Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14giridharadas.html?sudsredirect=true

Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.

Development Story from Kambu area

To read about how the kwa mukonza self-help group built a sand dam and
a demonstration shamba follow the link

http://www.excellentdevelopment.com/news_detail.php?id=98

Emerging journalism

Journalism training is booming in the developing world. David Okwemba of Kenya's The Nation newspaper also helps train journalists. For community-generated podcasts (esp. in Kambu for the radio station) we have envisioned community members conducting interviews and making stories.

Economist story here.

Flood, famine and mobile phones

Technology is altering humanitarian work and now 'the first people on the ground are often computer geeks'. Donors can track shipments, workers on the ground can coordinate with each other, messages can be more easily sent to communities.

This has implications for non-emergency aid. 'The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation draws vast detailed maps showing who is vulnerable to food shortages (“poverty mapping”).' Computers can keep public health records and identify early-warning signs.

Mukuru lets people in the developed world send cash and fuel to developing countries (soon to include Kenya).

Complete story here.

Les usages ruraux de l'internet

French initiative has rural communities setting up their own wifi networks.

Beyond the technical aspects, this solution brings some interesting side effects. The RAN Group notes that its members became more involved in the social life of their areas. The network requires regular meetings to plan periodic maintenance operations. The decision to establish their own Internet service has required the RAN Group to contact municipalities, negotiate with local farmers to plant antennas in fields, calculate costs with potential new members, share technical information among the different RAN members of several regions, etc. In this way, the network generates social links instead of isolating people.

From this article.

WATER - an example project 20km from Kambu

The Usalama Water Project blog aims to bring clean water to a village near Kibwezi and not far from Kambu (more or less here in the middle - kambu towards the bottom right). Engineers without borders (usa) are helping plan and build a pipeline tapping into the existing Mtito Andei pipeline which is 4km away. Obviously we are not going to lay a pipe and that is probably not what is needed anyway but the MDI people might be able to learn/start something useful researching from a blog like this. Note the use of the blog for publicity and accepting donations via paypal.

Want to watch a film about the project?