Hashtag #Afridev

A few friends and I have begun a discussion on the microblogging site, Twitter. Using the hashtag #afridev, we’re raising points and discussing all things related to Africa, Technology and Development. Mind you, this is stuff most of us talk about anyways but this particular dialog came out of our recent panel at South By South West Interactive in Austin. We asked the crowd to ask us questions using the hashtag #afridev. Amazingly, the topic trended on Twitter’s front page for a while, meaning lots of people were referencing or tweeting back. You can see a map of conversations here on mailana.

We wanted to continue this conversation after the panel, and get to some of the unanswered questions. So beginning with this post, I’m going back through to give my opinions (answers) on various topics. People who have anything to add to the conversation are welcome to do so here on on twitter using #afridev (you get it by now). We did register the Twitter acount @afridev for answering these questions via Twitter. The account isn’t really owned by anyone of us so we’ll all take turns using it.

Some people have negative connotations with the phrase meme, but I recommend they get over themselves and help the idea to spread by blogging or sharing (bookmarking, commenting, or tweeting) with some sort of Afridev annotation.

@ttsiuqmlap asks “OK, so I’ll volunteer to be your first client. Planning trip to Liberia with iPhone. Can I get all service as typical as in US?”

Answer: I live in Uganda and I’ve never been to Liberia but I’ll add some insight from my perspective anyways. In Uganda and Rwanda anyways, there’s only recently an official iPhone carrier, Orange Telecom. They’re still getting set-up so what most people do is jail-break their iphones and they use local sim cards when they get here. Then, you can use a local carrier like MTN which offers robust data packages over Edge and 3G.

@ehrenfoss asks “I can’t remember the outsource dev site you mentioned in the SXSW panel….sabasource? I made guesses at URL but no luck.”

Answer: That would be Samasource.org founded by Leila Chirayath

@ttennheat asks “Where can I find up to date information on salaries in each country of Africa?”

Answer: I’m not sure if there’s an official market guide but watch Kofi’s AfriMonitor.com and Appfrica’s own Afridex.net (a business information aggregator) for this information.

@katrinskaya says “I am still a little stunned that there was NO mention of Chinese investments in Africa on the appafrica panel. #afridev wtf?”

Answer: We would have loved for the panel to go on to allow us to cover more stuff, but as it stood we didn’t have enough time. My personal stance is that Chinese investments are only as positive or destructive as African leaders allow them to be. China is toning down it’s investments, due to the current world economic crisis, but the reality remains that they and other Asian nations will come back because they need the resources. Hopefully, it gets to the point where smarter decisions are being made to allow African countries to take these investments as a peer, instead of as the patsy.

@remmmy asks “If mobile is 30% penetration what kind of multi platform successes have you seen? Ie. in Radio/TV partnerships?”

Answer: I think MTN’s doing a good job of supporting multi-platform campaigns. Vodacom has an interesting acquisition relationship with Zoopy.com, a social video site in South Africa. A lot of these deals are yet to come, as the mobile market and economies continue to grow.

@macherb said “The discussion is about “Africa” but we don’t seem to be mentioning individual countries. Does this further Gov. Palin?”

Answer: That’s just a matter of the time we had. For us to talk about the situations in individual countries, we would have been there for a month. Rose, Teddy and I were representing Uganda. Erik and David represented Kenya, and we’ve done research and traveled to other places. It’s hard to relate that to an audience of people of varying degrees of understanding of the continent.

@cmsxsw asked “Examples/Best practices to start-up/fund your initiative in Africa? how to become financially sustainable? funding alternatives?”

Answer: For me I went the private sector route. You can throw a rock an hit an NGO in Uganda, it’s certainly easier to get money/partnerships as a nonprofit to do work here. More non-profits and NGOs are including local private sectors in their strategies now which is good and offers some new ideas. I recommend finding partners before you look for money, it can often help. In a nutshell. This probably deserves a whole post.

@a_trish said: “We have a problem getting info from the field to our donors connectivity & costs are an issue is there a way to streamline?”

Answer: This is a major problem. Bandwidth is the bottleneck for a lot of organizations. I’ve written a bit about ways people can use things like Bittorrent to get information out. At Questionbox we’ve built a custom offline collection of data. An ‘offline’ internet if you will. This allows us to look stuff up regardless of whether we’re on or offline, power or no power. We also have an offline Wikipedia collection and some other resources for companies that offer it. As far as realtime information, this is where utilities like Twitter come in handy. @sbramley has been using Twitter to update her donors from the field for several months at Water For People.

@littlestgator asked “What the heck is the url for afrigate? not finding it???”

Answer: I’m not sure what you meant from your spelling. Probably Afrigadget.com or Afrigator.com

Address your other questions to us at http://twitter.com/afridev. More to come!