African Farming Wisdom Now Scientifically Proven

 

Increasing the agricultural productivity of Africa is critical for the continent’s future development, and the world’s. Two-thirds of Africans derive their main income from agriculture, but the continent has the largest quantity of unproductive – or unused – potential agricultural land in the world.

This means the continent has the potential to become the world’s new breadbasket – but there is a problem. A report by the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC) found the continent had a “soil health crisis” and that three-quarters of its farmlands were severely degraded (New Scientist). The causes of this crisis include overuse of the same plot of land due to population growth, which prevents farmers moving around, and high fertilizer costs, leading to African farmers using just 10 per cent of the world average on their farms.

But a new study shows that an existing practice by some African farmers could help solve this dilemma if it was adopted by the majority.

At the University of Sydney in Australia, a study has confirmed the effectiveness of ants and termites as a tool to increase farm yields in dry areas. It found ants and termites in drier climates of the global South improved soil conditions just as earthworms do in northern, wetter and colder climates. Both termites and ants, by burrowing their way through the soil, carve out tunnels that make it easier for plants to shoot their roots outwards in search of water.

In field experiments, ants and termites helped raise wheat yields by 36 per cent by increasing water and nitrogen absorption. This is critical for agriculture in arid climates.

While termites wreak havoc on crops such as maize (corn) and sugarcane, they are very useful for other African crops.

The Australian research found termites infuse nitrogen into the soil. Nitrogen is usually dumped on fields with expensive fertilizers that are subject to market fluctuations. The termites have nitrogen-heavy bacteria in their stomachs, which they excrete into the soil through their faeces or saliva.

The research also found termites helped with reducing water wastage.

This research reinforces what has long been known to some African farmers. Long-held farmer tradition in parts of West Africa uses termites to enhance soil by placing wood on the earth to attract them. By burying manure in holes near newly planted grains, farmers in Burkina Faso attract termites to the soil.

In Malawi, bananas are planted near termite mounds to encourage the creatures. In southern Zambia, soil from termite nests is harvested and used as top soil on agricultural land.

If more farmers adopted this practice, Africa could simultaneously address its chronic malnutrition and hunger problem and contribute to the world’s food needs. As the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) found, “With 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land and low crop yields, Africa is ripe for a ‘green revolution’ like those that transformed agriculture in Asia and Brazil.”

McKinsey estimated that Africa’s agricultural output could increase from US $280 billion a year now to US $500 billion by 2020 and as much as US $880 billion by 2030.

The UN recently declared that the world’s population has reached 7 billion. That is many mouths to feed and presents Africa with a dilemma and an opportunity.

And as urban growth accelerates across the global South – the world is now a majority urban place – there is a huge profit to be made from providing food to growing urban populations.

The time to act is now, as there have been reports from African farmers that they are seeing harvests declining by 15 to 25 per cent. And the picture gets gloomier: many farmers think their harvests will drop by half over the next five years.

Given that there are 2,600 different species of termites now recognised in the world (UNEP) and with over 660 species, found in Africa, it is by far the richest continent in termite diversity (Eggleton 2000) and they are proof that an affordable solution is close at hand to the current crisis.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2012

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Mapping to Protect Kenya’s Environment: the eMazingira Solution

 

Powerful new grassroots crowd-mapping tools have sprung up in the past few years across the global South, from Brazil’s Wikicrimes (www.wikicrimes.org) real-time crime mapping technology to the now famous Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.com) – a non-profit company making the free and open source Ushahidi software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping – from its base in Kenya. They share some common features. All draw on the widespread use of mobile phones in the global South combined with growing access to the Internet, either through 3G mobile phone services, WiFi wireless connections, Internet centres or increasingly available broadband Internet services.

They then connect the mobile phones to the new mapping services available either on the phones or on the Internet. One example is Google Maps (http://maps.google.com).

