The city of Cape Town has approved R1.8 Million, 600,000 will be used for the competition while the rest will be used for development of entrepreneur networks in Cape Town.

Mansoor Mohamed, the City’s Executive Director: Economic, Social Development and Tourism, said:

“The competition forms part of the City’s strategy to position Cape Town as a leading enabler of entrepreneurship on the African continent and to build a stronger entrepreneurship ecosystem. The City already has strong partnerships with key stakeholders in the country.”

Registation opened on the 17 of February and you can register via the Cape Town Active website

Topic: Innovative Approaches by African universities to meet Africa’s Development Challenges
Speaker: Goolam Mohamedbhai, Secretary General, Association of African Universities

Participation in HE is no more then 5% in Africa, while it is as much as 20% in developed countries.

Challenges to Higher Education in Africa

• Coping with huge demand
• Gender disparity
• Poort and insufficient infrastructure
• Poor research output
• Poor linkages with community & rural areas
• Poor ICT

African’s have developed innovative approaches to meet these challenges

Addressing Gender Issues

• 5 years ago, enrollment in HE was 35% for females
• Disparity when it comes to Science & Technology
• Implemented affirmative action to encourage more women in science
• Some universities setup gender institutes (UCT in South Africa, Meraka in Uganda)
• Enrollment is now as much as 50%
• Mauritius has as much as 60%
• Gender disparity still exists amongst teaching staff

Teacher Training

• Severe shortage of teachers
• 1.2 Million teachers are needed by 2015 to achieve universal primary education
• Existing teaches need to be retrained
• Several open universities have been created such as UNISA, there are are other universities created in Tanzania, Nigeria, Zimbabwe
• Traditional universities are running teacher training
• Some countries have setup exclusive teacher training centers
• 500,000 teachers were trained between 2007-2009

Alleviating poverty through rural development

• 70% of SSA population live in rural areas
• Agriculture is the main rural activity
• Rural development also needs to be mainstreamed in university activities
• Some universities have made it a requirement for graduates to work in rural areas for at least a year on completion of their degree
• UCAD in Senegal, runs a vacation camp where they send students from various disciplines to rural areas
• University of Development studies in Ghana, made it compulsory in all programs to spend 1 trimester per a year doing field work in Ghana
• University of Bakhat in Sudan, created 11 community colleges

Promoting peace and assist with conflict resolution

• Unesco peace chairs
• Moi University in Kenya established centre for refugee studies
• South Africa has over 40 organizations for research
• The Africa centre for the constructive resolution of disputes, has trained over 12,000 people in conflict resolution
• The university of peace, launched an Africa program

Responding to HIV/AIDS

• A 2001 report showed that showed a serious impact of HIV/AIDS on HE & absence
• In 2002 the AAU (Association of African Universities) launched programs for HIV/AIDS
• A toolkit was developed for HE, has 10 modules covering management, policy, HR, student activities, curriculum reform, community, engagement etc.
• 4 sub regional networks established to facilitate coordination
• Second phase of AAU program started (2009-2013)
• After nearly a decade, there is now much greater awareness at universities

11:00 – Media

Topic: Plugged in and turned on: Africa’s place in the digital age

Speakers:

• Alice Munyua, Coordinator, Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) and the East African Internet Governance Forum (EAIGF)
• Boubakar Barry, Coordinator, Research and Education Networks, Association of African Universities, Ghana
• Jessica Colaco, Principal Researcher, Strathmore Research and Consultancy Centre, Kenya

First up was Alice Munyua

• The increase of bandwidth in Africa has resulted in many projects for example drumnet, which connects farmers to markets and decreases poverty
• It has enabled new ways of governance, and transparency. For example government in Kenya is looking at SMS voting
• Mobiles are used to pay bills in Kenya, which has had a huge impact (Example Mpesa)
• Kenyan Government is pushing universal access to broadband
• Businesses in Kenya are starting to include e-commerce in their strategies
• Access is being extended to rural areas
• Ushahidi was used as an example of something developed in Africa which is having an impact globally
• A number of conflicts in Kenya is a result of land disputes, mapping is being used to document land ownership and to avoid conflicts

Next up was Boubakar who gave us an overview of the benefits of Fibre optic cables, and the advantages of the new cables being installed.

