Another strong opinion piece on Africa’s image in the global media, this one by Ugandan journalist Charles Okwir for Think Africa Press. I particularly like these points: No PR firm on the planet could have delivered the positive coverage that the Arab Spring delivered for Tunisian and Egyptian pro-reform activists. And Al Jazeera has effectively… [Read more…]
February 11, 2012
An interesting challenge to received wisdom about mobile penetration from Slate, via Linda Raftree (@meowtree) and New America Foundation (@newamerica). In the case of mobile connectivity, a rising tide does not lift all boats. As more people use and benefit from mobile services, the divide between adopters and those left out will grow exponentially. This… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
Update 27/1/12: On a second look, the survey component of Portland’s study is arguably more problematic than the data-mining component I’ve focused on below. It makes statements about continent-wide Twitter usage based on a sample of 500 ‘top tweeters’. That’s a) rather small and b) riddled with sample bias. Original: There’s not much data around on… [Read more…]
January 21, 2012
What do you think about when you think of Africa? Drought victims being artfully photographed by superstar international snappers on an Oxfam junket? Because that’s exactly the kind of cliche Comic Relief spin-off See Africa Differently is here to challen- Oh.
January 19, 2012
Taken just north of the Akosombo dam, right where pleasure cruiser Dodi Princess departs. When the dam created Lake Volta, it flooded hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, which a former Canadian logger turned Stanford Sloan graduate is now harvesting: Using floating, chainsaw-equipped harvesters that combine the technologies of forestry and deep-sea oil drilling, B.C.’s Triton… [Read more…]
January 19, 2012
Ghana’s social media users put on a good show a few weeks back when incumbent president John Atta Mills gave his first press conference of 2012. They were critical of him, critical of the topics, critical of the mainstream media’s questions. But when Google’s Ghana country manager Estelle Akofio-Sowah addressed a technology jobs forum at the… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
Two education stories caught my eye today. First, good news for Ashesi College students and graduates here in Ghana. The US-style private university has been added to General Electric Africa’s Executive Schools list, making it a key recruiting ground for a major multinational. Mr. Abu Sulemana, GE Africa’s Chief Information Officer, explained that GE has… [Read more…]
December 15, 2011
Some things worth reading and watching about foreign investment in African land. A few days ago I tweeted a fiery opinion piece on this that ran on Al Jazeera, and last night I RT’d a Guardian piece on the displacement of Samburu tribespeople in Kenya, via @stefosis. As he says, “It’s becoming a huge issue.”… [Read more…]
December 9, 2011
October 1 marked the beginning of the West and Central Africa heat of Apps4Africa 2011, a US-sponsored tech contest that takes a new theme each year. In 2010, it was civil society. This time, climate change. The Ghana sections of my Twitter feed lit up when the results were announced on December 7, because the… [Read more…]
December 6, 2011
By its nature, aid proceeds from instances of want. But instances of want shade too easily into assumptions of dependence, which can serve to perpetuate that very condition: address a need through traditional charitable or government aid and you rob the local economy of a chance to fulfill it. Quite an opportunity cost. Some of the… [Read more…]
May 18, 2012
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