Tunafunga Pamoja

Written by: Brian Herbert

Google is launching a new market information system service in Uganda called Google Trader. It’s a system that allows individuals with cell phones to post buy/sell offers and to obtain information related to farming and health. Because of the buzz surrounding this announcement, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention some competition that has been brewing on the continent for some time now.

Esoko, the rebranding and complete overhaul of tradenet.biz, features many of the same services that will be offered by Google Trader. Esoko is currently partnered with organizations in Ghana and a number of other countries. Less than a year ago, Esoko (TradeNet) was featured on CNN.

Esoko launched as TradeNet about four years ago in Ghana, giving people in the field and in markets a way to connect via SMS. Users sign up for alerts so they can be notified when prices change, or when product becomes available to purchase. Connections that once could not be realized have now been made, thanks to this type of system.

Over the past four years, Esoko has built close connections with people on the ground, collecting market data, meeting with trade groups and helping people to feel comfortable with the way this type of networking works. I think this has been one of the major keys to success. Put simply, the “build it and they will come” mentality doesn’t work. It has truly been a grassroots effort by Africans to get the word out. The entire development team is located in Accra, Ghana and is primarily made up of Africans. I’m unable to avoid the cliche when I say this but, Esoko is a product that has been created by Africans, for Africans.

Besides sharing of market information, there are other tools in the works that, I believe, will make a major impact on traders around the continent. There is no doubt that services like Google Trader and Esoko are going to begin springing up around the developing world. As more of these companies spring up around Africa, hopefully there grows some good competition. In this environment, we will witness some great things happening.

It’s always nice to put a face on the people that Esoko has been working with. The Esoko Blog highlights some of the challenges Esoko partners are facing in countries from Madagascar in the southeast, Sudan in the northeast, Côte d’Ivoire in the west and everywhere inbetween.

There is some more information about Google Trader at the Google Africa Blog and White African.

Disclosure: I’m currently working on contract with Esoko.

Written by: Brian Herbert

I just wanted to write a quick post to raise some awareness about something that happened today. Bluehost disabled the account of the Kubatana NGO. Bluehost is claiming they had to shut it down due to US sanctions against Zimbabwe. However, if one reads the list of Specially Designated Nationals, Kubatana is not included. Essentially, there doesn’t seem to be any legal grounds to require the disabling of the account. Hopefully this was either a misunderstanding rather than Bluehost exhibiting laziness or caving into pressure from outside sources.

Read the original report on Ethan Zuckerman’s My Heart’s in Accra. Also, read an open letter to Bluehost on Christine Prefontaine’s Facilitating Change.

Written by: Brian Herbert

I’ve  been accepted for a 6 month position at a company in Accra, Ghana called BusyLab. My position is focused around PHP/SQL development and I’ll be working directly with the team of Ghanian developers there as well as a few other Westerners. I’m still trying to nail down flight details so I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be going but I should be jetting out of the States some time in March.

BusyLab is developing what looks like a really cool product called Esoko. It is essentially creating a marketplace online for people in agriculture to hawk their goods online. This is empowering people using the free market so they can get better prices for their product.

I may be posting more updates about my time there in this blog so stay tuned.

Written by: Cleopa Otieno

Through the Government of Kenya’s state corporation, Kenya ICT Board, in collaboration with the World Bank is rolling out a massive 300 information centers - the digital villages. Ten of these will be up and running by the end of this year. These efforts are geared towards enabling the citizens to easily access government and general information for development. Priority is given to rural and disadvantaged areas.

What is a digital village?

Digital villages are telecentres, information centers, or e-centres which provide a suite of services to the public via computers, internet, digital cameras, printers, fax machines and other communication infrastructure.

Among issues to be addressed by the DVs, which will be operated through a franchise model called ‘Pasha’ Villages (‘Pasha’ is a Swahili word for disseminate) include:

• Adoption and diffusion of IT and rate of uptake
• Attaining Millennium Development Goals through ICT
• IT ethics and development
• IT and the emergence of the knowledge society
• IT infrastructure for public administration and reform [legal framework, human resource development
  (HRD) frameworks]
• eGovernance for good government (eGovernment, eDemocracy and eBusiness)
• Innovations in capacity building for ICT development (education in IT, skills for ICT development)
• IT strategies for development (national and sectoral)
• Cyber-security

These among others will be the focus of this timely initiative. This will boost Kenya’s plan to operate a 24 hr economy and be felt across board. ICT and Business can also be addressed through the following ways:

• Procurement: public procurement information systems
• Metropolitan growth and Global Information Systems (GIS)
• Sourcing strategies: net sourcing
• Outsourcing web enabled strategies
• Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) access to public procurement systems
• Open sourcing, online communities
• E-Commerce Security
• Uptake of ICTs on micro-enterprises and their effect on the economy

Written by: Cleopa Otieno

Sadiki Mwita is a clinical officer with the St. Paul’s Health Centre which is an initiative of the Ugunja Community Resource Centre (UCRC). His is an interesting case of how ICT training at the UCRC is changing lives through a Microsoft Unlimited Potential (UP) grant. Having spent a better part of his life in the neighboring country of Tanzania before relocating to Kenya, he had not interacted with computers much all his life. He studied and obtained a Diploma in clinical medicine and surgery from Maswa Clinical Officers Training College in Tanzania.

In Tanzania, Kiswahili is the national and dominant language. In fact, most subjects at school are taught in Kiswahili. Sadiki was therefore more comfortable with Kiswahili than English when he started his computer classes at the UCRC. His major fear was the fact that the whole training would be conducted in English. Sadiki overcame this challenge and successfully finished his training.

Finishing the free Microsoft sponsored UP computer training and becoming computer literate was indeed an achievement in his life. But it didn’t end there, what followed was more interest and exploitation of his potential and a vision of unlimited opportunities that would come his way. He then searched the Internet and enrolled in an online dental assistant course from Penn Foster Career School in the United States. Since he didn’t have access to a credit card for payment online, he discussed an alternative with the institution and has been remitting $100 monthly through Western Union money transfers for his fees. Indeed, Sadiki has exploited his unlimited potential through his use of the Internet.

He is now looking at the possibility of telemedicine! with this he hopes to offer services that are not offered at the health center by involving professionals from other parts of the world. His newest challenge is overcoming poor connectivity, which is something he has been wrestling with since he started his was going to school online.

Written by: Brian Herbert

It was announced today that the blog aggregator, Afrigator, is being taken over by MIH Print Africa. Naspers Limited, MIH’s parent company is a multinational media company that has its hands in both traditional as well as new media. Their holdings include websites that target a number of different markets from Brazil to India to South Africa, pay television in South and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as a number of vibrant businesses.

It’s always exciting news to see a startup get acquired. All of the hard work that goes into the development of a site and the harnessing of a community does pay off.

Written by: Brian Herbert

There was some Twitter buzz a couple hours ago that Google has stepped up to the plate to host BarCamp Africa at their Mountain View campus. For those that don’t know, BarCamp is an “unconference” where most (if not all) attendees contribute to the knowledge shared either through informal information sharing sessions or full-blown presentations.  This BarCamp will be focused on the continent so hopefully there will be some great collaboration to focus some attention on technology in Africa. The event is on September October 11, 2008 so sign up if you can make it. It’s a terrible shame but I won’t be able to get out there. I will be attending BarCamp Atlanta II on October 17th, though!

Check out the wiki for more details.

Written by: Brian Herbert

When violence broke out in Kenya a few months ago, there were scattered rumors and reports of all sorts of atrocities happening in the country. Churches were burned, reports of police brutality surfaced and riots broke out across the country. It was virtually impossible to keep track of everything that was going on in the areas were I had been stationed only less than a year before.

Rather than incite violence with cell phones in Kenya, Ushahidi made an effort to consolidate all of this information into one convenient mashup. Aside from speaking with my colleagues on the ground in Kenya through Skype and Google Talk, Ushahidi became one of the most valuable resources on the Internet during this time. The concept was simple, take the Google Maps API and add markers over the places where there were reports of violence. Users were able to contribute by reporting violence themselves, bypassing traditional media. This gave people a “faster-than-CNN” look at what was happening on the ground.

What now? The post-election violence in Kenya has died down and there isn’t a need to consistently check a map charting the crisis. Due to the popularity of the mashup and an award of $25,000, Ushahidi has undergone a makeover. The new and improved Ushahidi will open the platform to allow anybody to create their own mashups. These will either be hosted buy Ushahidi or downloaded and installed on an independent server. This is great because the applications for this tool reach far beyond rioting and violent outbreaks in African countries. I can see this being applied to epidemics, natural disasters and any other number of situations where people need up to the minute, geographical information about an event that’s happening.