• Fibre produces superior bandwidth
• There is little loss of signal
• No EMF
• No repeaters are required as is the case with copper
• The monopolies that existed previously with the SAT-3 cable is falling away with new undersea cables such as SEACOM
• In 2 years, the bandwidth in Africa will have increased 125x that of  SAT-3
• Costs have not dropped as much as we had hopped
• The challenge is providing access to countries that are landlocked (almost 50% of countries in Africa are land locked)
• Africa spends as much as $ 400,000 – 600,000 on routing traffic to europe/usa and then back to Africa due to a very low number of IXP (Internet Exchange Points) in Africa
• There should be an IXP in every country in Africa
• There should be regional IXP’s (i.e South Africa, Eastern, Western Africa)
• There was concern that 8 operators control about 90% of the bandwidth in Africa

Next up was Jessica

• Not all of Africa is receiving quality bandwidth
• The increase of bandwidth has made the world flat
• It is reshaping e-commerce in Africa
• However there is a need for localized content that caters for the needs in Africa
• Mobile devices are key
• The IHUB in Kenya was mentioned, a place for bringing together innovators in Kenya

Topic: Educating Generation Next: Expanding higher education for future African leaders

• What are the connections between higher education and long-term economic growth
• How can international partnerships expand access to higher education in African countries, and for African students
• What kind of higher education is most relevant for Africans and Africa
• How are old and new broadcasting mediums used to expand access to education

Speakers:

• Boubakar Barry, Coordinator, Research and Education Networks, Association of African Universities, Ghana
• Neil Turok, Director, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada and Founder of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), South Africa
• Olu Ajakaiye, Research Director, African Economic Research Consortium, Kenya

Boubakar Barry is speaking about the challenges in Africa with relation to education.

In order to meet the challenges, we should have a holistic approach. ICT has an important role to play in meeting educational challenges. Education and research networks are important. They create an environment where experimentation can occur and drive innovation. Researchers feel isolated as there is no critical mass in specific fields, it does not allow them to participate globally. Co-operation should be promoted amongst African universities and universities globally.

Examples of networks:

• UbuntuNet Alliance,  which links educational and research networks in 12 African countries.
• Another initiative  is WACREN, for west and central Africa
• KENET –  Kenya, which links 500 institutions
• TENET – South Africa

The goal is to change the landscape and link the African research community with the global community. In the near future, Africa will be fully integrated.

Next up is Olu Ajakaiye He is presenting stats on the state of higher education, Africa lags behind in most areas. Looking at examples like number of pc’s per 100 people, access to TV’s, access to the Internet etc. Knowledge intensive services are not strong, South Africa is an exception. Only 2 countries are advancing towards a Knowledge economy, South Africa & Mauritius.

• In the beginning, ROR was used as yard stick to measure. This was bad as it switched the focus from HE.
• New analysis takes into account broader impacts of HE such as spill over to wages and increased quality of life

Modalities for international support

• Overseas scholarships, the result is many people left but did not come back
• Centres of excellence
• A network of local and international scholars
• AERC is an example of a network which combiners International and African scholars
• Brings african scholars and their institutions together with international scholars and insitutions

Neil Turok is up next, speaking about AIMS for Africa.

We are all Africans….

He is showing us some serious physic equations, and links the formula to how these principals have been used in technology such as mobile phones.

Scientific knowledge is our most important knowledge, we will need it to meet the challenges we will face in the future. Advanced science is making enormous strides, it’s important that Africa takes it’s place in the global scientific community.

They created AIMS (African Insitute for Mathematical Sciences) in 2003, to enable the best students in Africa to become researchers. They faced challenges with funding.

• Currently 54 students, just as many women as men
• Only the best lecturers
• A 24 hour learning environment

Principals

• Relevant
• Innovative
• Cost-Effective
• High Quality

in 2004 28 graduate students, now 254 students have graduated. He is currently speaking about the next einstein initiative and creating 15 AIMS centers. He also showed us a truly inspiring video of a South African student who went through AIMS. Niel ends with:

Africa’s is the worlds greatest untapped pool of scientific & technical talent It is also the continent in greatest need Developing Africa’s brightest mind is vital for Africa Only Africans can fix Africa Smart AID proposal for G8

Time for questions, this post will be updated with the next sessions details.

