I chose to address the acute need for creating enabling environments on the ground for new technology companies, the present lack of seed-stage financing to fund their growth and opened with the ambitious question, Can an African tech entrepreneur change the world?

This might sound like hyperbole, but I believe (as do many others) that something big is happening here. A combination of pivotal factors including access to broadband, a youthful demographic and widespread mobile adoption, coupled with entrepreneurship and investment, will enable the African digerati to radically shape their future—not in a figurative sense, but in a real, measurable way. Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora has been an outspoken proponent of this ideal for years. Much of his thinking is neatly captured in this piece which recently appeared in the Globe and Mail, guest edited by the indomitable Ory Okolloh.

I had a tough act to follow after Nick Tadd, Teddy, Steven King of Omidyar Networks and Tidjane Deme of Google, but managed to pull off a (mostly) coherent talk despite the jet lag.

The visuals from my presentation are below. Rather than reproduce the content of my talk in blog post form, I’ve made detailed notes along with slides in PDF form available here (508 KB).

Overall, the event was a rare opportunity to share ideas, network, make partnerships and connect offline with loads of people whose work I’ve followed online for quite some time. I left the conference with my head spinning and delved into many conversations in DC over the too-short days that followed.


These and other photos from day two of the conference can be found on Ralston Smith’s flickr set.

I later told Erik, half-jokingly, that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting half a dozen TED Fellows as well.

Long before the March 3rd iHub launch, it became clear that something truly unique was taking shape here. Too often, young African software engineers, designers, researchers and innovative thinkers (often referred to as the “Cheetah generation”) labor in isolation and with limited resources, working on the same or similar problems that someone else, somewhere has likely already solved. Just as important, others may be venturing down a path filled with insurmountable obstacles and dead ends.

The idea behind the iHub—and other new technology labs cropping up across Sub-Saharan Africa—is to put a group of exceptionally smart “doers” under one roof, provide them with a top notch work environment, generate ideas at a rapid pace, filter out the dead ends, present the best candidates to investors and produce viable businesses (and success stories) along the way. The end goal isn’t to generate wild profits for the iHub itself under an exclusive brand, but rather to grow a stronger technology community that hackers, researchers, policymakers and VCs are naturally drawn to.

It’s not a far-fetched idea that world class products and services can grow out of a place like the iHub. Africa is a continent renowned for innovations conceived and built from limited resources. Countless examples exist of indigenous technologies borne from constraints that have led to hugely successful solutions. Among them is M-Pesa, Kenya’s popular mobile banking and payment system, whose model has only recently been prototyped in the West. Likewise, witness how Ushahidi, an open source software effort conceived in the wake of Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence has elevated Africa’s global tech status and attracted worldwide acclaim for its rapid deployments in conflict and crisis zones such as the DRC, Gaza, Haiti and Chile, as well as serving as an invaluable tool for election monitoring. Even Washington DC has Kenya to thank for the part it played in cleaning up after Snowmageddon.

When the “Why I blog about Africa” meme made the rounds of the blogosphere awhile back, I mentioned the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship I observed in Cameroon and elsewhere on the continent. I made reference to bearing witness to “an African Renaissance” fueled by ICT and led by a young generation of idealists.

It’s an open secret now that the African Renaissance is already in its early stages. The continent is undergoing a period of rapid transformation due in part to increasingly faster and cheaper bandwidth which is being utilized by young Africans armed with laptops, smart phones and bright ideas.

This video, produced by the iHub’s neighbors the 1Percent Club in the iLab, captures some of the buzz and creativity on the ground in Nairobi:

We’ve observed the same enthusiasm and immense potential for open collaboration in our coworking and incubation space at Limbe Labs. Ideas get cross-pollinated, professional networking occurs spontaneously and businesses are accelerated at a faster pace.

In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss some ideas brainstormed in Nairobi for how this emergent tech hub network can better support African entrepreneurs.

I’ll be covering BarCamp for the duration of the event, which will include posting live updates and photos as well as engaging attendees with comments and questions from readers. It’s a participatory medium just like BarCamp, so I hope you’ll join the conversation.

You can also follow the twitter stream with the hashtag #barcampcameroon. We have a professional videographer who will be assisting us with interviews, so we hope to have some nicely edited YouTube videos in the days following the event.

Edit: wondering what this BarCamp Cameroon business is all about? Read a recent interview with one of the organizers.