These mapping services are revolutionary in what they bring to poor communities. They allow people to quantify in real time what is happening in their area, as well as see what is happening around the world. Where in the past this sort of mapping and statistical data collection was chiefly the domain of government departments and private services for wealthy corporations, individuals can now participate in the collection of data and map what is happening in their area. This can include mapping actual crime as it occurs, or slum-mapping, where a visual snap-shot of a slum area is made to better target aid and development.

This is a game-changer for human and sustainable development. It has the potential to close the gap between the collection and analysis of data and action. Accurate, real-time data makes it easier to push government agencies to deliver on their promises, especially during a crisis.

Kenya’s eMazingira website (www.emazingira.org) is showing the difference these tools can make. It allows people to identify potentially destructive practices that harm the environment – unregulated forestry, pollution, dangerous animals, land degradation, climate change – and alert others to what is happening. This level of awareness, it is hoped, will in time reduce the destruction of local environments and improve the quality of life for both humans and wildlife.

Mazingira means “environment” in Swahili. The website’s motto is “Keeping the environment clean for the future generation”.

The eMazingira website is a visually simple affair with a leafy banner image and an interactive map showing what is happening. It is in its first iteration and future upgrades are on the way. A rolling list of incidents keeps readers briefed on what is happening, from “Fire burning” to “Sewer burst” to “Rogue elephant”. There are five main categories to choose from and users can file reports by text message, email, sending a Tweet (www.twitter.com) or filling in an online form on the website.

“We got to know about Ushahidi during its first deployment which was in Kenya, when it was used to map post-election violence incidents in early 2008,” explains Dunston Machoka, director of BTI Millman Limited (www.btimillman.com) inNairobi,Kenya, a custom software development firm leading the project.

“We were inspired to develop eMazingira, on one hand, because of the passion we had for environmental conservation and on the other hand, from the success stories we had observed of Ushahidi deployments inKenya,HaitiandJapan.”

Machoka believes this is a critical time forKenya’s environment: “eMazingira comes at a time when environmental conservation is a huge concern inKenya. Our key observation was that there was no effective reporting mode for environmental incidents for citizens.”

The website hopes to better engage citizens in tackling the country’s environmental problems and sees this as a way to spur further government action.

One of eMazingira’s proudest moments came when it won the World Summit Youth Award as the 2011 Runner Up for the use of ICT towards attaining the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

But how easy is it to work with this technology? Machoka advises those starting out to turn to the Ushahidi team for support.

“I would advise them to get in touch with the Ushahidi team through their website and by doing so the deployment will be easy, fast and there will be adequate assistance in case of any challenges,” he said.

For the next two years, eMazingira will be focusing on rolling out the service to the country, from the main towns to rural areas.

“At the end of the period we hope to start similar programmes in East Africa based on the lessons learnt in Kenya,” confirms Machoka.

And that isn’t where the eMazingira story will stop: its creators also want to deploy the technology globally, if countries have the right conditions.

“The key necessity for the application would be good mobile and Internet infrastructure and government that can promote citizen participation in environmental conservation,” Machoka said.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: December 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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African Manufacturing Pioneers Proving it is Possible to Thrive

 

Africa’s paradox is that it is home to the greatest share of the world’s unexploited resources, yet has some of the world’s lowest per capita incomes. History has shown that exploiting the continent’s resources alone for export markets does little to improve incomes and living conditions in Africa, which in turn does nothing to improve human development. The key to resolving this paradox is made-in-Africa jobs, in particular high-value jobs that make products.

Africa still mostly makes its income from exporting raw commodities, from minerals to fuel to food. In the 1990s, Asian countries exported five times more manufactured goods, as share of GDP, than sub-Saharan Africa. Things changed in the 2000s. African manufactured output has roughly doubled over the last 10 years. And those goods are going more to the emerging economies than to the traditional powers (African Economic Outlook).

African Economic Outlook points out that by 2009 “trade between African countries and emerging powers equalled that between Africa and its traditional partners.”

“South-based manufacturing enhances the welfare of African consumers via prices and functionality,” the report says.

“For instance, generic Indian pharmaceuticals are cheaper than brands from traditional partners.”

