Fatou-Fatal Lingerie

The Lingerie Post reports:

Fatou Kebe is the young Parisian designer behind the lingerie line Fatou Fatal. Kebe immigrated to France at the age of two in 1979. She pursued her degree in philosophy and law. After graduating, she worked as secretarial support to Managing Directors at various companies. By 2005, she grew tired of the discrimination she perceived in some parts of French society and decided to start her own company.

via MadeinMine

Building Working Villages

TED Fellow Alexander Petroff, founder of Working Villages on how to build a self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable villages:

Related articles

• From Starvation to Sustainability (tedfellows.posterous.com)

NigerianWebRadio

When the founders of NigerianWebRadio were posed the question:

"why create a radio station broadcasting to the Nigerian Diaspora?"

They responded:

We live in the Diaspora too. And, we know how tough it is to be thousands of miles away from our roots,our culture,our music and our overall way of life.

Nigerian WebRadio is an internet-based radio station dedicated to the Nigerian Diaspora community. The radio station was conceived to bring up-to-date news and home-made entertainment to the doorsteps of Nigerians living outside the shores of Nigeria-website

Driver Identification Cards

Aloy Chife founder of socketworks on his work bringing Drivers License identification cards to Nigeria:

Connected from Stephanie Wang on Vimeo.
via Anam City

eTXT – email and SMS for the unconnected

A ForgetMeNot product:

...eTXT is a message which can be sent and received seamlessly as an SMS, an email or a chat message.Using our Message Optimiser (MO) platform, African Mobile Network Operators can enable their subscribers to send and receive email and chat messages to and from any mobile phone. No need for downloads to the phone, internet or PC access or change in user behaviour.

via Afrosocialmedia

Steel & Tube Industries

Steel and Tube a metalworks company initiated production with the:

"bulk manufacture of steel tubes and plates." they have gone on to be come a prime producer of Galvanized Iron Sheets, Mat-tiles Sheets, Hollow Sections, Expanded Metals, Bottle Sections, Fascia Boards.

Mobisoko- Africa’s mobile app marketplace

Founded by Juliana Rotich:

Mobisoko is an mobile applications marketplace for Africa. It is a way to find language and location relevant mobile apps. It is the place to download, sell and buy localized mobile apps. Mobisoko rewards local talent and provides opportunities for local programmers to showcase their work...the aim is to assist students and mobile programmers in Africa to distribute and showcase their mobile applications to the public. Many applications that are written for mobiles (particularly by students at universities) are not distributed because of the lack of resources such as hosting or expertise in marketing. Such applications end up being shelved and not being visible to people who could benefit from using them in their daily life. Secondly MobiSoko seeks to reward these innovators by providing them with sustainable incomes and careers. Developers can submit their applications to be hosted and made available for download and purchase-website

March of the Hubs - Active Spaces

Bill Zimmerman co-founder of Limbe Labs writes about the debut of Active Spaces:

Starting with a new identity, it made sense to reexamine our organizational structure. For its size, we felt that Limbe Labs was top-heavy and didn’t reflect a strong sense of community ownership. The first decision we made was that this space would be wholly owned and managed by the local tech community, rather than officers of a commercial entity. With this as our foundation, the rest were details; what criteria do we use to process new member requests? How many membership levels do we need? What percentage of invoiced commercial projects go toward funding the space? And so on...[continue reading]

Anam New City

Led by TED Fellow Dk Osseo-Asare, and a project of the Chife Foundation:

courtesy of Anam city

Anam City is a dynamic model for sustainable development that balances ecology with economic growth, delivers world-class quality of life across generations and leverages technology within the African culture of collective progress. The new city project is a collective effort of the greater Anam community in partnership with the Chife Foundation

Homegrown African Hardware Companies

In Afrinnovator:

Wayan Vota writes about the dominant laptop brand in Nigeria. It would be very easy to guess that typically it would be some foreign company such as Dell or HP. However, as Wayan notes, the reality is that it is neither of these but a local laptop manufacturer, Zinox.

