Trends In Africa

The township of Soweto is famous worldwide for its apartheid era images of riots and poverty. Images coming out of the area these days however are often of fashionable young South African’s partying, as numerous brands are using the township as staging post for reaching a rapidly growing black middle class (nicknamed “black diamonds” by marketers for their increasing spending power).

The Soweto Wine Festival expects over 5,000 visitors and is an essential part of the Western Cape based wine industry’s attempt to reach this new market. They describe their audience as:

“black middle class Sowetan residents (commonly referred to as Black Diamonds) and VIP’s plus ex-Sowetan residents who travel from the suburbs to enjoy these evenings with their friends and family, who reside in Soweto. Saying this, we are experiencing more and more black South Africans that reside all over Gauteng, coming into Soweto to enjoy this groundbreaking festival.”

Another increasingly popular event, targeting a slightly younger but similar audience, is the Soweto Beach Festival. Soweto being several hundred kilometres from the sea is held at Power Park Dam, with 400 tons of beach sand imported for the event. The event, sponsored by a host of drink and lifestyle brands, features performances by some of South Africa’s leading musicians.

Other (heavily sponsored events) in Soweto include a beer festival, a spirits festival and the Tour de Soweto (bike race) amongst others.

Jan Chipcase once again brings us a showcase of practical, real world innovation from developing countries. Second in a series on street hacks, he examines dual sim cell phones, diy electronic repair shops, software on demand and fake phones.

Future Perfect: Street Hacks

We’ve talked recently about the collaborative web and about neocartographers. In most of the examples it’s fun and casually useful, but what if theses technologies could save lives?

Fringehog points us to Ushahidi, a site created by a group of Kenyan bloggers that visualizes real time violence occurring in Kenya (since the disputed December 07 presidential elections). Users can text incidents to the site and once confirmed they’re tagged by location and subject.

Fringehog reports:

Why is this important? With all of the famines, wars, floods and other crises in the world today, what good will visualizing the chaos in Kenya do? Friend and fellow blogger Erik Hersman, one of the founders of Ushahidi, answers this question in the most eloquent way I’ve seen yet. In this post he suggests that a digitally connected world not only grants us a front row seat to the rest of the world, but also the power to influence events and create change in a way that was impossible just a few short decades ago. So that events that may occur thousands of miles away are in fact - quite literally - in our digital backyard. Which makes it a lot harder to just sit back and watch.

Ushahidi: Creating a Cartography of Crisis

The United Colors of Benetton has teamed up with Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour for a global campaign in support of Birima, a micro-credit program in Senegal that was founded by the singer. Similar to other micro-finance organizations like Kiva, Birima offers zero interest loans to Senegalese entrepreneurs to get their projects off ground. Additionally, borrowers also receive assistance from Birima advisors on their project and collectively develop a business plan with them.

The campaign features some stunning portraits of Senegalese workers who have used their loans to start up their own businesses. Photographer James Mollison portrayed them with the tools of their trade against a white background in an attempt to represent the “tangible symbols of an Africa that uses the dignity of work to fight poverty, promote equitable development, maximize its resources and take back responsibility for creating its future.”

According to the press release:

…Compared to normal micro-crediting, Birima grants higher loans for a longer period of time provided the submitted project has a positive effect on the community and can guarantee profits and development. Senegal was chosen for the pilot project because it is one of the most stable African countries, albeit with significant differences in income among the population. From Senegal, Birima’s style of advanced credit will be gradually exported to other African nations.

Core concepts of Benetton’s advertising are reiterated in this new campaign. By supporting and promoting a fund to finance work in Senegal, Benetton underlines the importance of co-operating with organizations dedicated to solidarity. At the same time, the campaign emphasizes how the commitment of a single person can put the wheels in motion to generate change in society as a whole.

Africa Works

Jan Chipcase points us to a very useful “street hack” he discovered in Accra, Ghana. Consumers who want to optimize their call costs are combining two SIM cards into one, enabling a normal mobile phone to support multiple phone numbers. This would allow a phone to run two or more service providers at the same time.

According to Jan Chipcase:

The hack is a response to an existing behavior - the practice of carrying separate SIM cards in order to reduce communication costs. It typically costs more to call someone on a different operator than the same and before this hack these consumers were willing to put up with the hassle of turning off the phone, switching in a new SIM card, and waiting for the phone to reboot.

[via Future Perfect]

Regular readers may have noticed that we’ve been banging on about the revolution that the mobile phone is making in the developing world (and therefore the ridiculousness of US-designed inventions such as the misguided $100 laptop). In an article called ‘Do We Really Need A $100 Laptop?’ in August 07, we said,

The mobile phone is one of the most important pieces of technology spreading across the developing world - and it’s changing the way people, communities and business connect with each other in these areas. Outside the US people use phones in a way many Americans can’t really comprehend. In June we argued in the piece The Three Region Theory For Mobile Phones that people have a different relationship to their phones and PCs depending on which one was introduced first to the mass market. Where phones appeared before the PC - as in many developing parts of the world - the phones become the predominant access to the internet - and in some ways the de-facto computer.

