Africa
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Outage Africa?
As entrepreneurs spark change, Africa’s electricity future is getting brighter. Women working on solar lighting circuit boards.Photo Credit: UN Women/Gaganjit Singh With the blessing of global institutions increasingly worried by the prospect of climate change, entrepreneurs are hacking out a small-scale, low-carbon path to universal African electrification. What’s encouraging them is the enthusiasm with which >>>
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Cable Commotion
As Africa’s rush for broadband connection continues, Steve Song’s map of African undersea cables can’t help but get tangled up:: I am gobstopped again with the announcement of the BRICs cable. I struggle now to find ways to represent all the impending capacity on a single map without it looking like a dog’s breakfast. What >>>
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Brain Gain Or Drain?
Africa’s got software talent… but for how much longer? What do African techies make of Silicon Valley? What might Silicon Valley make of them? No Prada suits, hoodies or flip flops. No algorithms stolen off dorm room windows. None of that Social Network, San Francisco stuff. Steve Mutinda’s award-winning mobile health app may be designed >>>
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Kenya’s Konza Technology City
Kenya’s plan for a 5,000-acre “Silicon Savannah” some 30 miles from Nairobi. >>>
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Africa’s Mobile Future(s)
Find out what’s ahead: “Mobile Trends Africa 2020”. >>>
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African Tech Joins Up
By developing its developers, Africa’s tech sector hopes to go from ping to kerching. Time was when African software developers didn’t register on Silicon Valley’s radar. No undersea fibre optic cables meant that there wasn’t much of a digital infrastructure in most of sub-Saharan Africa and so accessing and developing its software market was tough >>>
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Dawn of African Tech
African countries are trying to “cheat history,” as one senior UN official I met put it. Barely literate people in the poorest villages, places where there are no schools and the life expectancy is under 50 due to lack of health infrastructure, use mobile phones to listen to the radio, send money, buy and sell >>>
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We Are Here
Visiting pop stars and politicians made it famous. It featured in the Oscar-winning movie The Constant Gardner. But look at a map and you’ll strain your eyes trying to locate the tin shacks and mud huts of Kibera. Although one of Africa’s more densely populated areas – some 250,000 people crammed into 2.3 sq km >>>
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Mob Rules
Africa’s mobile phone kiosks: tech hubs set to rival Silicon Valley? In the West, there’s an app for everything. In Africa, so goes the latest business/development mantra, there’s the mobile phone kiosk. The noise around Africa’s diy mobile phone culture sometimes sounds like a faint repeat of the dotcom hype from 1990s San Francisco. However, >>>
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Fast Company
With the arrival of broadband, sub-Saharan Africa’s tech entrepreneurs are on the verge of take off. Question is: to where? In Buea, southern Cameroon, the tech boys are pulling an all-nighter. Mambe Nanje Churchill’s fingers go hurtling across the keyboard. With his 20-year-old junior looking on, the 24-year-old self-taught veteran of the local cyber café >>>