The Rhino Charge event is an offroading and camping event that raises money for Rhino conservation in Kenya. It is an event that many in Nairobi look forward to every year. A group of Kenyans have taken the initiative to plant trees after the event. It is one thing to complain about deforestation, and quite another to come together and do something about it.
Below is a picture of the saplings prepared for planting at Narasha Forest. How neat is that!!
If you are attending the Rhino Charge, its not too late to RSVP on the Facebook event page,, kindly do so as the number of confirmed attendees will determine how many saplings will be made available. The District Officer has pledged to provide a sapling for each person who RSVP’s and shows up.
DATE: 1st June 2009
TIME: 10:30 am – 01:30 pm
LOCATION: Narasha Forest right behind the district forest office at Eldama Ravine.
DIRECTIONS: At the town, turn right after the Kobil gas station (DO NOT proceed towards Maji Mazuri – Timboroa – Eldoret Rd), through the town along the Ravine – Kamwosor – Kaptagat – Eldoret Road. After the river/bridge drive about 0.7 kms from town center on your left sign board, M.E.N.R. Eldama Ravine Forest Station.
I applaud the organizing team, lead by Gerald Chelelgo, the contributions of Kipkorir Chemirmir, and last but not least, the District Forest Officer Timon Mboga.
The idea of coming together during social events to do something positive for the environment is so inspiring to me, and I hope to join Gerald for the next excursion, and to incorporate this in future events i am involved in.
Maker Faire Africa (MFA), a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and invention, will take place August 13-15 at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Ghana’s capital, Accra.
As one of the contributing editors of AfriGadget, I am incredibly happy to see this event come together. When I started pitching in afew articles on Afrigadget, it was partly because I really liked Emeka Okafor’s idea of ‘A Make Philosophy for Africa’
A MAKE for Africa will be a non-limited set of values and practical ideas that evolve, germinate, propagate and replicate with informed nudges…
The upcoming event is Ghana is one giant nudge, that I hope you can support either by spreading the word – grab a badge here, or by donating a small sum towards making Make Faire Africa happen.
I finally upgraded this blog to Wordpress Version 2.7.1. Initially I was worried about the theme not working with the new version, but seems like my apprehension was unfounded.
- Mobile press to make viewing my blog on your phone that much more pleasurable. This plugin was created by the good folks at Younique, a social marketing company out of South Africa. @Tylerreed good stuff man. Mobile press works beautifully on Opera and Iphone. I would highly recommend it. Do let me know if you encounter any problem on other mobile browsers.
- I am still trying to figure out how to use Zemanta to deal bring in ‘related’ links for posts.
Goodies for you:
A wallpaper that my talented relative Jepchumba designed, click on this image to download it from flickr.
Link to Beyonce’s video. I shamelessly borrowed the title for this blogpost. Needless to say, the video has bsolutely nothing to do with upgrading wordpress blogs
Industrial woven sacks that are typically used to package fertilizer and grain are transformed into chic bags.
Spotted October 2008 at Moyo Lake Gift shop in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Unrelated PS: Architecture enthusiasts, particularly those interested in Nairobi, help us out with this mystery on flickr? We used to play a game we called ‘Wapi?’ which means ‘where’ in Swahili. I think we started this game in 2006, we’d post a picture on our blogs and have everyone guess as to the location. Steve had the most difficult ones, JKE and Mental too. Might be time to revive the game? *off to go look for an image to stump y’all with*
Spotted in Nandihills, Kenya January 2009. I saw one just like this in Bungoma, but was not quick enough with the camera to get a good shot. Turns out Zain is using these as pre-fab offices in rural areas. I like the repurposing going on.
Spotted in Nairobi, January 2008
At Lagoon, a bar/nyama choma (roast meat) joint.
The 3 SAT3 countries of South Africa, Egypt and Senegal could be said to have fibre optic connections to the rest of the world or what others may call ‘true broadband’, the rest of the countries in Africa have to contend with VSAT connections or have their internet traffic routed through the above named SAT3 countries.
In the case of Kenya, fibre has been laid by companies such as Kenya Data Networks for communication within the country. The problem has been connecting Kenya to the rest of the world. That is where the bottleneck has been. The government of Kenya has been laying cable in many parts of the country, so is just a matter of time before high speed internet access is made available to urban areas and even smaller towns.
Do note the VSAT connections can have broadband-like speeds, so what we should look at is the connection costs and amount of bandwidth available.
For example, an E1 line (equivalent to the American T1) of 2 Mbps to ISPs costs 4000 USD in Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, 7000 USD in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, 32,000 USD in Cameroon, 25,000 USD in SA.
In residential access Telkom Orange charges about 5990 Ksh (approx. 75 dollars) for home access line of 256 kpbs downloads and 128 kpbs uploads per month. Many people use the Huawei wireless modems E220, E160 particularly in Nairobi with the 3G connections, utilizing a pay-as-you-go plan. Kenyan readers, how much do you pay for your internet access? what kind of speed do you get? Do you have a preferred service provider?
By and large, broadband access is very expensive. There are also other projects like TEAMS and EASSY (Quasi-Govt. consortium: Telkom Kenya/Orange is a member, as is Safaricom and Econet) that plan to connect parts of Africa to the rest of the world by Fibre optic Cable. So far SEACOM has arrived first and the prospect of having more competition could result in the cost coming down. Though that may indeed take time. For now, companies herald the arrival of SEACOM’s fibre optic line because it would mean an increase in productivity for businesses that depend on the internet. For example, there is a young businessman in Nairobi with an IT outsourcing company, with his relatively decent connection, he still has to wait for more than 5 minutes to download a 26MB file. In a few months with the SEACOM cable reaching Nairobi, the same download could take less than a minute and he can move on to other tasks. He has employees who often have to upload files via ftp to servers in the US. With the faster speeds it will make their jobs that much easier. He is not even too concerned about the cost right now, the overarching benefit is well…broadband.
