Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Africa is a hotbed of technological innovation. The challenges it faces – of bridging the urban-rural divide, expanding infrastructure and extending education – are seen by many of the Continent’s digital pioneers as opportunities for creativity and invention. The task now is to start developing their ideas on a continental scale. by Alasdair MacKinnon For Asia Kamukama, innovation means a four-by-four with solar panels […]
Ronald Ddungu, Deputy Head of Gayaza High School, Kampala, has been an eLearning aficionado ever since eLearning Africa 2008 in Kenya. At this year’s Conference he will be one of the leaders of a workshop entitled “Teachers in the 21st Century: opportunities provided by e- and mLearning“. This is his story. by Racheal Ninsiima This article was originally published in the Observer In 2008, […]
Last year’s eLearning Africa helped shed some light on the true state of technological innovation in Africa. During our presentation we ran a video featuring our African customers speaking about their experience with technology. The interviews offered an interesting insight into the real ICT needs of the customers as well as useful examples of how they innovate with NComputing to overcome local constraints. By […]
In this second edition of HubFocus, we talk to Barrett Nash, co-founder of the Creative Entropy Lab. The CE Lab is based in Kigali, Rwanda, and is motivated by its founders’ commitment to “positively working towards a global equality of opportunity”. Nash and fellow co-founder Pedro Reyonolds-Cuéllar are looking to create “something organic that evolves, able to positively iterate on creative ideas from anyone […]
In the popular imagination, “desertification” in the Sahara conjures up an image of inexorable walls of sand advancing, as the climate warms, southwards into the Sahel. In reality, the situation is more complex. Climate change does have an impact on land degradation in the semi-arid belt that skirts the desert: but it is only part of the picture. Global warming increases the frequency of […]
Imagine you are a young entrepreneur in East Africa and have a great idea for a start-up, but don’t know how to implement it. A little training would help and probably be even more effective combined with a loan or a grant. You live near Mount Kenya, 150 kilometres northeast of Nairobi, and cannot afford to commute. This is where your trusty mobile phone […]
Tech-savvy students at Leqele High School in Maseru, the capital of the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho, are using ICT to revolutionise their English literature classes. Their adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar in an African setting is making literature more enjoyable and accessible for everyone. by Pauline Bugler Opening up the centuries-old drama to students was proving a complex task. The archaic […]
African traditions are under threat. While younger generations increasingly desire to move to the big cities, emigrate, or assimilate, globalisation has brought external cultures into competition with local ones, leaving many of these older structures close to dissolution. One proposed solution to this erosion of tradition is the ATOE (African Traditions Online Encyclopaedia) – a Wikipedia-style, user-generated website that will amass the collected knowledge, […]
It’s impossible to encapsulate the variety of Africa’s languages in a single picture. The Continent’s complex history has had an equally complex effect on language. Some languages are vast, spoken over great distances by tens of millions. Some are tiny, spoken by single villages, towns or tribes. Many of these languages, which each encode millennia of tradition, history and culture, are critically endangered: one […]
From Tunis in the north to Cape Town in the south, Dakar in the west to Port Louis in the east, hubs, labs and hackerspaces are leading the way for co-creation and social change all across Africa*. With each group and space responding to the specific needs and context of its community, we’re starting a new series to find out what distinguishes, and unites, […]
