Tech4Africa Conferencei 2010 was the first of what will hopefully become an annual web and emerging technology conference that brings a global perspective to the African context. Founded by digital maven and entrepreneur Gareth Knightii, Tech4Africa Conference 2010 was held in South Africa at the The Forum | The Campus in Johannesburg on the 12th and 13th of September, 2010. Key note speakers at this years event were Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and Leila Chirayath Janah, founder and CEO of Samasourceiii a social business that connects over 800 women, youth, and refugees living in poverty to digital work.
As delegates to the conference, we were offered the choice each day to either attend either a track of talks of a technology theme or an alternative track of talks that discussed the business behind emerging technologies. Session in the “Technology Track” featured experts in the fields of computer programming, telecommunications engineering and interface development among other fields while the business track was geared towards entrepreneurs, business managers and anyone else interested in listening to expert advice on content, mobile. internet and other emerging technologies. I had initially planned to attend sessions in the Technology Track on the first day and sessions in the Business Track on the next day, but I instead chose to switch between tracks depending on what I thought would be the more relevant topic for me at the time.
Is that a spud you're speaking through?
The first session in the Technology track hosted Steve Song. As the Telecommunications Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundationiv, Steve Song looks for ways to to lower the cost of communications infrastructure and raise awareness of the potential impact of affordable infrastructure on socio-economic growth. In his Tech4 Africa talk entitled “3 Pieces of Kit for Neighbourhood Network”, Steve introduced us to The Village Telcov, a community based telephone network based on open source applications. Using a network of low-cost mini routers called the Mesh Potato, designed and developed by Steve and his team at The Village Telco, entrepreneurs can set up and operate community telephone networks that would anybody residents in the area to make free”local” calls to one another. The sustainable business opportunity lies in connecting the community network to the national telephone of mobile grid allowing subscribers to make calls outside of the community network using pay-as-you-go vouchers.
Affordable access to communication is encapsulated in the Millennium Development Goals because of the proven positive impact it has towards progress in national development. At the community level a networks like the Village Telco would have a positive social impact due to the ease with with communication across an area like township could become. For example, the Village Telco would enable people to consult with their local clinic over the phone if they needed to confirm the dosage for prescribed medicine or even receive diagnosis for ailments that wouldn't necessarily require the in-office consultation of doctor.
We all gave Steve a resounding round of applause after he was disturbed mid-speech by a phone call on his demonstration “Mesh Potato” connected handset from fellow Shuttleworth Foundation fellow, Steve Vosloo, who sat in the back row of the auditorium with a similar device. Steve and his team have chosen to grant their product open source licensing allowing anyone to reproduce or further develop their idea.
Impressed by it all, I couldn't help but wonder if this was a possible solution to our quest for rural connectivity. To view or download the presentation given by Steve Song visit http://www.slideshare.net/ssong/tech4africa-the-village-telco
Business for a Change
The keynote speech on the first day was delivered by Leila Chirayath Janah, CEO of Samasource. Samasourcevi is a not-for-profit startup who connect women, youth and refugees in communities at the bottom of the pyramid with an opportunity for income by utilising the internet and web-based technologies to outsource bulk data related tasks on behalf of major corporations on the other side of the digital divide. In beginning her speech, Leila observed that literacy levels in Africa were a lot higher than most of us assumed. The continent's challenge, however, lay in the fact that that opportunities to generate an income especially for women and young school leavers were scarce. Low employment rates are prevalent across the continent especially in territories ravaged by war and communities that host refugees. By setting up ICT centres with internet connectivity or using pre-existing centres like internet cafe's, Samasource eliminates the need for members of communities they work in to travel the long distance to the urban areas to look for work by training them to use the internet and then providing them with jobs that might involve data entry, book digitization, internet-based research, business listings verification, audio transcription, or video captioning. Stating that “the internet is not just an information superhighway, it's a work superhighway”, Leila further made a case for how the internet and various tools that can be built around it allow for outsourced work opportunities in areas that organisations have never imagined getting their work done in. This bodes well especially for organisations with social responsibility values since they are pleased to get involved with a project that yields both a financial and a social return on investment.
Inspired largely by the period she served in Nigeria as a teacher, Samasource is a wonderful example of one can use internet technology to address local employment problems. She still faces a challenge in convincing company's to give her work, however she says she is encouraged by the fact that she has proven that quality work can be done regardless of location.
Leila's keynote speech is available for view at http://tech4africa.com/blog/class-of-2010/presentations/
Technology Allows Us To Be Efficient and Innovative (especially in a crisis)
In between talks, I attended a couple of discussion panels on day one. I returned to Tech Track eventually to hear Erik Hersman's speak about “How they Built Ushahidi ...”. The story behind Ushahidivii, a crowd sourced crisis mapping tool, is amazing in so many ways. One spectacular thing that it does prove is that great work can be come from this continent even during the worst imaginable conditions. Ushahidi (kiSwahili for the word “Testimony”) was conceptualised, developed and launched in six days during the nightmare period of Kenya's 2008 post-election violence. It is a web based platform that shows dots on a map based on the location indicated in reports received by sms and email. The information received, which is usually messages for help, helps volunteer organisations to see which the most hard hit regions are and therefore enabling them to channel their relief efforts accordingly.
During his talk Erik walked us through the their time-line of successes and failures since they first built Ushahidi. He gave us insight into why they've chosen to structure themselves as a small team organisation capable of working together on Ushahidi regardless of where their physical location maybe. Ushahidi has been re-developed and used around the world to map the various other situations that could benefit from crowd-sourced data on map including crime in Atlanta, the USA swine flu epidemic, monitoring of the the Indian and Iran elections by Al Jazeera, the Haiti earthquake aftermath and most recently during the Kenyan constitutional referendum..
Erik is a spectacular speaker and I'd encourage you to look for his speeches mad at TED or other events. Among other interesting projects he also keeps a blog (http://www.afrigadget.com/) that discusses African innovation in technology. You can view slides from his Tech4Africa presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/whiteafrican/making-ushahidi-tech4africa-talk
Other Sessions
Other sessions that I sat in during the first day of Tech4Africa were expert panel discussions on “All You Need To Know About The Market”, “Mobile Content for Grownups ...” and a Q&A session with though leaders like Dustin Diaz (Twitter), John Resig ( jQuery creator), Jonathan Snook (Yahoo), Joe Stump (formerly of Digg now with SimpleGeo) and Andy Budd (a leading User Experience designer).
Links
i Tech4Africa – http://www.tech4africa.com
ii Gareth Knight – http://http://www.oneafrikan.com/
iii Samasource - http://www.samasource.org/
iv The Shuttleworth Foundation - http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
v The Village Telco - http://www.villagetelco.org/
vi Samasource - http://www.samasource.org
vii Ushahidi – http://www.ushahidi.org
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