If you think the answer to, “Who sells the most laptops in Nigeria?” is a big western brand like HP, Dell, or Toshiba, you would be wrong. You may be surprised to learn that the leading laptop sales company is the homegrown, Nigerian compnay Zinox, as IDC confirms:
The Q2 2010 IDC report posted on the company’s web site reveals that Zinox laptops are the fastest growing and best selling Notebooks in the Nigerian market. Zinox is strongest in the laptop market where it leads six other international brands, including HP, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo and LG Electronics, with a 53.6% market share and a year-on-year growth of 799 per cent, while its closest competitor, HP, achieved a 23.6 per cent market share

Continuing:

Not only are companies such as Omatek setting the pace for hardware manufacturing, they are also setting the pace for hardware innovation in Africa. Omatek manufactured and launched it’s ‘handtop’ the world’s smallest desktop computer

More here

The Promise of Open-Source Biotechnology

TED Fellow Guido David Núñez-Mujica presents a case for homegrown biotechnology development:

Mary Abukutsa-Onyango on Indigenous Vegetables

In Open Access, an interview with Mary Abukutsa-Onyang on the importance of indigenous vegetables, she underlines the significance of open access journals:

Prof. Mary Abukutsa-Onyango discusses the importance of Open Access for research from Kenya and other African countries from Leslie Chan on Vimeo.

Quick Hits

Tanzania’s tech sector is rising, but better reporting is needed-Afrinnovator
What others are doing with millet,Anheuser-Busch's flavored beers
The rise of the lady “techpreneur” at IPO48.
Africa's top 40 global competitors-How We Made it Africa

Processing Millet

Spore on the millet revival:

Image courtesy of Spore

For decades, millet has been neglected in favour of imported cereals. But now this crop, which is well adapted to the climatic conditions of the Sahel, is making a comeback: research is under way into new varieties and products that are attractive and easy to use for consumers...The rise in prices of rice and wheat has created fertile ground for a revival in millet consumption. It is a process that is being further advanced by an increase in output and by improved processing and marketing techniques designed to offer consumers a range of products that are more varied, simpler to prepare and more ‘modern’. Since the 1980s, various regional initiatives aimed at promoting local cereals – among them IMS, Procelos, Rocafremi and Senegal’s PPCL – have been making efforts to develop new products with a view to making local cereals more profitable: among the novelties are ready-to-cook preparations (tô, pap or couscous), ready-to eat foods (pastes, biscuits, dumplings, pancakes, baby foods) and industrial products (starch, malt).

More here

Making Agriculture Cool

Bankelele writes:

Courtesy of Cityfarmer

The urban population does not grow food, has little interest in agriculture. They want to make live in cities (like Nairobi which generates over ½ the country’s GDP) and build applications for mobile phones that do A, B, C, D etc. One way to increase interest is to agriculture relevant to a young population, farmers employing new techniques new crops, not just traditional maize and beans.
In the technology space, there has been a shift, deliberate or not towards rewarding innovations and projects in the field of agriculture including:
- Apps for Africa was won by i-cow a voice-based mobile phone application that helps dairy farmers manage breeding and feeding of cows leading to better yields.
- The Chase Bank /Enablis Business Plan competition in which agri-business proposals overtook ICT both in the number of entries received and list of top 100 picked. Of these 35% of the entries submitted came from Nairobi and 30# were from people aged 18 – 25 years.
- Finally M-farm, an information resource for farmers scooped the top prize in last week’s IPO48 entrepreneur contest.
The best way to make agriculture cool is for it to make money, but by also making agriculture relevant for the youth - using best practices, new technology, and high profits (tea sector),

