bought a copy from a bearded woman for $1.47 in the Mission District in San Francisco.

My mind has been racing lately, but I've been pouring my energy, not into blogging, but into understanding the strange Google universe and the fascinating and murky overlap between the fields of telecommunication policy and international development. More on that soon, but...

In Kigali, Josh Ruxin says Rwanda needs Microsoft's billions and its managers.

In Washington, Nicholas Carr writes that the Internet probably ruins are ability to be literate. I think he is right.

In Nairobi, Hash is geeking out with Barcamp Nairobi.

In New York, Paul Graham explores, in the best article I've read in a while, the unique character of global cities.

Obama

2008-06-04T10:56:00.001-05:00

Via one of Andrew Sullivan's readers:

My grandfather, 86 years old and a veteran of WWII, just gave me a call. He was calling all of his grandchildren to let them know what an important night this was in the history of our country.

Grandpa drove a truck for over 50 years, and he told the story of how he drove with a team of drivers, 2 white (including him), and 4 black. When they stopped at the truck stops, the black drivers had to use seperate restrooms and showers, and had to eat in a small room in the back of the kitchen. Grandpa and his co-driver would eat in the back with the rest of the team, and while they didn't speak of it at the time, they knew it was wrong yet felt powerless to change it, and believed that it would never change.

Tonight, he told me, we have come full-circle. Many people, especially the younger generation who supported Obama, will never fully realize the historical import of what happened tonight. But he wanted his grandchildren to know this story that he had never told us, and it was the second time in my 33 years that I have heard my grandpa cry.

Summer at Google Inc.

2008-06-02T09:26:00.001-05:00

So, I moved to San Francisco a few weeks ago to start a summer internship at Google Inc. I’m working for Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Head of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs, researching the best ways that Google can help make internet access cheaper and more widely available throughout Africa.

Needless to say, I’m madly excited about this gig. The crux of my excitement is what Andrew calls the ‘chicken and egg’ paradox of technology in Africa. In other words, while technology has been shown to be a driver of economic development in the poorest countries, there is no incentive for market entry without an established surfeit of users. Thus, many large technology companies are at a point where they get to explore demand and supply opportunities at every level, ranging from major investments in submarine infrastructure to innovative rural-end solutions, as well as perfecting the art of interacting with both host and donor countries on issues of access.

The ‘chicken and egg’ paradox ensures that I won’t get bored this summer. That and the fact that San Francisco was just named one of the top five cycling cities in the US.

On Cycling Season

2008-05-24T22:18:00.003-05:00

I’ve been off the grid lately, on a journey that confirmed in my mind that the bicycle is both the most elegant machine ever developed by man, as well as the key to freedom.

With a lightweight backpack containing only a t-shirt, shorts, sandals and a few tools, I flew with my road bike to Amsterdam the first week of May. Arriving at dawn, and meeting my friend Scott at Bicycle Mark’s house in town, we re-assembled our bikes and hit the road.

We had no map and no itinerary; our only goal was to by in Paris at the end of the fourth day. Our journey took us south along the Dutch coast, into Belgium and finally across the French border into Dunqurque.

This part of the world is heavenly for cyclists, with bike lines beside every road and useful signs pointing the direction to the next town. Riding 50 and 85 miles per day, we would end the days tired and hungry, celebrating our accomplishment with a few beers before finding a hostel or guest house.

On most days, I would settle in behind Scott’s slipstream (he is a ridiculously powerful athlete, nearly making the Olympics in rowing), and we’d cruise through the Dutch countryside, passing old farm houses as well as historic windmills and new wind turbines.

We survived the week with only one flat tire, outside of Bruges, where a friendly fellow, whose kids were selling lemonade to cyclists, gave us directions and offered a bike pump. After 220 miles (400 km), we arrived at Dunqurque train station and took the TGV to Paris to make a Friday night party.

I spent a good amount of time on my bike in Paris as well; the city has become much friendlier to cyclists since the installation of Velib. At 5:30AM on my last day in Europe, after a long evening, I road my bike across town to Gare du Nord to catch my train back to Amsterdam. With the first hints of dawn appearing, and the roads completely desolate, Paris was mine.

Kenya Charges Man for SMS Hate Speech

2008-05-22T10:45:00.003-05:00

I've been off the grid lately, having cycling adventures and moving to San Francisco. More on that later, for now:

In February, I wrote about how SMS messages promoted violence in post-presidential election violence in Kenya. Thanks to my friend Hannah in Nairobi, I learned that the the Government has recently charged a 'employee of a 5-star hotel' with promoting ethnic-based violence via SMS message.

One of the hundreds of hate short text messages sent during the post-poll violence was read out in a Nairobi court on Wednesday.

Mr Emmanuel Siundu Waya, an employee of a five star hotel, was charged with initiating it.

The court was taken through a chain of how the short text message (SMS) was forwarded to at least six people within hours last December 31.

Mapping Genocide: Google Earth and Darfur

2008-05-02T09:29:00.002-05:00

Stacy Perlman, a senior at Northeastern University, interviewed me a few weeks back for a piece on the use of Google Maps for human rights activism. The result, "Mapping Genocide: Google Earth and Darfur," is a wonderful narrative piece of journalism, plotting the emergence of Crisis in Darfur through Ushahidi. Stacy captures the crucial crux of this issue:

While there is no way to monitor how many people have been influenced by the map to join an advocacy group, lobby congress or donate money, a case study report on the project noted that “more than 100,000 have visited the “What Can I Do?” page on the museum’s site to find out how they can help.” The page provides a variety of ways to take a stand including contacting the media to tell them there is a lack of coverage on the issue and communicating with decision-makers such as the U.S. government and the United Nations about the need for humanitarian assistance.

While crediting the Crisis in Darfur Map as a great awareness tool, Joshua Goldstein, a graduate research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School noted that the obvious pushback to a project like this is that “at the end of the day you’re not saving lives.” Although awareness about Darfur is critical, Goldstein makes the point that awareness that leads to activism is even more crucial.

Mwenda Arrested in Kampala

2008-04-28T19:57:00.002-05:00

Uganda's most important journalist was arrested on Saturday. Not a good sign. At least he was released on bail on Monday.

Rebekah has the roundup on GV...

Bloggers and independent media outlets in Uganda are reporting that three journalists and a photographer at The Independent, an opposition newspaper based in Kampala, have been arrested and that the paper's offices have been raided by Ugandan security forces. One of those arrested was Andrew Mwenda, who was previously charged with sedition for his coverage of the death of Sudanese vice president John Garang in 2005.

Read more...

Hip Hop in Kitgum, Northern Uganda

2008-04-25T11:08:00.001-05:00

If you happen to be in Kitgum, a small outpost town in northern Uganda, on Monday, go check out this concert. It's being put on by my friend Abramz Tekya, an amazingly energetic community organizer, and the illest break dancer south of Karuma Falls.