Fanisi Venture Capital Fund

Fanisi VC "...focuses on a segment of the market that has to date been outside the ambit of most venture funds in the East African market. Fanisi makes equity investments of $0.5 million - $3 million per transaction in high growth businesses, including start ups and early stage companies, and is committed to working with East African entrepreneurs to build world class businesses with significant development impact on the economies in the region..."

MakerCulture-A Series

Ponoko reports on "an 11 part, multi-media series" that captures "the movers, shakers, doers and makers of today":

MakerCulture is a multi-media series of articles, photos, podcasts, and videos capturing the maker movement. What’s so great about this series is the way it covers all different sorts of makers — from hackers to bakers, punk educators to citizen scientists, and all sorts of artists and activists in between.

More here

Pamela Anyoti Peronaci-Chilli trader

New Agriculturist reports:

courtesy of Pamela Anyoti Peronaci

In 2007, Pamela Anyoti Peronaci decided to set up a business-Sunshine Agro- exporting bird's eye chillies from Uganda to Europe. "My aim was to export just one container, to give me capital to put back into the business so that I could expand," she says. From small beginnings, working with 15 widows, whom she trained and supplied with inputs, Anyoti Peronaci has developed a contract farming operation which, in 2010, had 1,250 outgrowers and exported 24 tonnes.

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Ziliot- A B2B social network

Ziliot's "...mission is to create and establish a new B2B social network, Ziliot, which enables SMEs, professionals and government authorities between the developed countries and developing countries to find and interact with each other..."After the jump watch co-founder Aniekan Okono explain their mission: 

Africa Felix Juice

Sierra Leone's Africa Felix Juice in the First Step economic zone "..plant has a Working Capacity of 3.000 kg/hour of fresh fruits for the production of..."
-Pineapple juice concentrate,
-Mango juice puree,
-Pineapple juice
-Mango juice
-Papaya juice puree

Pulse -An Academia Connector

Pulse co-founded by Leslie Tita and William Takor will enable universities to connect students and lecturers:

What is Pulse ? from pulse on Vimeo.

Iroko Partners of Nollywood

Sarah Lacy writing in Techrunch:

Raymond Njoku (Founder of Iroko Partners) spent weeks trolling the Alaba markets introducing himself to producers and trying to explain to them how a YouTube channel could be an answer for revenues, not simply another channel for the pirates to steal their intellectual property. Once he sold a few of the bigger ones like Ulzee, word spread and more producers piled in. Just four months in to his business, Njoku has bought the online rights to 500 movies from 100 different one-man production houses. Last month his YouTube channel had 1.1 million uniques, 8 million streams, and is on pace to do more than $1 million in revenues this year from YouTube ads. Those numbers are massive for a Nigerian-based Web company, particularly in such a short time. Facebook has one of the largest user-bases here, feeling ubiquitous in the city. And yet it has less than three million users.
Njoku is playing a long-game. Most of his traffic is from outside Nigeria, because broadband penetration is still so low there. He’s paying more than he would have to for rights; about $3,000 per film, roughly what TV stations pay. That immediately returns about one-third of the production costs, a welcome surprise for a new medium that most of these producers had never really considered before. He provides a lot of other value-added services too, like creating an IMDB-equivalent for the messy Nollywood industry, and watching all movies to strip out things like the unauthorized use of a Beyonce song. In the future, he’s going to provide French subtitles so the movies can find new audiences in surrounding West African nations.

More here

Related articles

• Nollywood Movies for Free on NollywoodLove (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)

Imbe-Queen of Fruits

Kim Kido writing in Worldwatch:

Image via Wikipedia

With sap that makes arrow poison, leaves that contain antibacterial compounds, and fruit as tasty as its cousin mangosteen, the uses of imbe (Garcinia livingstonei) are as varied as the places visited by its namesake David Livingstone. One of about 400 varieties of Garcinia, imbe is the best known relative of the mangosteen in Africa The fruit is eaten raw, cooked with porridge, seeded and dried, or crushed like grapes to create a drink. The fruit can also be fermented to make a purplish wine or soaked in alcohol and mixed with syrup to make liqueur...[continue reading]

Related articles

• The benefits of the Mangosteen fruit for our bodies (4youknow.wordpress.com)

Burro Sustainable Power

In Ghana:

Burro is a new kind of company dedicated to delivering high-quality, affordable goods and services to low-income families in the developing world. Our for-profit business model will allow us to sustainably serve consumers who are largely ignored by the marketplace but who are eager and able to spend on innovations that improve their productivity...Burro's first offering is a rechargeable battery service that our clients use predominantly for flashlights, radios, and cell phone charging. It costs less than available throwaway batteries while delivering more power and eliminating potentially hazardous waste.

via Treehugger

ÀSÀBÍ by Nike Oshinowo

In Ladybrille:

Nigerian ex-beauty queen and style icon Nike Oshinowo ventures into the beauty industry with the launch of her first fragrance ÀSÀBÍ. ÀSÀBÍ is Oshinowo’s middle name and means “special birth” in the Yoruba language. The fragrance is expected to hit retail stores soon and will be sold for ₦5,000.