15:30 – Media

Topic: The cellular evolution: How mobile phones make markets work better

Speakers:

• Vincent Kadar, CEO, Telepin, Canada
• Julius Juma, Lecturer at the Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Nairobi, Kenya
• Heloise Emdon, Program manager, Communities and the Information Society in Africa

First up is Heloise Emdon, who is giving us an overview of Acacia who will be speaking on the mobile revolution.

• 12 years ago when the IDRC started the model was to provide internet connectivity to rural communities.
• Livelihoods have improved for the BOP
• Mobile phones catered to the pentup demand for communication services in Africa
• Created side industries that were capitalized on
• MPesa is being used as an example, financial regulations in most countries do not allow this model
• Mpesa reduces the transaction fee from 15% to 5%
• M-Health, example is JavaRosa that is used as a decision support system and to capture information
• Sub-Saharan Africa, has the lowest fixed line density, but mobile density is on Par
• Internet users per 100, is only 6.47 in Africa
• More users have mobile phones then bank accounts in Africa
• Mobile internet will never replace fixed line internet, its personal
• in 1995 Latin America was on par with Africa in tele density, 8 years later Latin America has a totally different picture far exceeding Africa.
• Almost half of African countries are landlocked, so the new fibre links coming in will take a while before it reaches these countries.
• South Africa has the highest number of fixed lines
• Countries that have achieved high growth rates, have invested 5-7% in communications infrastructure
• We will only see growth once there is investment in this infrastructure (Communications)

Next up is Julius who will be speaking on “Linking smallholder farmers to markets an experience from Kenya”

Characteristics of these farmers:

• Volumes traded are very small
• It’s costly to sell

The market has failures which results on costly retail prices of seeds and fertilizers and poor prices for producers amongst other things. This leads to farmers being trapped in subsistence farming.

Small holder farmers are important, and it’s important to ensure that they efficient linking them to markets. Mobile phones are being used to address the constraints of Small holder farmers.  Examples:

• Kenya agricultural commodity exchange (KACE)
• Drumnet

KACE provides market information and prices for different markets via mobile phones. Prices provided are wholesale pricing. The prices are extremely timely, and also shows you the prices of markets closest to you.

DrumNet  links Input Dealers, output buyers, farmer groups and the banks. Drumnet also assists farmers with SMS reminders guiding the farmers for example “It’s time to harvest”. A farmer is linked to a Bank as well as a buyer, all transactions were enabled via mobile phones. Transactions were cashless.

Before drumnet there were several intermediaries, the farmer only ended up with 65% of the total price payed by the eventual buyer.

After drumnet, replaced most of the intermediaries, brokerage, provided finance. Farmers now earn as much as 86% of the final price payed by the buyer.

Question was asked to farmers: How much food did you borrow or receive as gifts? They found that drumnet farmers were less likely to borrow food or receive gifts. They were also more likely to give food to others, its clear from the results that farmers using the drumnet system seem to be more well off.

Better markets = Higher Margins for farmers

A new project has been started together with the IDRC, eARN (eAgricultural Research network), to figure out what has worked and what has not worked in the different projects around Africa.

Now we have Vincent Kader speaking, who will be speaking on mobile money.

• Mobile phones have a higher impact then even broadband internet
• Second highest growth in the world is from Africa
• Mobile money is a tool for financial inclusion and growth
• 200M International migrant workers remitting to dependaents
• 70% of mobile users are prepaid
• Stores in canada sell prepaid vouchers for an operator from the philippines, used to transfer cash to dependents.
• The road to mobile money: Top-Ups, Airtime balance transfer, mobile financial services, domestic transfer, international transfer

We have come to the end of the formal program for the day, and just in time my laptop says i have just 17 minutes left. It was a packed day, all in all some very useful information. Check back tomorrow for more reports on the sessions here.

11:00 – Creating Prosperity Through Innovation

Speaker: Minister Venancio Massingue, Minister of Science & Technology (Mozambique)

The minister is thanking the previous speaker, organizers and giving an introduction to his talk.  His points:

The time for Africa has arrived, if we believe we can do it we can. We should not underestimate ourselves. No co-operation between politicians and scientists were one of the reasons behind the brain drain in Africa.