More here

Building Clusters-Botswana's Diamond Technology Park

Botswana's DTP is

...modelled on similar successful international developments, the concept of Diamond Technology Park is that of a supply chain cluster housing the entire diamond industry in a centralized, secure manner.Diamond Technology Park tenants have been drawn from the world’s leading diamond companies who enjoy superior levels of expertise and solid experience. Other tenants include companies that service the diamond manufacturing industry such as local and international banks, courier companies, machinery suppliers, security, the Botswana Police, a world renowned laboratory, mining houses, brokers, consultants, the Diamond Hub and the diamond office of the Ministry of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources.This model creates opportunities for small, medium and micro enterprises and generates greater efficiencies and security for all

via Palapye

Appropriate Technology : If you can’t Sell it don’t Do it

Paul Polak's scathing indictment of Appropriate Technology:

Sadly, far too many of the tools developed by the appropriate technology movement are far too expensive to be affordable to the customers for whom they are intended.
It bears repeating: the appropriate technology movement died because it was led by well-intentioned tinkerers instead of hard-nosed entrepreneurs designing for the market.
With its passing, thousands of technically effective, often outrageously expensive tools lie gathering dust on the shelf

ATI's Manual Sunflower Oil Press for Africa, $110 to $200+- It did the job but was too expensive, and more affordable presses took over much of the market
along with the pamphlets, articles and books that describe them and large numbers of appropriate technology journals, books, catalogues and more recently web sites.
As far as I know, only a handful of tools designed by the appropriate technology movement ended up in the hands of more than 10,000 people who need them.

More here

Related articles

• Africa's Informal Economy Revealed (fastcompany.com)

Garage Biotech contd

The DIYBio movement continues to blossom, Nature's Heidi Ledford on the Life Hackers:

Would-be 'biohackers' around the world are setting up labs in their garages, closets and kitchens — from professional scientists keeping a side project at home to individuals who have never used a pipette before. They buy used lab equipment online, convert webcams into US$10 microscopes and incubate tubes of genetically engineered Escherichia coli in their armpits. (It's cheaper than shelling out $100 or more on a 37 °C incubator.) Some share protocols and ideas in open forums...

the importance of tinkering:

most members of the do-it-yourself, or DIY, biology community are hobbyists, rigging up cheap equipment and tackling projects that — although not exactly pushing the boundaries of molecular biology — are creative proof of the hacker principle. Meredith Patterson, a computer programmer based in San Francisco, California, whom some call the 'doyenne of DIYbio', made glow-in-the-dark yogurt by engineering the bacteria within to produce a fluorescent protein. Others hope to learn more about themselves: a group called DIYgenomics has banded together to analyse their genomes, and even conduct and participate in small clinical trials. For those who aspire to change the world, improving biofuel development is a popular draw. And several groups are focused on making standard instruments — such as PCR machines, which amplify segments of DNA — cheaper and easier to use outside the confines of a laboratory, ultimately promising to make DIYbio more accessible.

More here

Related articles

• The Spread of Do-It-Yourself Biotech (science.slashdot.org)
• DIYbio NYC on the BioBus (mt-soft.com.ar)

Bark Cloth

The Bark Cloth company, on the qualities of their fabric woven from the plant fibers of the Mutaba tree:

Image courtesy of Bark Cloth

No cloth is like another. The large variety of subtle natural tones, as well as the dyed cloths in shouting fancy colors, make BARK CLOTH® unmistakable. Depending on lighting conditions, angle of viewing, and treatment the moldable material changes from the supple, but robust charm of leather to the translucent and graceful lightness of fleece. Its strong contrast between archaic authenticity and state-of-the-art textile finishing processes generates a convincing effect for nearly unlimited applications.

For further coverage read the Bark Cloth blog

"Lets Invent" with the GoGo board

From their website:

The main goal of the GoGo Board project is to create an open-source platform that is designed to be low-cost and allow for local assembly by those who are interested. We choose human scale parts that can be assembled with out special soldering equipment. The parts are carefully selected so that they are widely available in many countries. So far, the GoGo Board has been locally built in the USA, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, China, and many other developing countries.

At SEED International collaboration on building a GoGo board

The GoGo board is a programmable device that is designed for sensor-based and control projects. It is suited for building robots, data loggers, and devices for human-computer interaction. Its functionality is inspired by the MIT Cricket and many other programmable devices such as the the Lego Mindstorms, the IRX board, and Basic Stamps.