Season after season, year after year, people set fire to African landscapes to create and maintain farmland and grazing areas. People use fire to keep less desirable plants from invading crop or rangeland, to drive grazing animals away from areas more desirable for farming, to remove crop stubble and return nutrients to the soil, and to convert natural ecosystems to agricultural land. The burning area shifts from north to south over the course of the year, in step with the coming and going of Africa’s rainy and dry seasons.

NASA has previously published some impressive seasonal fire patterns of the African continent, using Terra and Aqua satellite telemetry data. More recently, the University of Maryland, in partnership with NASA and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, has created the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS). FIRMS combines remote sensing and GIS technologies to deliver near real-time global hotspot/active fire locations to natural resource managers and other stakeholders around the world. Here’s a dynamic map of Africa’s bush fires plotted over the last 48 hours:

As you can see, the most intense fire activity is located around Angola, southern DRC, Zambia, Mozambique and Madagascar. This is consistent with seasonal fire patterns for this time of year.

While fire is a part of the natural cycle of the seasonally dry grasslands and savannas of Africa, ecologists and climatologists have reason to be concerned about Africa’s intense burning. The frequency with which fires return to previously burned areas helps determine which species of plants (and therefore animals) can survive. When the fire-return interval is too quick, the land may become degraded and unusable for farming or grazing. In the semi-arid and fragile Sahel, land degradation through overuse of fire or overgrazing can create pockets of desert. The massive amount of burning that occurs in Africa each year creates carbon dioxide and aerosol particles, both of which play a role in global climate and may create a public health hazard as well (as one who has lived through many of Central West Africa’s fire seasons, I can attest to the latter).

Seasonal burning of dry grassland and savanna is one issue, but slash and burn agriculture of Africa’s forestland is a different matter. Near real-time mapping resources such as FIRMS are invaluable tools for advocacy, outreach and community education.

For more information about this topic, check out blogger Andriankoto Ratozamanana’s TED Global talk on the environmental crisis posed by the “crazy slash and burn” of Madagascar’s forests and the positive steps being taken to remedy the problem.

Related posts:
White African – Malagasy Bloggers Unite: Foko
USAID – Slashing “Slash-and-Burn” Agriculture

We had a lengthy chat with Quentin and Michael following their presentation, where I learned that Quentin—who, incidentally, was born in Kenya—has devoted much of his time to finding new ways of networking computers so they can be provided for the billions of people who are unable to afford a PC. He’s also famous for a piece of web history involving a coffee pot and a camera. More on that later.

A Radically Different Approach
The motivation behind Ndiyo, says Quentin, “came out of an awareness that the traditional way that we’ve done networked computing—of having one computer per person connected by a bit of network cable—is never going to be a viable way to provide IT to the world.” This model of providing networked computing, he points out, is over a quarter century old and has remained fundamentally unchanged.

Meanwhile, PCs, after Moore’s Law, have followed a pattern of geometric growth in processing capabilities. Today’s desktop PC is easily capable of hosting a multi-user system, yet sits idle most of the time. In theory, there should be enough surplus computing power available to provide access to the billions of people who could benefit from ICT—if it could be distributed equitably, that is.

Quentin saw that the “one user, one PC” paradigm just didn’t make economic or functional sense for the developing world. The conventional PC-based networking model is so intrinsically wasteful and expensive in terms of energy, resource and time inputs that it has effectively blocked access to ICT in poorer nations.

Moreover, networked computing should be easier to manage and support, especially for small organizations, cybercafés and schools. Another grounding principle of Ndiyo is to ensure that the world’s IT infrastructure remains open and is not captured by proprietary hardware and software, or dependent on a small number of Western companies.

It is with this philosophy, driven by a passion for social justice, technical challenges and a commitment to using Open Source software and open standards wherever possible, that Ndiyo was founded.

Instead of making PCs cheaper, Ndiyo makes them easier to share. It’s a radical approach based on an old idea that makes good sense: thin client computing. Ndiyo provides a new model—another form of “plumbing” if you will—based on a novel piece of open hardware called a Nivo.

From Coffee Pots to Nivos
To grasp the elegance of the Ndiyo system, it’s worth revisiting a Cambridge coffee pot in the early 1990’s. Quentin is widely credited as the inventor of the world’s first webcam, which pushed pictures of the departmental coffee pot over a network so his fellow engineers could see when it was fresh. Later, as an AT&T researcher, he became one of the original developers of VNC, a free and extremely useful protocol that lets you operate another PC remotely. Descendents of this protocol are now built-in to the Windows and Mac operating systems.