Kilimo Salama-Weather Insurance for Farmers

In the NYTimes:

Weather insurance for small farmers has always faced numerous barriers. But throughout east Africa today there are projects finding creative and innovative ways to overcome them. One of them is a project in Kenya’s southwest that so far insures 22,000 farmers. There are so few farmers with insurance in Africa that this project is the continent’s largest. It is called Kilimo Salama, which means “safe farming” in Swahili. ...Each farmer who buys insurance is linked to the nearest weather station — no one is more than 20 kilometers from a station. If the weather station shows that the rainfall was insufficient early in the growing season, or too much late in the corn season, all the farmers in that area get an automatic payout — farmers do not have to file a claim. If the rainfall was only slightly off, farmers get a small payment. If the weather was extreme enough to destroy their whole harvest, they get the full amount

More here

Quick Hits

Jewelry designer-Buki Peters
Investing in wealth creation, The Adventure Project
The need for Open Science
Manufacturing in Africa can be profitable

Malawi's Fish Farming Innovation Platform - RIU

Kmerblagues-The Comedy Central of Cameroon

Activespaces reports on Kmerblagues a Facebook application created by Mohamed Ahmed Felata:

Cameroonians can use it to submit jokes, share them on their walls and vote to promote the best ones. Winning jokes for the week are announced each Monday and are rewarded with airtime vouchers. Cameroonians abroad can win too and send the voucher code to a friend back home.

via VC4Africa

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• Venture capital is critical to Nigeria industrialisation - Okolo (vanguardngr.com)

Supporting Liberian Entrepreneurs-BSC Monrovia

In Liberia:

SPARK BSC Monrovia video from Africa Interactive on Vimeo.
BSC Monrovia develops entrepreneurship and education so that young ambitious women and men are empowered to lead their societies into prosperity.The BSC Monrovia helps to build the capacity of local economic and educational institutions

via Next Billion

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• Stretching a buck in Monrovia (fellowsblog.kiva.org)
• Ushahidi Liberia: new office, new lessons in importing + cold water (ushahidi.com)

The Kitchen-Table Industrialists

In the NYTimes, Anand Giridharadas on the maker revolution:

Courtesy of Brian Finke, New York Times

Makers, as they call themselves, can’t compete with the long, orderly rows of workers from the poorer provinces of China or India who cut, stitch and solder bras, shoes and cellphones for pennies — or even with the hundreds of billions of dollars a year worth of stuff that continues to pour out of large, old-fashioned American factories. Their method involves creating “hacker space” cooperatives, where a few dozen members share a 3-D printer, a laser cutter and an oscilloscope and engage in collaborative manufacturing projects. Makers have created companies like Shapeways and CloudFab, which for a fee will manufacture small runs of products that you design. They are becoming kit makers like Ayah Bdeir, manufacturing building blocks that allow others to create things.

More here

How-To: Set Up An Electronics Lab

In Make magazine 'Dave Jones from the Electronics Engineering Video Blog':

The African Yam Bean

In Worldwatch:

Image courtesy of D. Adewale, IITA.

...Many consumers worldwide may already be familiar with the tuber portion of the African yam bean plant-the American variety (Pachyrizus erosus) is harvested and sold as jicama in grocery stores. Although the two yam bean plants are related genetically, the American variety does not produce edible beans.Grown in pockets of tropical Central, West and East Africa, the African yam bean has great potential to contribute to overall food security and improve local diets. A publication by the National Research Council notes that the tuber of the African yam bean contains twice the protein of comparable African root crops including yams and sweet potatoes and has almost ten times the protein found in cassava. Consumers can enjoy the tuber raw—it’s crunchy, juicy, and mildly sweet-and it can also be cooked like other starch staples found in Africa.

More here
via DailyKos

Papyrus Reeds

From the SEED initiative:

“Papyrus Reeds...” is a sustainable enterprise that harvests and processes papyrus reeds and crafts them into high-quality baskets, purses, carpets, chairs, sleeping mats and blankets, using the waste as natural manure.