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been identified as a key part of Africa’s future prosperity and key to its ability to reduce poverty and achieve development objectives like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (www.un.org/millenniumgoals).

The sector is large but its economic power is inefficiently used. Telling the Wall Street Journal, Mthuli Ncube, chief economist at the African Development Bank Group, estimated one-quarter of Africa’s gross domestic product — about US $450 billion — comes from 65 million small and medium-sized enterprises.

Manufacturing has been difficult to measure because so many businesses are just tiny cottage industries.

Obstacles to growth include poor infrastructure, unreliable power supplies, unscaleable business models, low quality standards and poor quality branding and design.

Access to funding is often weak and fragmented and many programmes run by international donors and banks targeting SMEs are uncoordinated and duplicate resources. The global economic crisis has not made these factors any easier.

But things are changing in many areas. The booming technology, consumer goods and resource sectors offer hope for a manufacturing renaissance.

There are examples from Africa defying the sceptics and showing it is possible to expand and export manufactured, finished goods that meet international standards.

What they have in common is a sophisticated product offering and an ability to meet international export standards. They also have overcome obstacles that scare away more timid international rivals.

Nigerian shoe and garment maker Fut Conceptus (www.futconceptus.com) has been taking raw Nigerian leather that was once just sent overseas for export, and instead is turning out high-quality shoes and bags made in Nigerian factories. These shoes – made in African, Spanish and Italian styles – meet international standards and are exported aroundAfrica. It has also established operations in Spain and the United Kingdom.

Started in 2008, the company got off to a good start by seeking out the best expertise to train its staff. Shoe-making experts fromSpainwere brought in to do the training. The company also imported top-quality machinery fromItalyandSpainto make sure its operations were modern and efficient.

These first, smart moves have meant the company is able to run an efficient and high-skilled operation inNigeriawhile also making its products to international standards. This is critical for a start-up business: the better the quality of the product in the beginning, the better the chance for accessing lucrative export markets. And the better and more efficient the manufacturing processes, the better chance a company will have meeting increasing demand and tight deadlines. It is one thing to make the best shoe in the world, but if you cannot deliver the quantity required for orders, then your reputation will be damaged.

Fut Conceptus is able to produce 22,000 pairs of sandals and 10,000 pairs of safety boots a day, according to its website.

Fut Conceptus Manufacturing Nigeria Ltd. also found a way to thrive in the country’s difficult and erratic conditions. To deal with the unreliable power supply, they run four electric generators. This costs them US $500 a day in fuel. This power problem scares off multinational companies, leaving the market open for Fut Conceptus. The company has been able to use this first-mover advantage to build its brand acrossWest Africa. It currently makes men’s moccasins, slippers, law enforcement footwear, safety footwear, and ladies’ sandals.

Founder Olumide Wole-Madariola is proud of the achievement. “Nobody was ready for what we were doing… Nobody was ready for ‘Made inNigeria,’” he said.

South African sauce maker Primolitos (www.primolitos.com) has become one of the few African companies able to meet international standards for food exports. It makes a vast range of products (http://www.primolitos.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10&Itemid=12), from juices to sauces, spices, pickles, soups and baked goods.

The company has been around for over a decade and sells 2,000 products. It has also set-up a sister division to specialise in liquid and powdered food sachets. The company also has a clear “Quality Policy”, championing collective decision-making between management and staff, delivering “quality and safe consumer products”, and a system to quickly respond to consumer complaints and recall substandard products. All ingredients for building trust in a business.

It also has an ISO 20 0002 (www.iso.org/iso/home.html) accredited factory, complete with three testing labs, a training room, test kitchen, care centre for employees’ children, a wellness centre, laundry, high-tech water filtration and purification systems and the latest in hygiene and manufacturing processes. All of this a clear example of the commitment required to build a quality company that can export.

Over at Good African Coffee, Ugandan entrepreneur Andrew Rugasira is pioneering new ways to process coffee inAfrica. He set upUganda’s first enterprise to make instant coffee two years ago. This is a radical departure from the old practice of exporting the coffee beans to Europe for processing into instant coffee, which would then be exported back toAfrica.