There are other factors such as open access, latency, and reliability, but talking about that would be tantamount to counting chicks before they hatch no?
As always, feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments or via twitter if you prefer to be pithy.
PS: To keep up with the African Telecommunications Union conference, Becky Wanjiku is live blogging from Port Louis, Mauritius.
Now this is positively surprising, though not to many Africa-watchers… Africa is hot for business now, and its popping up in Time Mag’s trend watch. Great to see that ideas espoused at TEDGlobal Arusha 2007 are reaching the ‘center’ from the fringes.
It’s great to see Time magazine present some trends that are not obvious, well-worn, are already over. They take a chance in this list of ‘10 Ideas Changing The World Right Now.‘ The line up includes not your usual suspects. With any list like this, there is no telling which are likely, but they are at least plausible. Two extra points for a positive African scenario. The ten trends are featured in the pic below; details at the link.
In the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder…what of the global economic crisis? Wouldn’t that put a dent in this positive outlook? Oz has a great run down of how the global crisis affects Africa.
Blurb:
1. A slump in external demand affects exports and remittances.
2. A slump in external demand lowers commodity prices. Oil producing nations such as Nigeria are particularly vulnerable.
3. Lack of credit is stifling capital inflows and trade finance in the more advanced markets – such as Nigeria, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
4 The region is not immune to financial problems of its own. Credit has ballooned in many countries. Banks’ loan books are often concentrated in commodity-related industries.
5. Some retail investors borrowed heavily to punt on local stock markets.
For those in the African technology space, the challenges of gathering data from the field in areas that are not quite ‘on-the-grid’ are apparent. Let me just keep it short by saying ‘Houston, we have a power problem’. Charging laptops when you are off-grid is not easy, but if you have a Nokia E71 that can stay for 3 days without needing a re-charge…well, you get the idea.
Last October I excitedly proclaimed just how much I loved Nokia because they had a data gathering app for E71’s, which they were making available for NGO’s to test out. Please forgive me for not blogging about it. but you can find more info on the mobile active wiki, or watch this 2 minute you-tube clip on tracking the Dengue fever in Brazil.
This brings me to the latest news from FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS forms provides a killer functionality of basically using SMS as the data carrying pigeon. This is how it works. The person running the FrontlineSMS hub creates forms with questions for the person in the field to fill in with information. The field agent only needs to have downloaded the forms client from http://forms.frontlinesms.com/, this will work on any Java enabled phone, which is preety much a whole lotta phones. They can then receive a form from the hub via sms, fill it in and send it back again via SMS. Hmm I like my data-pigeon metaphor! This eliminates the need for a GPRS connection. If the person is entering the data at a place with no mobile signal, the information is still saved in ‘offline’ mode until the phone has a mobile signal. I do have to point out that with \o/ forms you do not require an E71 or high end PDA like with the Nokia data gathering tool. I still heart Nokia, and would highly recommend the E71 if you need a smartphone.
This functionality adds more fuel to the mobile => Cloud paradigm that I feel will redefine the participation and engagement with communities in rural areas. Once the information gets back to the hub, it can sync with a web app like Ushahidi or any other web enabled implementation that takes input from the Frontline SMS hub. The pretty graphs and visualizations are best presented on the web IMO. Personally, I am looking forward to using FrontlineSMS \o/ forms to plan a kick-ass tree planting party!
PS: For \o/ users in Kenya, do note that FrontlineSMS works with the Safaricom E220 modem. If it works with the new USB stick version E160? kindly leave a comment.
When I met Ken during the Plan International workshop in Kenya, he said something that I cant help but pass along. “Do not ask for permission, ask for forgiveness” Keep doing whatever it is you love to do, and do not be afraid to try something new. I think Tonee and I co-opted that for our new-years motto. Seriously though, if you have ideas for using \o/ in your work, check out www.frontlinesms.com. Ken and his team have built a very useful data gathering tool that could give your project even more reach. Plus, the folks in the forums are super-nice. Really.
To say that I feel so lucky is an understatement. Let me just get this out of the way “omg omg omg I am listening to Vint Cerf speak!’
Predictions
There will be millions of devices plugged into the internet. For example a sensor for his wine cellar, E.gArch Rock – Actuator’s needed to make the sensor turn it back on.
DNSSEC will have increased importance in the security of the web.
Vint loves sensors. He goes through a list of sensors he could add to his wine cellar, even the wine bottles.
IPV6
It is my fault that we ran out of IP address space – Laughter from the audience.
cloud computing introduces the internet problem all over again. How can clouds talk to each other?
well, just watch this for yourself? I am seriously in awe. InterPlaNet sounds fantastically cool. In watching his talk, i am reminded to be curious, keep your mind expanding just like the universe is. I hope to see Interstellar internet at some point. If he’s not losing packets with InterPlanet, my guess is Insterstellar internet would be just as successful.
Kenyan, African, global soul, tech and a strong advocate for renewable energy in Africa. This blog is my space to share information about my interests and experiences, ranging from the occasional travelogue, product review or information relating to the projects I am involved in.
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