VNC remains an invaluable tool today, but there’s a noticeable difference between sitting in front of a PC and operating one over a VNC connection. For Ndiyo, the thin-client had to function exactly like a normal PC. The problem required a unique piece of hardware, a specialized “frame buffer” as Michael Dales describes it, to push pixels fast down a network cable.

The solution is a small widgetized device called a Nivo (for “Network In, Video Out”) with ports for a mouse and keyboard, VGA video and an Ethernet connection centered around a custom chip developed by DisplayLink, a company created by Quentin in 2003.

Instead of starting with a PC and seeing what we could take out, we began with a monitor and asked what was the minimum we had to add to give a workstation fully capable of typical ‘office’ use. Some of the original VNC team were involved in the design of the new software and protocol, which combines lessons learned from VNC with the need for a very fast, simple device optimised for high-speed networks.

The Nivo is an “ultra-thin client,” allowing the power of a PC to be shared between several users at once simply by plugging in a network cable. The Ndiyo system takes advantage of a key feature of every Linux distribution—support for multiple user sessions out-of-the-box. An arbitrary number of Nivo boxes can be connected to a single PC, with between five and ten clients as a reasonable load.

The Ndiyo System in Action
Ndiyo’s founders like to point out that their system isn’t vaporware—it’s a real solution that works today. The “Internet Cafe in a Box” is a concept they designed to illustrate the affordability and simplicity of a typical cybercafé using an Ndiyo system. It could equally be used for a school computer lab or a small office. All that’s required is a PC to act as the server, the Ubuntu Linux Ndiyo Edition CD-ROM (which installs in half an hour), six Nivos, six flat-panel screens, a few network cables and an inexpensive network switch to connect them together.

The system is easy to set up, affordable, open, robust, is less harmful to the environment and less dependent upon technical support than a conventional PC-based network. With a power draw of just 3 watts for each Nivo (or about 5 if you connect a mouse and keyboard) the energy cost savings alone are substantial.

Ndiyo systems have been successfully piloted in partnership with the GSM Association and mobile network operators in parts of the world which have typically had poor Internet connectivity; Bangladesh and South Africa.

The trials involved both Edge and 3G mobile networks to provide broadband Internet connections to servers, each of which runs a number of local Ndiyo workstations. The Ndiyo architecture enables many users to share not just the cost of the computer, but also of the internet connectivity. Here’s a video of the trial in South Africa:

The Ndiyo Starter Kit is available to people interested in building their own projects with Ndiyo technology.

Final Thoughts
The Ndiyo model and the philosophy behind it are very compelling, for several reasons.

On a practical level, the environmental benefits and energy cost savings of an Ndiyo-type system are obvious. A client which consumes 5 watts verses 300 or more is clearly advantageous. I imagine it would be possible to provide backup power to an entire Ndiyo cluster with a single UPS device, or even to supply constant power using a renewable energy source. This is a big consideration for developing countries where power infrastructure is often less than reliable or nonexistent.

Ndiyo also provides an alternative to traditional Western notions of how technologies should be deployed, used and paid for in developing countries. Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and refurbished PCs are two different approaches that spring to mind. Refurbished PCs are potentially transformative, but have a lot of hidden costs including power consumption, spare parts, support and maintenance. Perhaps instead of unloading tons of obsolete PCs on developing countries, a market-oriented solution with new or refurbished flat panel monitors could be tried instead, used with Nivo clients to build robust clusters.

The Ndiyo cluster also leverages ideas from mobile phone sharing—a concept which needs no introduction to Africans, and takes greater account of conditions on the ground where these systems will be used.

Find out more about Ndiyo. Listen to an interview with Stafford-Fraser. Read their executive summary, check out their FAQ and follow Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Michael Dales on twitter.

If you’d like updates on more stories like this, you can follow me on twitter here.

With a surplus of time and broadband, I ended up crawling YouTube for snippets of Cameroon, which is where I stumbled upon this professionally edited, tastefully scored clip:

The videographer has done a remarkable job of capturing Buea, with an emphasis on the market in Buea Town. It opens with some nice aerial shots followed by a trip up the main road past dozens of places I recognize. I was able to identify my butcher’s stand in Clerk’s Quarters, the Tolé tea fields and landmarks around Molyko and elsewhere. If you listen closely during breaks in the soundtrack you may hear some Pidgin English spoken. Perhaps best of all are the many typically mundane scenes of things like mamas selling their wares in the market, piles of cocoyams, okra, bundles of bitter leaf, plantains, palm oil and dried fish—things that I’d grown accustomed to seeing every day which are of course totally absent here.

I can say with pride that this is my town.

