Sunday, November 24, 2024
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, […]
Solomon Tilewa Johnson, archbishop of the Province of West Africa, was the spiritual leader of over a million Anglicans in the region. In 1990 he became the first Gambian to be appointed as the country’s bishop, a see also covering Senegal and Cabo Verde, and represented his Province, to which he was to be elected as archbishop in 2012, at the Lambeth Conference of […]
Nelson Mandela for decades served as the inspirational leader of worldwide opposition to one of the most roundly vilified systems of political racism the world has seen. His lifelong struggle against apartheid saw him spend 27 years as a political prisoner, eighteen of which he served at the notorious Robben Island prison. After his release on the 11th of February, 1990, he was elected […]
Until recently, many young Kenyans saw farming as an unskilled, unrewarding profession, suitable only for the retired or the uneducated. Now, however, a group of determined young farmers are challenging traditional prejudices and trying to explain the attractions of farming as a profession. They are the ‘Mkulima Young Champions’ and have become figureheads for a digital initiative to change the way farmers are viewed […]
The weather is an important factor in the success of any farming enterprise. A good farmer should always plan for possible change; “cursing the weather”, as the saying goes, “is never good farming”. In much of Africa, however, getting accurate information about the weather, in order to make decisions about activities, such as sowing, irrigation and harvesting, has always been difficult. Climate change, which […]
Africa never stops changing. Since the Namibia edition of eLearning Africa in May, we’ve been keeping our eyes peeled for fresh developments on the Continent. And what a few months it’s been: Africa seems more buoyant than ever, with new eLearning projects blossoming everywhere. International interest in Africa is also growing – the Obamas visited Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa at the end of […]