Related articles

• The LEGO Technic Idea Book: Wheeled Wonders (oreilly.com)

Fodder shrubs deliver Dairy success

A New Agriculturist photo gallery on Shrubbery as a food supplement for dairy cattle:

Using secateurs to give the clean cut that stimulates re-growth, Phylis Wambui Mungai harvests branches of Calliandra - one of the nine recommended fodder species - from the rows of one metre high shrubs planted on the contours of her sloping farmland. She systematically cuts from each shrub every 8-12 weeks.

Feeding at least six kilos of fresh foliage each day can increase cow milk production by a litre a day. Unlike grasses, the fodder shrubs retain high protein levels in the dry season, maintaining feed quality and enabling farmers to benefit from higher prices for fresh milk during the dry months.

More here
Images courtesy of New Agriculturist

Automating the Maker Revolution

In Global Guerillas:

Open source hardware is taking off. Hackerspaces are spreading like wildfire (we'll see thousands, potentially tens of thousands, of these spring up in the next five years). To help this revolution zoom, we need an online system that standardizes and simplifies the description of the processes used to make the hardware. For example: Marcin over at openfarmtech has composed a replication document for partners developing the LifeTrac II open source tractor. It's a great effort, but so much more should be done.

More here
via Adafruit Industries

Related articles

• Open-source hardware - around the web (makezine.com)
• Recruiting In An Emerging Age Of Makers (chrisgammell.com)

Peace Anyiam-Osigwe on Creative Industries

TED Fellow Peace Anyiam-Osigwe founder of AMAA on the rise of Africa's creative economy:

...One of the best things coming out of Africa right now are the creative industries. We have a lot of brilliant writers, filmmakers and musicians. P-Square, for example, comes to America from Nigeria and sells out shows. We have dressmakers like Tiffany Amber who are now internationally renowned. All these young entrepreneurs are succeeding in the face of so much adversity. There is a vibrant youth culture going on in Africa, and these things need to be talked about, these things need to be shown.

And more on her other projects:

My business partner Dayo Ogunyemi and I are also building cinemas throughout Africa. These “Cinemarts” are community centers in rural and low income urban areas, anchored by digital cinemas fitting an average of three hundred people, with indoor and outdoor refreshments areas. Each ticket to a show will cost one dollar or less. We have a lack of cinema halls on the continent now. We’re building them so that there is a form of distribution for African films that can make some money for the filmmaker.

More here

Related articles

• The Challenges of Informal Economies (africaunchained.blogspot.com)
• Anyiam-Osigwe speaaks on her vision for African movie industry (vanguardngr.com)
• Time for Africans to Explore Africa (africaunchained.blogspot.com)

A Better World by your Own Design

In Engineering for Change Rob Goodier writes:

Printed Microfluidic molds. image courtesy of R. Goodier

Self-service could be the new thing in international development. It's already the new way to learn something: There are hackers clubs for subjects from robotics to biology, and Maker Faires worldwide have showcased the backyard genius of passionate amateurs.
It may also be the new thing in solving problems in underserved communities. The talented volunteers from developed countries who used to lead development projects abroad are starting to relinquish control. Instead, they are asking how they can serve from the backseat while the beneficiaries themselves take the wheel...[continue reading]

Related articles

• A World's Faire for Makers (adafruit.com)

Mini-Livestock keeping

Spore provides us with an overview of the burgeoning Mini-Livestock space:

Photo courtesy of Spore

The need to produce animal protein for a relatively modest investment is more pressing than ever at a time when the price of fish and meat, including imported products, is soaring in most countries. Mini livestock keeping should not be seen as a rival to classic livestock rearing, but as a complement to other farming activities...Studies have shown that in some parts of Central and West Africa, consumers prefer so-called bush meat, considered a great delicacy, to beef or lamb. In the major towns, clients nostalgic for the flavours of their home villages are prepared to pay a premium for farmed game and giant snails. This trend is helping to promote peri-urban and even urban farming of these small species. Mini livestock keeping is an affordable solution for women, young people and landless farmers, since it generally requires little space

