In my previous blog I said I’d talk in my next one about how I think Africa can feed itself and half the world, and take up its rightful place in the global village market in the process .Well sorry but l I lied! Not at the time you understand; and not about Africa. It’s just that I have changed my mind since and want to tell you instead about a meeting I went to in London last week, called the Guardian Activate Summit. It was all about the application of web-based ICTs (information communication technologies) in making the world a better place.
I had been invited as a speaker, and found myself in very illustrious company. Leaders of huge multinational multimedia and telecom industries and some super-bright young innovators told of the latest things going on in the field of ICT. A lot of it is truly dazzling. But what on earth was I, a peddler of human-powered water pumps, doing in this ethereal web-world?
The session I spoke at was moderated by Ethan Zuckerman, jovial and genial genius, founder of Global Voices. Ethan said some extraordinarily nice things to me about KickStart which encouraged me. My main point was that ICTs are essential and we use them all the time at KickStart in our business operations, to drive efficiency and achieve more with less. And that sure enough the one-acre farmer in Africa these days often uses a cellphone, to send and receive ‘business’ information (not just social stuff) and to send and receive money using Electronic Money Transfer services. Which is great. And that these phones will get smarter and smarter and cheaper and cheaper so that very soon the farmer will be able to do much more than just talk, text and send money with a cellphone. But .. and here is the nub of it … information alone is not enough ! Whats the use of knowing that tomatoes are wanted in Nakuru and are fetching 1,000 shillings per crate if you have no way of producing tomatoes of the right quality on time and have no way of getting them to market??? So we need a whole bunch of ‘web-footed’ (vs web-based) technologies as well – better seeds, post harvest storage, access roads, local value-add industries, a supportive legal environment, and a range of other things - if the one-acre farmer is to really get ahead. So while ICTs are cool, awesome, and indispensable lets not imagine they will resolve the world’s problems without us also developing and disseminating other less fashionable technologies that enable people to make and produce things. Not sure how this argument went down – many of the participants (seemed to me) live almost completely in a virtual world, and probably don’t dig potatoes up that often, so the world of the smallholder African farmer is very very remote and exotic for them. Still, the organizers assured me I did a great job, so perhaps I needn’t enquire further!
There was one particular observation during Activate that I really did appreciate. It was that some of the most exciting and promising new information and communication technologies these days are being pioneered in Africa, not just in Silicon Valley or the Silicon Fens, or in digitally sophisticated places like South Korea. I urge you to find out more, for example, about Ushahidi ….a “crowd-sourcing” system developed in and for the notorious Kibera slum settlement in Nairobi, and originally used to collect, analyze and map information from thousands of ordinary wananchi about stuff going on in Kibera. Later it was used in the post-election violence period in Kenya, to help organize and manage the response, and more recently in Haiti post-earthquake, and now for the Gulf Oil Spill, election monitoring in Guinea … in fact all over the place.
No surprise to some of us, this simply underlines the point I have been making on this site – namely that there are some decidedly smart young people on this continent. And with very few resources and hardly any money they are able to respond to a challenge quickly and effectively. Inventiveness, innovation, enterprising attitude, goodwill, optimism, a practical approach – these are the qualities we have in abundance here. And which form the basis for my assurance to you, which I will get back to as promised, that Africa has what it takes to eradicate its own poverty and to feed the world, or half of it at any rate.
I had been invited as a speaker, and found myself in very illustrious company. Leaders of huge multinational multimedia and telecom industries and some super-bright young innovators told of the latest things going on in the field of ICT. A lot of it is truly dazzling. But what on earth was I, a peddler of human-powered water pumps, doing in this ethereal web-world?
The session I spoke at was moderated by Ethan Zuckerman, jovial and genial genius, founder of Global Voices. Ethan said some extraordinarily nice things to me about KickStart which encouraged me. My main point was that ICTs are essential and we use them all the time at KickStart in our business operations, to drive efficiency and achieve more with less. And that sure enough the one-acre farmer in Africa these days often uses a cellphone, to send and receive ‘business’ information (not just social stuff) and to send and receive money using Electronic Money Transfer services. Which is great. And that these phones will get smarter and smarter and cheaper and cheaper so that very soon the farmer will be able to do much more than just talk, text and send money with a cellphone. But .. and here is the nub of it … information alone is not enough ! Whats the use of knowing that tomatoes are wanted in Nakuru and are fetching 1,000 shillings per crate if you have no way of producing tomatoes of the right quality on time and have no way of getting them to market??? So we need a whole bunch of ‘web-footed’ (vs web-based) technologies as well – better seeds, post harvest storage, access roads, local value-add industries, a supportive legal environment, and a range of other things - if the one-acre farmer is to really get ahead. So while ICTs are cool, awesome, and indispensable lets not imagine they will resolve the world’s problems without us also developing and disseminating other less fashionable technologies that enable people to make and produce things. Not sure how this argument went down – many of the participants (seemed to me) live almost completely in a virtual world, and probably don’t dig potatoes up that often, so the world of the smallholder African farmer is very very remote and exotic for them. Still, the organizers assured me I did a great job, so perhaps I needn’t enquire further!
There was one particular observation during Activate that I really did appreciate. It was that some of the most exciting and promising new information and communication technologies these days are being pioneered in Africa, not just in Silicon Valley or the Silicon Fens, or in digitally sophisticated places like South Korea. I urge you to find out more, for example, about Ushahidi ….a “crowd-sourcing” system developed in and for the notorious Kibera slum settlement in Nairobi, and originally used to collect, analyze and map information from thousands of ordinary wananchi about stuff going on in Kibera. Later it was used in the post-election violence period in Kenya, to help organize and manage the response, and more recently in Haiti post-earthquake, and now for the Gulf Oil Spill, election monitoring in Guinea … in fact all over the place.
No surprise to some of us, this simply underlines the point I have been making on this site – namely that there are some decidedly smart young people on this continent. And with very few resources and hardly any money they are able to respond to a challenge quickly and effectively. Inventiveness, innovation, enterprising attitude, goodwill, optimism, a practical approach – these are the qualities we have in abundance here. And which form the basis for my assurance to you, which I will get back to as promised, that Africa has what it takes to eradicate its own poverty and to feed the world, or half of it at any rate.
It is really great that there's a lot of innovation to make communication a better place. yes, like money transfer has been very easy not only in Africa but also worldwide.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, I wish I can hear you as a speaker.
Ken
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