The African Potato Lab

In Wired:

Photo: Grant Lee Neuenburg/Wired.com

A better sweet potato is not worth much if nobody grows it, so a big part of the project involves bringing plants to communities and encouraging farmers to cultivate them.
The head of the Mozambican office, Dr. Maria Isabel Andrade, leads a team of researchers who are breeding sweet potato varieties that can survive in drought conditions. Droughts are a fact of Mozambican life for up to seven months a year."We come to a community, and we identify a farmer that is, let's say ... better ... than any other farmer," explains Andrade. A better farmer is knowledgeable about sweet potatoes, and has enough irrigation to keep plants alive between harvests.Once Andrade and her colleagues have found the right person for the job, staff members provide plants, specialized training and a guarantee of a return on investment through a system of vouchers. In return for the subsidy, the farmer has to provide vines to her neighbors when the planting season begins.

More here

1,000 Sustainable Gardens

A Slow Food Project to incubate a 1000 gardens:

The food gardens will be cultivated using sustainable methods such as composting, natural treatments for pests, rational water use, planting local varieties and intercropping fruit trees, vegetables and medicinal herbs. The focus is on helping farmers and communities to recover local crops with less need for external inputs, rather than just handing over seeds and fertilizers. The gardens will also work to restore prestige to small farmers, an occupation now often shunned by young people in Africa as in many other parts of the world.

via Tree Hugger

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• Open Gardens Toronto - Sustainable Garden Initiative (sustainablelibraries.wordpress.com)

Buka, Brooklyn

via NaijaBlog a peek at Buka restaurant New York City:

The iHub Robotics Initiative

In Nairobi:

Image via Wikipedia

Since its inception, *iHub_ has been focused on software development (Specifically on mobile and apps) and this has been a huge success. *iHub_ is now looking to replicate this success to the computer hardware sphere, and more specifically in robotics.
You may ask, why robots? Well, it depends how you look at robots. Most people think about robots as the ones seen in the Transformer movie. But no, robots are actually more simple that that. Any device that uses a computer chip to perform a task is considered a robot. Just to give some examples, traffic lights are a form of robots (Actually in South Africa, traffic lights are called ROBOTS). Another example is a digital power meter. It may not look like a computer, but the chip in the meter qualifies it as a robot. A personal computer is also a type of robot, albeit one that needs human interaction to function. More familiar examples may be the extra-terrestrial vehicles on Mars or satellites in space.

More here

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• The Latest in Hobby Robotics 06 (fakeiitian.com)

In Developing Economies, Equity beats Microfinance

Alan Patricof writing in Fortune:

SMEs provide over 30% of total employment and generate 16% of GDP in low-income countries. In middle-income countries, SMEs capture an even larger share at 57% and 39%, respectively. But they are often considered too risky for commercial investment and need much more investment capital than can be provided by microfinance.
Oftentimes, it is venture capital firms and angel investors that fill this "missing middle" in the U.S., but in the developing world this kind of capital is not readily available in any significant amount. No successful company in the U.S. started with loans. Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg did not borrow from their local banks to start Apple (AAPL), Dell (DELL) and Facebook. They got angel investors and venture capitalists to provide them with risk capital in the form of equity and quasi-equity.

This is beginning to change albeit slowly:

Organizations taking a novel approach to development while providing significant resources are springing up around the world. One such example of new thinking, new instruments, and a new vision is Fanisi (in Kenya), which provides equity investments of as much as $3 million to promising SMEs across East Africa.

Other equity focused investors mentioned are Song,SEAF and the GrassRoots Business Fund
More here

Olatunbosun Obayomi at the BMW Guggenheim Lab

TED Fellow Olatunbosun Obayomi of the BMW Guggenheim Lab discussing how we can invent urbanity:

Turning Trash into Toys for Learning

From INK conferences via TED, Arvind Gupta on how to fabricate toys and educate with trash:

Public Libraries, 3D Printing, FabLabs and Hackerspaces

Shapeways highlights a video on the convergence of Public Libraries, 3D Printing, FabLabs and Hackerspaces:

Related articles

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Hacked Motorbike: “Make People Happy”

Chika Okafor reports on a fabricated motorbike "Make People Happy":

courtesy of high tech Africa

It’s a six(6) passenger seater, modified 150cc powered, unique four wheeled bike, designed and fabricated by self taught maker, designer and motivator by the name Ibrahim Adekunle whose informal skill training is focused on soldering and welding of automobile radiators
"Adekunle" whose make shift garage cum workshop is situated under the Opebi - Oregun link road bridge in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria might be lacking cutting edge first world fabrication tools,equipment and a non conducive operable environment.