“For decades, Africans have produced what they do not consume and consumed what they do not produce,” Rugasira told the Wall Street Journal.

The company has developed unique distribution arrangements for its instant coffee. A recent deal included providing coffee for an American network of 12,000 churches.

The company’s products are cleverly designed and packaged and are sold in distinct colour-coordinated packets. The company also passionately champions “trade not aid” as the long-term solution toAfrica’s economic growth (http://www.goodafrican.com/index.php/our-story/trade-not-aid.html).

On the African islandof Madagascar, a company is trying to reverse the practice of exporting Africa’s cocoa beans for manufacturing into chocolate products. The Madecasse Chocolate LLC. (http://madecasse.com) is a collaboration between American entrepreneur Tim McCollum and Madagascan chocolatier Shahin Cassam Chenai. The company is making a range of chocolate and vanilla products for US supermarkets.

“IfAfricacould sell the world chocolate…it wouldn’t solve all the continent’s problems, but it could make a big dent,” McCollum told the Wall Street Journal.

Africais believed to produce 60 to 70 percent of the world’s cacao supply. Less than one percent is made inAfricaand most is made into chocolate outside the continent.

Madecasse’s high-quality chocolate bars sell in the USfor US $6 each. Their market niche is to make “a single-origin chocolate, made entirely in Madagascar, which rivals the flavour of the best European chocolates”, according to its website. Flavours (http://store.madecasse.com) include pink pepper and citrus, cinnamon and sakay (a type of Madagascan hot pepper sauce), exotic pepper, sea salt and nibs, Arabica coffee, and baking chocolate. They also sell the world-famous Madagascan vanilla beans and extract. All are sold in colourful and well-designed packaging and sold on their website.

Chenai is a self-taught chocolate maker and works with a local team to refine the Madécasse chocolate.

“Connoisseurs knowMadagascarproduces some of the best cocoa in the world,” maintains Chenai. “My passion is to prove we can produce some of the best chocolate in the world.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: December 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Ghana: Oil-rich City Sparks Entrepreneurs and Debate

Commodity booms can seem like the answer to a poor nation’s prayers, a way to fulfil all their development dreams and goals. The reality, however, is far more complex. More often than not, the discovery of resources sparks a mad scramble for profits and patronage, as politicians and politically connected elites carve out their slice of the new resource boom before anyone else.

The twin cities of Sekondi-Takoradi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekondi-Takoradi) in the Western Region of Ghana are now experiencing an oil boom. Ghana’s oil production went online in December 2010 and the government is hoping it will double the country’s growth rate.

Large supplies of oil were found off the coast in 2007, transforming Takoradi from a sleepy, rundown port city into the hub for the oil boom.

Local man Peter Abitty told the BBC he was renting out an eight-bedroom house for US $5,000 a month. The house overlooks the sea and comes with banana and coconut trees.

“Tenants that come here can take the coconuts for free! We don’t charge anything,” Abitty said.

He put the strong interest in the house down to a simple fact: “It’s out there: oil, oil, oil.”

People’s hopes are being raised in Ghana’s case because it has built a reputation as a better-governed country than other African petro states like Nigeria and Angola.

But others argue that price increases caused by the boom are destroying local businesses. A report on the Ghana Oil news website found popular local businesses suffering. One example it gave was the Unicorn Internet Café, an employer of local youth, which shut down in 2010 because of high rents.

It found businesses have shut down in the following sectors: timber, sawmilling, super markets, mobile phone shops, boutiques and trading shops. But it also found many new businesses opening up, including banks, insurance companies and hotels.

The challenge facing Ghana is to ensure oil brings a long-term change to a higher value business environment and economy, rather than just an unequal and temporary boom.

Another challenge is to connect the many youth leaving education in the city with the jobs and opportunities being created by the oil industry. The twin cities are a regional educational centre with a lot of technical colleges and secondary schools.

To counter these concerns, a Regional Coordinating Council is promising to place the growth of small and medium enterprises at the centre of regional development.