More here

Hackerspaces and Technology

Akiba at Freaklabs writes:

One of the most important things about hackerspaces, and an area that differentiates it from other areas in the tech industry, is that most of the ideas and projects aren’t designed for any type of financial return. And unlike academic research labs, hackerspaces are usually very hands-on and focused on practical implementation. In Tokyo Hackerspace, we have a lot of projects or project ideas that revolve around environmental or humanitarian applications of technology as well as art. These types of projects would rarely see the light of day in corporate scenarios (without government subisidies) but are often the types of projects that, when further refined, may turn into something that is financially viable or lay the groundwork for something much bigger.

More here
via Adafruit

Related articles

• Hackerspaces and Technology (adafruit.com)
• ReMade, a hackerspace documentary (makezine.com)
• Hackerspace video series (boingboing.net)
• ReMade: The Rebirth of the Maker Movement (adafruit.com)

“A Man’s Story” (This Is Ozwald Boateng)

Ozwald Boateng's biopic - "A Man's Story":

"...A Man's Story profiles Ozwald Boateng, his design, his business, his personal life. Charismatic, glamorous, hard-working and very humanly flawed, Boateng's personal and professional triumphs and set-backs are the fascinating heart of this film which is set against a back-drop of models, movie stars and fabulous locations..."-Britfilms

Watch related 2010 Fashion show

Related articles

• Ozwald Boateng Spring/Summer 2011 (thisheartsonfire.com)
• Ozwald Boateng Closes London Fashion Week (prweb.com)
• And for him? Retro suits and floral sweatshirts (independent.co.uk)

Presenting African Digital Art

Jepchumba the founder of African Digital Art:

A little bit about ADA from African Digital Art on Vimeo.
The term digital art is permeating through the web even though the precise definition is unclear. Digital art covers a wide range of artistic production; audio/visual production, animation, interactive projects, websites, short films, graphic art and design. African Digital Art is an online collective, a creative space, where digital artist, enthusiasts and professionals can seek inspiration, showcase their artistry and connect with emerging artists-website

Airplane Hacker-Gabriel Nderitu

Airplane Hacker/Maker Gabriel Nderitu looks forward to the test flight of his Kahawa West Aircraft read Bunmi's take:

Watch related videos below:

via Afrigadget

International Investors See Market Opportunities in Africa

The VOA reports:
International investors are showing a growing interest in Africa's retail market. American retail giant Wal-Mart is in preliminary talks to buy South African wholesaler Massmart for more than $4 million. And the Dutch-based supermarket network SPAR recently opened a new outlet in Nigeria...[continue reading]

Zuqka a media sharing Platform

CP-Africa reports:

Zuqka is a Kenyan video sharing platform, which works primarily like notable video sharing sites like Vimeo and Youtube. At Zuqka you can watch the collection of videos uploaded by the community or add your own after a quick sign up.Zuqka also offers you the ability to blog, which is a feature not usually found at Video sharing platforms. You can also create a slideshow or traverse their events.

Making Electronic Designs

Image via CrunchBaseFrom the Ponoko Blog:

Ponoko has teamed up with SparkFun Electronics to help make it easy for you to build custom electronics products using your online personal factory.This combines the digital making wizardry of the world’s easiest making system with a 1500+ strong electronics catalog from open source electronics supplier SparkFun...[more]

What kind of thing can you make?

How about an FM radio transmitter and receiver? The Niftymitter is a fairly simple, open-source design from former Ponoko blogger Roy Shearer. You can download the lasercutting files for free in the Ponoko Showroom and get most of the parts you need through the Ponoko hardware materials catalog...[continue reading].

Related articles

• Ponoko Teams Up With SparkFun To Help You Make Stuff (crunchgear.com)
• Make Your Own Gadget With Ponoko and SparkFun (nytimes.com)
• The Homemade Gadget (inc.com)