More here

Pig Markets for Malawi

RIU reports on the successful implementation of Pig markets in Malawi:

courtesy of RIU

They discovered a classic market failure: farmers were rearing pigs in Malawi but not finding markets; meanwhile Malawian pork processors were importing pigs from outside the country. Once RIU had established the problem they decided the best strategy was to construct four purpose-built pig markets...[continue reading]

early feedback seems to be positive,watch related video here:

Esnat Zimba, the Balaka Pig Farmers Association chairperson, said:

"In Balaka we have many pig farmers but we do not have the markets. By helping us construct the market RIU has empowered us economically and socially. These markets will be used not only by members of the association but many other farmers."

She continued to explain that Balaka has over a hundred farmers who are keeping pigs; without the help of the market, vendors would not be coming to the market to buy pigs.

AdderFab-Powder Based 3d Printer

Open3dp reports on Adderfab:

The objective of this project is to design and prototype an open source, open architecture, powder-based three dimensional printer. During the course of the project a prototype system was manufactured and, during subsequent testing, was found to successfully print objects by applying an organic binder to a multi-mode sugar powder.
The prototype system consists of three main subsystems: the enclosure, the powder chambers, and the print carriage. The enclosure is made from a set of interlocking acrylic panels that are joined by threaded fasteners. There are three powder chambers, feed, build, and waste, which store powder in its bound and unbound states. Powder for each layer is transferred from the feed to the build chamber using a manual spreader bar after the feed and build piston are moved vertically by a non-captive linear actuator. The print carriage is supported by a pair of rails and is moved over the powder beds by a rack and pinion gear system. Carriage and print head motion is controlled by stock Lexmark Z735 hardware and software, with only minor hardware modifications.Watch related video after the jump.

More here

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• Will 3D Printing End Mass Manufacturing? [PICS] (mashable.com)
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• Mini Home FabLab for Around $4000 (makezine.com)

Re-Designing the African Kitchen

Fatimata Ly asks:

Image courtesy of Project Hope

How could we design kitchens for Senegalese families?
I have noticed that in many houses, people end up cooking outside, the same happens in my family home for slow cooking dishes. Most families do cook in the yard as I said earlier we tend to use many vessels, meat or fish is marinated for long hours, fried or grilled on charcoal, spices are pounded, large amount of leaves chopped… Just to give out few details of the whole process. So whether it is indoors or outdoors, we should define a space with several areas that would allow the disposal of several various sized vessels, a storage place for large rice bags, condiments, a preparation space, a cooking area etc. And as women tend to work on a lower level, lower benches so women could easily reach out for vessels. Most cookers in the country are low, about 80/90 cm from the floor, the imported stoves are barely used in large families

courtesy of email variety

More here

University Construction Set

Open Source Ecology is

Open Source Ecology Backhoe

...looking for a volunteer to develop a curriculum for either a certificate, associate, or Bachelor’s level program, Open Economic Development, based on the GVCS. The problem statement is: what is the substance of such a program, and how does it contribute to real skills for Open Economic Development? The scope is not only the GVCS – but the infrastructure and civilization-building ramifications of the Global Village Construction Set. If you are a curriculum developer, or if you want to take this on as a Ph.D. thesis through Gaia University or another university, contact me to discuss the details. As I discussed in the last post, you would have to do the heavy work of composing the curriculum, as I will continue with my core competency of developing the GVCS – so that there’s something to teach about in the first place – and not only that – but also so that there’s the real economic engine that can raise such initiatives from the ground up.

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Komati Fresh produce

An SDC Investment:

Komati Fresh Produce Farmers (KFPF), is a produce coordination organization (PCO) located in the Lowveld region of Swaziland. KFPF was formed in 2003 to provide the local community a well organized formal market for fruit and vegetables. The organization is comprised of 14 farming groups who are shareholders in the PCO. In total, KFPF includes more than 596 small holder farmers each with at least 0.25 hectares of land. In addition, the organization has infrastructure in place to collect, pack and export gooseberries to South Africa.
KFPF’s primary activity is the production of Cape Gooseberries, a perennial crop, which thrives on marginal soils. The Company exports Gooseberries to South Africa via its primary customer Well-Pict SA, a producer and marketer of various berries.

Garage48 comes to Lagos

In their Blog:

For the first time in its existence, the Garage48 event series is coming to Lagos. Together with two world companies, Google and Nokia, it will take place from the 6th to the 8th of May 2011 at the Lagos Resource Centre, Victoria Island. Originally developed in Europe, Estonia and expanded to other countries, the purpose of the event is to build new web and mobile services in one single weekend - 48 hours.

More here