The dreams and promises for Takoradi are very ambitious. “In five years time, I see Takoradi becoming one of the modern cities of the world,”  Alfred Fafali Adagbedu, the owner of Seaweld Engineering (www.seaweldghana.com), a new local company set up to service the oil sector, told the BBC.

“I can imagine skyscrapers, six-lane highways and malls.”

“The transport industry is going to improve, because workers on the rig are going to need to be transported. Agriculture is going to see a boom because all those people on the rig will need to be fed.

“Even market women are going to see more business, because a lot of workers are going to have very fat paychecks. Everyone in this city is going to gain in business.”

How far Takoradi has to travel to come close to meeting these dreams and expectations can be seen in its current state. The railway station has a train with laundry hanging from it because it hasn’t moved in years, reported the BBC. People are living in the sleeping car of the train.

But the typical signs of a boom are all visible: traffic jams, booked hotels, rising rents and prices, and it is already hurting people on fixed salaries.

Local authorities have plans to demolish rundown parts of the city and rebuild with modern office environments for the new businesses resulting from the oil economy.

An estimated US $1 billion a year in revenue will go to the Ghanaian government and local authorities want 10 percent of this to be ring-fenced for regional development.

“Many resources are coming from the western region. From years back, gold is here, timber is here, diamonds are here,” said Nana Kofi Abuna V, one of the few female chiefs in the area.

“But when they share the cake up there, they leave out the western region. This time, if there is oil and gas in the region we should benefit more than everybody else.”

But Adagbedu at Seaweld Ghana believes Ghana will see real improvements.

“I’m very sure we will avoid the mistakes,” he said. “Ghana is a democracy, everyone is watching, so there is going to be a lot of improvement here.”

And to help in keeping these promises, the BBC will continue to return to Sekondi-Takoradi to track its changes and see how things improve.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Turning African Youth on to Technology

 

An African NGO believes the Internet is the single biggest key to rapid development in Africa – and it is working to connect youth, women and rural populations to the web, and in turn, switch them on to the vast resources stored across the world’s Internet sites.

After initial successes with a youth project and with farmers, Voices of Africa (VOA) (http://www.voicesofafrica.info) is now seeking to scale up its work to fan out across Africa – and takes its services to the world’s largest refugee camp, the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya. 

The youth and technology empowerment NGO has developed a business model to deliver low-cost Internet access and e-resources to Africa’s slums and rural farmers.

VOA argues that “the digital divide, defined by a lack of access to information for a specific population, symbolizes the largest difference between developed and developing countries: the opportunity to obtain and utilize information.”

“The digital divide runs much deeper than hardware and software,” it says. “While equipment is necessary it is not sufficient. The real heart of the digital divide is that those without access to information resources often suffer needlessly while the solutions to their problems are floating in the air.”

But why is the Internet so important?

“The internet puts the choice of content at the fingertips of the user,” explains executive director Crystal Kigoni. “Traditional media is one way communications. Internet is bi-directional.

“Our NGO is completely grassroots. We train the people who train the people. It is an each one, teach one philosophy and is highly effective. We also design our projects to be self-sustainable after one year of successful implementation.”

The philosophy behind Voices of Africa – “Sustainable Development through Information Empowerment” – is to give people the information and resources to take better control of their lives.

Access to the Internet in Africa is patchy and, for the poor, an expensive resource. The penetration of mobile phones in Africa has been spectacular in the past five years. But there are limits to the resources people can afford to access with their phones. Issues abound about data costs, mobile phone networks, and mobile phone capability.

VOA targets youth and women in sub-Saharan Africa through online educational resources offered on their e-learning website (http://elearning.voicesofafrica.info/). The resources have been certified by Nazarene University (http://www.anu.ac.ke), a private university in Nairobi, Kenya.

The e-learning resources include high quality training videos, presentations and screencasts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast) – like a movie, it is a digital recording of changes on a computer screen and is used to teach software – to share on the web. The resources are also shared through compact discs (CDs) and iPods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod).

