Africa Surprises at Picnic08

The 2008 PICNIC technology conference in Amsterdam wrapped up last weekend and featured a whole day of events devoted to Africa dubbed ‘Surprising Africa‘. Ethan Zukerman, Binyavanga Wainaina, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Erik Hersman and many others presented on topics ranging from film and fashion to mobile device penetration, local innovation and entrepreneurship. Africa News has video while all the days presentations and panels were also documented on twitter and flickr.

Ethan Zuckerman offered his impressions of Picnic08 on his blog recounting Binyavanga Wainaina’s experiences in Lagos and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “This Is My Africa“. He goes on to express his admiration of Francis Kéré, winner of an Aga Khan award for architecture:

The building is pretty much the best example of African solutions to African problems that I can think of. Realizing that his fellow villagers in Gando were brilliantly skilled at building with clay, he looked for ways to use local techniques and materials to build practical, long-lasting structures that can be locally built and maintained. The school is cool, light and vastly superior to the structure it’s replacing.

After vowing not to blog from the stage on his day of presentation, there still turned out to be extensive reporting on Ethan’s own talk. Hubert Guillaud even covered the talk in in French. Erik Hersman cited examples from a number of African innovators who are using mobile devices to solve unique problems offering this final thought…

Here’s one more compelling thought. The challenges brought about by bad governance, poverty, low bandwidth (all the negative things you associate with Africa) also provide an incredible opportunity. The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.