On the same theme, the BBC has a great story that explains how the phone is changing education in Africa:

Unfortunately, rich country biases limit understanding of this amazing phenomenon: for those in North America or Western Europe the cell phone is primarily or uniquely a phone designed to make voice calls.

In the rich world, even those who use the mobile for other tasks such as e-mail almost always do so as an adjunct to their “computer” (ie, the desktop or laptop in their home or office): the mobile phone is used for those tasks only when the “computer” isn’t accessible.

…this revolution of personally-financed wirelessly-connected computers largely goes unnoticed by the international development community, and because their paradigm revolves around desktops and laptops they spend millions developing specialised laptops for schoolchildren in developing countries, which will surely only ever reach a small fraction of them, while the network of invisible computers continues its exponential penetration into those same regions, below the radar.

Of course, even in the high-growth areas of sub-Saharan Africa, the fastest growing cell phone market in the world, most people still don’t have a cell phone of their own (though many have access to one via a friend or family member).

But important sub-groups in that region have much higher penetration than the general population, including knowledge workers such as teachers or healthcare providers.

The question we should be asking ourselves, then, is not “how can we buy, and support, and supply electricity for, a laptop for every schoolteacher” (much less every schoolchild), but rather “what mobile software can we write that would really add value for a schoolteacher (or student, or health worker, or businessperson) and that could run on the computer they already have in their pocket?”

The story goes on to look at the impact of mobile banking - something Danah Boyd picks up on her blog and how the troubles in Kenya have impacted the opportunity for Kenyans to get credit for their phones. She explains the system and points out that telephony has become vital for survival:

Kenyan phone users do not have monthly phone plans; they pay for prepaid credits (like most of the world). Prior to the election, getting credits was easy - they were available in kiosks, stores, bars, anywhere you could imagine. Yet, these venues all closed shop after the election because of the violence and looting. Credits have become a rare commodity and the price has skyrocketed. Credits have also turned into a currency and people are trading credits for food and medicine. Credits are worth more than the government’s currency. Because of difficulties in getting credits to citizens, a service called Pyramid of Peace has popped up to help people send credits to Kenyans.

Part of why people are so shocked about what is going on in Kenya right now is because Kenya was so stable. (I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if Gore supporters would’ve taken to the streets after my country’s corrupt election rather than be so complacent.) When people think about what is necessary when everything goes haywire, they normally talk about food, water, shelter, medicine. What does it mean that telephony has become a central player in people’s lives? What does it mean that access to communication technology is necessary for access to food, water, medicine?

Related PSFK Articles Do We Really Need A $100 Laptop? $100 Laptop Seems To Have Crashed No Mention Of Mobile Phones In News Of $100 Laptop Problems

MyG-Life is a new SNS that’s more than a platform for socializing - its larger goal is to teach disadvantaged youth about the basics of graphic animation and how to build their own computer games (which they can share with their friends in their virtual network). Though currently only active in West Virginia and a few US universities, the site is planning to go international in late 2008. The site allows users to evaluate different web-based games, suggest improvements, and use tutorials to help them learn the basics of being a game producer and programmer. Kids are even encouraged to manipulate the open-source code of the games the site producer’s have created and change graphics, text, and create their own remixed versions.  According to American-Israeli Idit Caperton, MyG-Life’s founder, the site is targeted towards students in Israel and Palestinian territories, hoping it might encourage communication and play between youth in the areas. As BBC reports:

“We are a global foundation - our mission is to reach youth globally, and to create multiple networks,” she said. “Cisco gave us some seed funding to start networks in the Middle East to develop the platform, and take Arab-Israelis, Jewish Israelis and Russian immigrants from five different cities and get them all connected through learning how to make games about education, social purpose and social change… That was very successful, and led us to go and do some pilots at the college level at the American university. Now we are in conversations to continue the work with urban Jewish Israelis as well as Palestinian students, and see if, both at the high school level and the college level, we can create this powerful network.”

The site is also in conversation with foundations in India and Amnesty International, looking at incorporating this in their youth strategy for Asia-Pacific.

BBC News: Teach Yourself Game Design

The PlayPump is an incredibly simple but effective invention that helps people in Africa access clean drinking water. While children are playing on a merry-go-round up to 1,400 liters of clean water can be pumped into a tank that stands seven meters above the ground. The tank’s walls are used to place ad billboards while two sides are reserved for educational messages. The revenue from ad-sales is put into the maintenance of each pump.

PlayPumps Site

Current offers a healthy dose of reality with this feature on Lagos, Nigeria, the world’s fastest growing megacity, according to the U.N. (a “megacity” is defined as an urban area with a population of 10 million people or more). The city, which claimed less than 300,000 residents in 1950, now has somewhere between 12 million and 20 million inhabitants, the large number of floating and immigrating residents making it difficult to determine exactly how large the city has become. Learning about Lagos - its dominating informal economy, nearly non-existent infrastructure, rampant corruption, and unsafe health conditions - forces anyone with the conception of the “City of Tomorrow” as being a futuristic, well-oiled, Tomorrowland to seriously reconsider.