Project coordinator Nick Kungu coordinates the staff working on the pilot Kenyan projects: a Rural Internet Kiosk; a Youth Empowerment Center; and KiberaNet, which launched in August 2011. VOA uses a part-time and volunteer staff of more than 20 Kenyans and four international ‘virtual’ volunteers.

The group is also working with farmers in Kutus, central Kenya, to help them get a better price for their products and introduce sustainable agriculture practices. This is done through online courses so the farmers do not need to travel. It is hoped by doing this they can improve the supply of food for the country.

The Youth Empowerment Center in Webuye constituency of the Western province of Kenya involves a partnership with the government of Kenya to teach computer basics, research and data collection, social media, ICT (information communication technology) for development, social business and community health.

In rural areas, the need for information cannot be overestimated. In the remote countryside, there are few schools with adequate resources and almost no community libraries. The lifesaving knowledge the people require has to date been completely beyond their grasp. As one rural woman in the Western province of Kenya exclaimed to VOA after encountering the resources on the Internet, “It is like being brought from the darkness into the light.”

Another project in development is SlumNet, which seeks to combine the Internet with low-cost devices like tablet computers and netbooks. Its pilot scheme, KiberaNet, launched this month in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya to test the business model. VOA hopes to then expand it to Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. It is using a business model to bring low-cost Internet access to Africa’s slums that is fully funded by the local communities and the users.

It has identified the key needs of youth in slums that need to be met: a way to access the vast resources available on the Internet; a way to generate income, undertake low-cost learning, and organise for social justice; ways to overcome social, economic and political isolation; a way to access affordable equipment and resources to improve their quality of life in the short-term.

To make it a sustainable business model, the community takes a 60 percent stake in the incorporated entity. Voices of Africa will select six local civil society organisations to take another 10 percent stake in the business. VOA takes 10 percent and the remaining 30 percent will be open to outside investors.

It involves setting up a closed intranet system and Internet access covering the entire Kibera slum, which has an estimated population of 2 million, a majority under the age of 30.

KiberaNet hopes to act as a community hub for socialising, education and generating content. A key part is creating an atmosphere that is welcoming to novices. The business model is about delivering the bandwidth of Internet access and simultaneously generating a sustainable source of income to keep it going. Partners in the business include Promote Africa, Plexus Group and Future Optics Networks.

VOA also has been blogging about its time in Kenya’s Dadaab Refugee Camp (http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e483a16) at their website, www.voicesofafrica.info, and has been developing plans to expand services to the camp, home to over 400,000 refugees from drought and famine in Somalia. The camp was only designed to hold 90,000 people. The chronic food insecurity has caused a massive humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, leaving over 10 million people in need of help.

“There are plenty of resources going in but it is aid business as usual,” claims Kigoni. “You see lots of waste in many areas, and a lack in others that would be extremely beneficial. Hence, why Voices of Africa has come up with the youth technology and empowerment plan that accompanies a general information and communications system, DadaabNet.”

DadaabNet will be a youth-run community Internet service and education service. VOA plans to use a wireless intranet, internal communications systems and low-cost internet access in the refugee camp.

The project is the first of its kind in Dadaab and a first in Kenya, claims VOA, allowing free educational content without needing to access the Internet.

The intranet will host free educational videos that can be accessed by mobile phones and computers. The topics covered in the videos include health, nutrition, sanitation and computer training and how to use technology for sustainable development.

The curriculum is also approved by Nazerene University to certificate level.

The system is supervised and would be able to offer resources to other NGOs seeking to provide services to the camp’s residents. The intention is to open up opportunities for education and employment youth who are currently unemployed.

At present the youth in the camp, many of whom have not completed secondary school, get by ‘hustling’ for work, according to VOA. By being left to their own devices, there is a risk they will fall into negative behaviour like crime and drug use or be preyed upon by terrorist organisations operating in the area like al Shabaab, they maintain.

“In our dreams, everyone everywhere in the world can have the opportunity to develop their minds. It is through this creativity that Africa will rise,” concludes Kigoni.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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