Strategic areas that are being focused on:

• Human Resource
• Education
• Agriculture
• Health
• Energy
• Marine Sciences
• Information Communication Technology
• Biotechnology
• etc.

Implementation of the strategy is done via programs and projects, every project is linked to a program.

Some programs include:

• Millennium Village project
• Scientific Expeditions – Scientists are sent to rural communities to study and determine solutions for their problams. This sounds a bit like Living Labs?
• Biotech program
• National research program on HIV

It’s very important that the programs are used by local people, he told a funny story that had people chuckling.

The minister is speaking about their innovation program:

• They identify innovators
• Provide support for producing a prototype
• Provide support for patents and registation

Some examples:

• Mecho-mechanical maize mill
• Bicycle ambulance
• etc.

They have also launched an incubator programs, he is showing the buildings where they started. The initial facilities were dilapidated and old. Mozambique has a partnership with Japan where scientists from Japan come to Mozambique to work with local scientists. Programs are created for co-operatation (i.e Japan, India). They have also approved Tax incentives for the science park and have declared it as a special zone. The Maluana Science & Technology Park is being planned. There are plans to build four science and technology parks around Mozambique.

The minister is wrapping up, Final slide is on “What we expect from you”, he has a good sense of humour. Requesting assistance on the implementation of the CSIR of Mozambique.  I am guessing it’s very similar to the CSIR in South Africa?  Huge round of applause.

Scientific research is important but it should be relevant to people

Time for questions.

Question: The Framework for innovation, to an outsider it seems like there is a whole lot of work done in Mozambique that could be useful in other parts of the world and in Africa? Is there a sharing mechanism for patents? Especially amongst the SADC region.

Question: Is there collaboration with other African countries, so African countries can learn from each other?

(Interestingly, none of the colabs mentioned were with an African country)

Question: How to ensure there is a bridge between politicians and Academia/scientists? Is there a mechanism  to review the programs, are we going to end up with machines that are not being used in the field in 5 years.?

Answers:

Very Briefly

There are mechanism’s in place to review and feedback, also people are being hired to focus on collaboration. Even amongst African countries.

Lunch Time Speaker: Punam Chuhan-Pole, Lead Economist, Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region, World Bank

In the past decade, Africa has seen phenomenal growth in Economic activities. One of the key drivers is Africans themselves is driving this change, combining local knowledge with global knowledge. There is optimism that these changes can be long lasting, however there are causes for concern as well.

Punam is providing examples of economic growth:

• Average annual GDP grew from 2.5% in 1990’s to 6% in 2003-2007
• Growth was not only with mineral rich countries, but all of them
• There is a declining poverty rate in Africa
• Over 60% of children are completing primary schools
• The next challenge will be getting more people into secondary/tertiary education
• Progress on controlling HIV
• Private investment is increasing, currently 15% of GDP. Still lower then Asia
• There is rising foreign direct investment, to record levels in 2008
• Exponential growth in ICT, especially mobile services, some countries in Africa are approaching 100% mobile penetration
• Improving trends in competitiveness
• Concern: There is a skills gap that affects Africa’s competitiveness
• Increase in agricultural productivity, but due to expansion of agricultural lands but not due to actual productivity increase
• Slowdown globally had consequences in the continent

Knowledge Exchange Visit - 2009

SAFIPA have announced that they are accepting applications for the 2010 knowledge exchange visit to Finland. I previously wrote about the Knowledge exchange visit:

The Governments of Finland and South Africa have been working together in the fields of Science, Technology and Innovation, as part of that mandate SAFIPA is planning a knowledge exchange visit for South African entrepreneurs and other relevant people.

From the Invitation email:

Open call to all interested parties. This time the call will be especially directed to people interested in e-Health, e-Learning and e-Government. The call will opened Jan 30th and will close on Feb 12th. People from the previous call are encouraged to re-apply. Only one person per organization will be accepted, so organizations will need to prioritize.

The trip is scheduled for the 10-17 April 2010, to apply you are required to send the following:

1. Motivation Letter
Interested organisations and individuals are requested to submit a 1 page motivation letter to SAFIPA. Your motivation should be brief information about your organisation as well as current (and future) ICT projects working on e-Health, e-Learning and e-Governme. You need to articulate how a knowledge visit to Finland can enhance your current work as well as contribute to ICT innovation and learning’s in South Africa.