The trouble, it seems, stems from the zoo’s use of Maasai guides (billed as “warriors” in their bios) as cultural interpreters who, ostensibly, are on hand to help visitors understand the relationship between animals and people in Africa.  Some concerned professors and students at the University of Washington pointed out in an August 8 Seattle Times article that, in addition to marketing the “exotic” and associating Africans with animals, the practice harkens back to days when zoos used people of color as accessories to exhibits.

The debate, however, began on the Internet more than a month prior at the H-Africa Discussion Network, a scholarly listserv for issues related to African history, culture and Africa studies.  Knowing that I was a Seattle native, Deborah forwarded a digest of the discussion to me in an email.  One contributor to the thread went beyond the issue of race and pointed out the cultural mishmash presented by the zoo’s exhibit:

The Zoo markets this program with the word “Masai” [sic]. But its opening day ceremonies program lists only Guinean musicians, a group of “Kenyan” acrobats from the Mombasa coast hotel circuit, a “Bantu” high school girl’s chorus, and a musical group of Zimbabweans, Guineans and Ghanaians.  All worthy in their own way.  But does this not have the effect of genericizing “Africa”?   I’m also puzzled as to why this production includes a “Swahili language guide” illustrated with photos of the Masaai “cultural interpreters,” and a program on “beading in Swahili” (which seems to be the only portion of the exhbit explicitly described as “help[ing] support the zoo’s conservation efforts in Africa”).  Since I (perhaps mistakenly) thought Maa, not Swahili, is the Masaai’s native tongue, the cynic in me wonders whether the intent is to capitalize on the common American Kwanzaa/Lion King notion of Swahili as “the” African language. 

After seeing the zoo’s exhibit, another respondent wrote:

As it is, I saw little that was essentially Masai or African with a bunch of animals laying around in their pseudo-natural environments, the same animals they’ve had laying around for the last several years.  Bluntly, there’s no real cultural exposure going on here.  That “Masai” and “authentic African” is plastered over everything seems little more than an exploitative expropriation and genericizing of the name Masai and anything African to sell more zoo tickets.

I must confess that prior to coming to Africa, if I’d seen this story in the press I might’ve dismissed it out of hand as an artifact of America’s obsession with political correctness.  After living for a year in Cameroon, however, I’ve not only gotten to know Africans from all corners of the continent but also developed an awareness of the vast differences between the various tribes and ethnic groups within the country I now call home.  So how do I respond to the Woodland Park Zoo’s “Maasai Journey”?  Call it a cop out, perhaps, but I’ll reserve judgment since I haven’t seen the exhibit myself.  If anyone at home has visited it or is planning a trip to the zoo soon, your comments are welcome.

Still, I think the zoo could do a lot worse.  To wit, here are a couple of photos I took of the “Africa Lounge” in SeaTac International airport on June 12th of 2006, the day I left for Peace Corps orientation in Philadelphia:

Note the faux weathered, rusty corrugated tin roof, zebra-patterned lampshades and ceiling fans.  The menu features an item dubbed the “Zulu Pulled Pork Platter” or some such thing, too.  Now that’s expropriation of a generic, sanitized “Africa” if I’ve ever seen it!

So I took at stab at writing my own condensed personal history, but ended up feeling woefully inadequate trying to compete with Jimmy’s tales of adventure. I crash bicycles. Jimmy Buffet crashes seaplanes. I take off from work to join the US Peace Corps. Jimmy Buffet takes off in fighter jets from the decks of US Navy aircraft carriers. And so on.

Maybe this’ll be easier. Ten things, huh? OK, here goes:

1. In our early years, living on the island of Okinawa, my kid sister and I picked up Japanese before English.
2. For the last decade, the steel in my right leg routinely sets off airport metal detectors. It was a fun novelty at first that has since grown tiresome.
3. I can recite Hamlet’s soliloquy from memory.
4. Despite the fact that I lived on a houseboat in Seattle for many years, I’ve never seen the romantic comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
5. Unable to convince anyone else of the wonder of the idea, I spent two weeks alone in the backcountry of Death Valley, CA.
6. I once dined on a seven-course meal of cobra (including the snake’s blood, bile and beating heart) at a clandestine location in Hanoi next to a table full of drunk soldiers with AK-47s. A week later I ate a dog in Sapa near the Chinese border. I’d rather forget the latter.
7. I’ve ridden a horse with a broken leg (mine, not the horse’s) in the mountains of Peru (see #2).
8. My Uncle Bill had a speaking part in the hit TV series “Northern Exposure” which was partly shot in the very nice town of Roslyn, Washington in the Cascade foothills. (I only discovered this recently after Heather and Joe lent me the series on DVD.)
9. I can balance on a stationary bicycle with a beverage in one hand indefinitely.
10. Unlike Jimmy Buffet, I have never recorded a hit album.

I could hardly believe my luck. The frameset is a steel 80’s vintage Atala, an Italian marque I hadn’t encountered before, but it has the same classic geometry common to many European frame builders I was acquainted with. Almost immediately I was reminded of my trusty Ciöcc, hanging in a dark storage unit some 8,000 miles distant—the first new Italian road frame I’d scrimped and saved for while working as a messenger way back when. The pearl blue paint of the Atala, though chipped and scraped up, was largely intact as were the decals, including one proudly claiming “Campion del Mondo” with the years it was ridden to victory. Inspecting it from every angle for cracks, dents or evidence of repairs, I was taken by details like the engraved seat stay ends, heart-shaped cutouts in the lugwork and chromed fork crown. Even better, it had what appeared to be the original Campagnolo headset, a decent seatpost, bottom bracket, a fine polished 3T quill stem with matching drop bar and, as luck would have it, a single Modolo caliper in working order.

Remarkably, the components that came with the frame were exactly what I needed from my parts list. No more, no less. I had truly found a frame with an African soul. As if it needed any more cred, I was told it was raced by the previous owner in the storied Tour de Cameroon (even if it weren’t true, I didn’t care). Might these all be signs that the African Fixie was meant to be?

Tonight I stroll past the tail end of the row and receive the usual calls; “white man—Douala!”, “white man—Mutengene!” Every so often I hear “le blanc!” which never fails to take me back to pre-service training in Francophone territory. Along the way to the head of the line I stop and get a soft serve ice cream for 100 francs. There is a hawker calling for Buea but I pass his empty car in search of one with at least two or three people idling inside. With a rehearsed line or two of Pidgin I confirm I’m not charged a white man price, negotiate the additional travel to my junction and settle into the relative safety of the back seat. In Africa air bags on public transport are unheard of; here I rely instead on meat bags.

With any luck we’re not left waiting more than twenty minutes or so before the car is filled four to the back and three (or more) to the front. The record capacity I’ve witnessed for a mid-sized import in Cameroon now stands at eleven souls: eight inside, two riding side-saddle in an open trunk and one belly-down on the roof hanging on by the window sills, plus cargo. C’est Cameroon. It would be nigh impossible for the average American frame to fill a taxi thusly. Thankfully, the typical Cameroonian is slim enough to make four people crammed into a back seat tolerable for up to an hour of travel. Once I was unfortunate to share the back seat with three surprisingly large locals who left me hobbling on the roadside like a cripple with a thoroughly asleep right leg.

With a sputtering groan, clunk and clatter the taxi—overloaded not only with human but animal and vegetable cargo on this night—pulls away from the curb and makes its way with supreme effort uphill and out of Limbe. In a few minutes I am almost dozing, nestled comfortably between my fellow passengers, when the car abruptly decelerates. Ahead is a group of men in olive drab fatigues and black berets shouldering well-worn Kalashnikov and FAL rifles. The man nearest the road wields a flashlight and a sinister-looking spiked steel device designed to destroy the tires of vehicles that fail to stop for inspection. Control. The driver pulls over, passengers mutter low complaints and all wait for the inevitable demand for identification. Carte de sejours are produced and passed through half-opened windows to the men with assault rifles, the driver produces a “fee” of 500 francs and after a ten minute delay we continue on our way.

I wake up still in the taxi someplace vaguely familiar but not yet recognizable. We’re past Mile 17 but before GCE Board Junction, which is all that matters. A few minutes and 800 francs later I’m dropped at my darkened street and begin my solitary stroll toward home. On this uncharacteristically clear night, wisps of cloud sail overhead across a field of stars. The stars tonight are unusually close and bold, with an icy glitter in their light—glints of emerald, blue and gold. A yellow planet rises above the horizon to the south, brightest object in the sky. Venus. To the north the imposing dark mass of Mt. Cameroon rises skyward, eclipsing all. I pass by my friend Valentine’s barber shop where a scruffy white dog sleeps under the fluorescent light. Cresting a short hill, the road dips into the heart of Sandpit. Ahead on the left is my tailor’s tiny shop built from a shipping container and next to it the place where I buy my MTN phone cards. A scrawny cat crosses my path. I turn to the right. Home.