Not only African countries will find the new Ushahidi useful. I can see this working in Europe and North America as well. Having a tool like this would be useful right now in the Caribbean and the United States with hurricane season in full swing. Most importantly is seeing a project in Africa make an impact on the world as a whole.

Written by: Brian Herbert

Software developers will often times write their code in such a way that it can be adapted for people who are different culturally, speaking various languages and using different alphabets. Being able to use software in ones native language is valuable in that it gives the user a more natural way to use the product. In most cases, “just learn English” isn’t an effective solution!

Internationalization is most often done by translating text in a single file or by running text through a machine translation service like SYSTRAN. While I won’t get into the topic of developing software for localization, I would like to stress that most localized software and websites are either literal translations or machine translations. In the case of software, this could potentially be an issue in specific edge cases. The pitfalls for literal machine translations of websites should be obvious since the mechanics of different languages are different and some words carry different weight in different cultures. When large bodies of text are translated using a machine, there are bound to be some not-so-subtle issues.

The best way to localize software is to have dedicated speakers contributing to the project. Besides software from large companies like Microsoft, localized projects are more than likely going to be open source for languages such as Swahili or more obscure languages like Kamba or Luo. I’ll highlight some software that has been localized using this method. As a disclaimer, since my Franch and Swahili are poor and I can’t speak a bit of Afrikaans or Zulu, I cannot test these out for myself. Feel free to leave comments if any of these haven’t been localized as well as I think they should be.

OpenOffice is an open source (FREE!) project that has been localized for a number of languages including French, Swahili, Afrikaans and Zulu. This project is supported by many dedicated volunteers since this is one of the few viable alternatives to Microsoft Office on the PC. Check this list for the latest list of supported languages. If you haven’t tried this yet, it’s better than paying a lot of money for licenses, asking for donations or pirating Office if you don’t have to. OpenOffice and Microsoft Office share the same fundamentals so anyone learning on OpenOffice should be able to figure out Microsoft Office.

Just because OpenOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office doesn’t mean it should be dismissed. However, most Africans will not be able to use it in their native tongue or national language (unless it’s French or English). A list of language packs for Office 2007 can be found at the bottom of this page. It’s too bad that Microsoft isn’t supporting more languages in their latest versions of Office. To Microsoft’s credit, language support is available for older versions of Office for Swahili, Afrikaans, Zulu and others. Check the bottom half of this list to see if your language is supported.

Beyond productivity in an office suite, there are localized options for web browsing. Mozilla Firefox has been fully localized in a number of languages including Afrikaans. However, it doesn’t look as though other languages (besides French) have been introduced to the browser. Since this is an open source project, however, this is a possibility in the future. Hopefully this will happen sooner than later!

This is far from a comprehensive list of software and projects localizing in African languages. The Kamusi Project has a small list of Swahili projects. The International Development Research Centre has a number of projects researching the possibility of getting software in the languages of African people.

Written by: Brian Herbert

Since today is Labor Day, a day off for “working citizens”, here in the States, I thought I would highlight the Ethopian based African startup Zebra Jobs.  This is a website that’s comparable to CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! HotJobs.

Not only is Zebra a job board, but it also offers registered users a wide range of services from education and internship opportunities as well as pointers on job search and building skills. For employers, they can post their listings for free, as Zebra is supported through sponsorship and ad revenue with Google AdWords.

When signing up and entering my contact information, I noticed the “State/Province” dropdown didn’t work. Since this is a required field, I had to figure out how to make this work so I continued to fill out the form and it disappeared after selecting my country. Continuing with this form, I was told I had to fill in all the required fields. I suspect something went wrong with the AJAX lookup of valid states. I may be being picky but this should come after the country dropdown for usability sake or this should not rely on AJAX as most Africans are using very slow and unreliable Internet access.

To Zebra’s credit, even though I had the issue with the dropdown menu, the rest of the sign up process was a breeze. It didn’t require too much information, which a lot of job posting sites generally do. I was quickly able to sign up and start browsing positions and found a number of jobs related to technology.

Even though I found a few positions in my field, at the time of this writing, I only see 306 jobs posted for all of Africa. This is understandable given the current adoption of technology in Africa but could be much better, even though most people conduct their job searchs via word of mouth or through traditional media like the newspaper. As Africa becomes more technologically literate, more people will move their search online which will make this tool much more valuable.

It will be interesting to see how well this site adapts to the market as competetors will surely enter as more users come online. This is a great start and I’d love to see more sites like it.