2. Orgnanisational information
a. Name of organisation
b. Your CV
c. Registration and corporate
d. Human resource and portfolio
e. ID information
f. Geographical spread
g. Current ICT projects and initiatives
h. Innovations of note
i. Future ICT plans

Please forward your motivation memo as well as organisational information to:

C/o Lorraine Shikwane
SAFIPA Programme Office
lshikwane (at) csir (dot) co (dot) za

New Zoopy Features

HD Content

You can now upload, share and watch videos in brilliant high definition on Zoopy. Any videos uploaded at a resolution of 1280×720 or higher will be encoded into a special HD MP4 format, which can then be viewed either by clicking on the HD button inside the Zoopy video player or by visiting the Zoopy HD page at http://www.zoopy.com/browse/hd

Updated Audio & Video Players

The players have been given an overhaul, and now includes the feature of creating links to specific timestamps in your media.

Zoopy TV Everywhere

Zoopy TV now features more prominently across the site for quicker access to the ever-updating archive of videos, and all Zoopy TV shows are easier to find, more distinguishable from user uploads and will be growing each of their individual brands in their own dedicated pages they each own on our new site.

The jury is still out on this feature, what are your thoughts? To be a social media company should user generated content not be promoted just as much?

New API

Zoopy have also released a new API, and the entire site is built using the API. Now thats awesome.  They have also launched a wiki for the API. There also seems to be plans to launch a few tutorials, what i would like to see is some links to any pre-existing zoopy libraries (Are there any? would anyone be interested in a python lib? )

You can read more about the redesign over at the Zoopy Blog.

From the Release:

In the 21st century, Africa is emerging as a dynamic and innovative continent. This new Africa boasts a reservoir of young talent, a growing market for cutting- edge technologies, and a source of fresh ideas. New technologies allow entrepreneurs, educators, and health specialists to overcome the old barriers of distance and borders. Citizens and journalists are using innovative tools to hold their public officials accountable.  And new practices are resulting in growing agricultural exports and greater food security on the continent. Despite its well-publicized challenges, Africa is a continent of exciting possibilities.

This conference aims to enrich our conversation about Africa, highlighting good news stories from Africa, and drawing on lessons learned, projecting trends, and focusing on the many ways in which Canada–-Africa relations support innovation on the continent.

I will be live blogging the conference as well as chairing one of the sessions at the conference. If you want to find out whats happening, you can check here or follow me on twitter.  I have also embedded the scribblelive feed on this post.

What is 7.am?

Currently the website does not allow you to sign-up online, you have to signup via your mobile phone. The site lets you post ’status updates’ which can be automatically posted to both Facebook and Twitter, in addition you can also perform check-in’s from different locations.

The check-in’s are manual since the site is web-based, the advantage of this means that even phones without a GPS can use the location based features. The disadvantage is, it becomes cumbersome to keep searching for locations to check-in. In addition to this, 7.am has a bunch of other features like chat, a diary, virtual currency called “smart bucks”, groups and the ability to backup/sync your contacts to the site.

The missed opportunity

When viewing the menu, you are faced with a huge number of menu options, i counted 21 different features and options. More features and options are not always better, especially on a mobile device.

Also some of the features could be removed entirely, for example the ‘diary’ feature. This is in effect almost exactly like posting a status update, with the difference being that you can add a title. Why even have this feature?

While it’s interesting that the location features can be used without a GPS on most WAP enabled devices, there does not seem to be any motivation to encourage check-in’s. We see companies like Gowalla and Foursquare encouraging check-in’s by making it a game.

While it’s at a very early stage, the service could work with the removal of unnecessary features and some refinement.

The €11.9 million program, known as Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy, will focus on enhancing the competitiveness of emerging market SMEs in the information and communication technologies (ICT) and agribusiness sectors in particular. The program will also employ the use of the mobile communications platform to grow content, services and applications for developing countries.

The three partner organizations created the program to foster the adoption of ICT technologies and innovative, technology-driven business models in developing countries. This approach is known to have a transformative, long-lasting effect on economically, socially and environmentally sustainable development efforts.

The program will combine an interrelated series of global, regional, and country level activities.

Highlights include: