Safaricom, Africa-tech and Google in Africa

One of the things that many Afro-optimists share is an excitement about the way that technology is providing new opportunities for the passion, energy, and talent that’s so apparent in young people across the continent.
Last week, Google announced (hattip Appfrica) that it was launching a blog dedicated entirely to its work in Africa, which has [...]

Kristoff column on micro-giving

CX Chua, one of the students from the Northwestern University ENGAGE Uganda Program 2007, celebrates with his Global Youth Partnership for Africa soccer/peer mentor team after finishing a 5-week after school program in the Namuwongo slum of Kampala, Uganda.
Nick Kristoff’s column today, “The Luckiest Girl,” tells the story of Beatrice, a bright girl from Uganda [...]

Vietnam is the most attractive “emerging market retail destination”

The “trade vs. aid” conversation is one we’ve started and will come back to, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in A.T. Kearny’s annual ranking of the most attractive emerging market destinations for retail expansion. Basically, the consulting firm looks at about 25 variables spread across categories including: political and economic risk, market saturation [...]

Barcamp Nairobi and the next hubs of innovation

Last weekend, the folks from AfriGadget, Ushahidi, and a bunch of others helped organize “Barcamp Nairobi” a (non) conference meet-up that brought together programmers, social activists, mobile phone enthusiasts and technologists to get to know one another and share ideas.
The topics ranged from ICT and rural energy (as presented by LightingupKenya.org) to women bloggers to [...]

Apply for the second annual Youth Leadership in Connective Philanthropy program

Each year, the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University (another of my gigs) and the Chicago Global Donors Network get together to give 25 Chicagoland undergrads and high school students the chance to learn about philanthropy by allocating $5,000 to youth-led development projects around the world.
Last year’s students learned about the history of philanthropy, [...]

OLPC, Microsoft, Opensource and customer questions

There is a really interesting conversation that started last week at outsourcing expert Steve Hamm’s blog Bangalore Tigers at BusinessWeek. The conversation is about the One Laptop Per Child program founder’s decision to agree to ship units with a version of Microsoft’s XP operating system rather than the open-source, Linux based system.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/globespotting/archives/2008/06/olpc_the_open-s.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_bangaloretigers
For some, this is [...]