Over the past few weeks myself, Solomon King of NodeSix.com, Joshua Goldstein an Appfrica Fellow, Jessica Colaco at the iHub in Nairobi, Philip Thigo and John Kipchumbah at SODNET (Social Development Network Kenya), and a number of very dedicated individuals from the United States Department of State have been working behind the scenes to put together a contest for African software developers called Apps < 4 > Africa.

The contest is a collective effort to support some of the many young minds out there working on ideas that would improve quality of life in African countries in ways that can be accomplished through software. In many other countries around the globe, these innovations have come from the bottom as constituents become more engaged with their own communities and representation. African countries are on a trajectory that’s no different.

Thus, it makes a lot of sense that civic minded individuals across the continent may also be turning to technology as a way to get involved. And like entrepreneurs of all types, hopefully it’s encouraging for them to know they’ve got support for their ideas and that their work will be rewarded. This contest won’t be a silver bullet to any of Africa’s struggles, and none of the apps that come out of this contest will be either, but this competition, the prizes, judges and mentors supporting hopefully represent the type of community that can help a handful of these ideas and apps mature over time.

Here is a description:

From July 1st to August 31st, we welcome citizens to submit ideas that technology can help solve, and challenge technologists to build tools that lead to a better world. The top applications will receive cash, cool gadgets, and the chance to hob-nob with our judges panel of technology and civil society luminaries. On Thursday, we are particularly pleased to have Under-Secretary of State Judith McHale join a group of civil society leaders and civic-minded technologist to launch the contest at the *iHub_ in Nairobi.

This is only the beginning. Over the duration of the contest, we will host events around the region that address a variety of technology platforms and activist themes. We’ll also be encouraging collaboration between mentors from around the world and coders in the region. Whether you are a citizen, civil society leader or technologist of any kind, we hope you will join us in the Apps 4 Africa challenge!

THE JUDGES

Anil Dash (Expert Labs), Nathan Eagle (Txteagle), Thomas Gibian (Investor, ECP), Joe Mucheru (Google), Emeka Orafor (TED), Ory Okolloh (Ushahidi), Tim O’Rielly (O’Reilly), and Rakesh Ranjani (HakiElimu).

PRIZES AND DETAILS

The prizes haven’t been announced yet, but I assure you the bounty will be sweet! Several thousand dollars in cash or gadgets for multiple winners. All entrants will use our repository at http://code.apps4africa.org to submit their ideas where they will remain as open source projects that others can either build upon or learn from. The other details like duration of the contest and rules can be found at http://apps4africa.org.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

As I enter the last week of my time working as a Fellow at Appfrica, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the experience and to recommend this amazing program to future applicants. My experience has been nothing short of incredible, both on an educational and a networking level. When first reading about the program online, I immediately contacted Jon about joining the company as a Fellow, as I was eager to learn about its for-profit approach and about his experiences as a social entrepreneur in Uganda. Now, after four weeks in the country, I can definitely say that I have learnt a lot and that this experience has helped mould my identity as an aspiring designer for sustainable development and social entrepreneur.

The fellows program is structured in a way to encourage the sharing of skills, knowledge and ideas between members of the Appfrica team and the visiting Fellow. I was able to learn a lot about the technical aspects of mobile application development in resource-poor settings from the fantastic team of programmers here at the office. This was a great opportunity for me, as I get increasingly involved in the information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) space. I was able to bring my web/graphic design skills to the table and contributed to the design elements of a number of projects that were being developed by the other team members.

In addition to the graphic design work, I was also kept busy coordinating some of the initial technical development for ResultsSMS – my “baby project” during my time here as a Fellow. The first day after I arrived, Jon sat down with me at the excellent Good African Coffee and went through the current projects that Appfrica was working on. We worked together to figure out the best way for me to contribute, learn and to have an overall valuable experience during my time at the company. Due to my growing interest in the application of mobile technologies in international development, I was immediately attracted to the ResultsSMS project, which is an open-source system for distributing medical test results, patient education and follow-up information by SMS in resource-poor settings. As the project was still in its very early stages of conception when I arrived, I spent a lot of my time over the first couple of weeks researching on the technologies that would make such a system implementable, and developing the system together with a geographically dispersed team, through discussions and development of concepts and visualizations. This mini-project management experience and the ability to take control of a whole project during my time here was also incredibly exciting and valuable.

Unfortunately, this control would only be short lived. The Fellows program is of course transient in nature and I guess this would be the only limitation I can think of when reflecting on my experience. Since this project was largely managed remotely, I could have potentially continued to stay involved after the Fellows program. Unfortunately, due to a number of larger commitments I have waiting for me upon my return to Europe, however, this will probably not be possible. Therefore, I recommend that future participants in the program consider structuring their time in such a way to allow for potential completion of a project after physically leaving Uganda.

I also want to take this chance to mention my appreciation for the hospitality of Jon and Sarah, who got engaged during my stay in Uganda! They were wonderful hosts, not only providing me with a very comfortable bed in the guest room of their house 10 minutes from the Appfrica office, but also introducing me to a number of their wonderful friends in Kampala and generally allowing me to be a part of their lives in this very exciting city.

I came here to learn and to absorb everything I could from the experience. I would, therefore, like to end with a number of notes and observations I made throughout my time as an Appfrica Fellow:

For Profit Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneurship means many different things to many different people. From Creative Capitalism to non-profit business models with socially-oriented missions, the term is becoming almost as synonymous as Web 2.0 or the Cloud. In my opinion, Appfrica’s mission “to indentify individuals with talent, passion and training, picking up where the university leaves off to help them improve their technical skills, while mentoring their growth and solidifying their business skills”, definitely qualifies as social entrepreneurship.

After becoming increasingly interested in this concept over the past couple of years, I was excited to learn how Appfrica Labs balanced is socially-oriented mission with a for-profit model of financial sustainability. I have learnt that this model works incredibly well in the software development/IT space, where a lot of the company’s clients come armed with generous technology-oriented development grants or solid business models and associated financial backing. Appfrica’s clients range from NGOs to African investment groups and start-ups, which creates an interesting mix of projects. Some of these projects have more of a development focus than others, however, they all generally align with the company’s guiding principles of African investment and the building of innovative solutions for developing countries.

Apparent Lack of Design Thinking/Training in Uganda

When mixing in with a lot of the IT crowd in Uganda, and particularly with Makerere University students who are studying in this field, I repeatedly heard comments like “I like coding but I don’t like design” and “I am not much of a creative thinker–I’m not good at design.” It turns out that there is also very little focus on design in the IT-related curricula at local universities, and the general application of design thinking and the design process is also pretty much absent.

Although I think this a real shame, I also think it presents an interesting opportunity for the future. As the Internet starts spreading across the continent and connectivity becomes increasingly feasible and affordable. I think that the need for good web, graphic and UI designers in Africa is going to grow significantly. When this time comes, I imagine that much of Africa’s design work will be outsourced to design studios in the continent’s major economies or abroad. I truly believe that there is a skilled designer in any good coder/programmer. Good code logic and structuring is based on very similar principles to good web-design; I think that there needs to be more focus on developing and fostering these skills in university programs. Therefore, there is an opportunity in trying to create this, support or simply help to develop a solid web-design industry in Uganda. To anyone who is skeptical about the value of good web or UI design in development projects, I ask you to re-consider. The lack of a good interface and streamlined user-experience in a revolutionary technology with a great potential impact, will simply act as an obstacle to its widespread acceptance.

Open Working Environment

Another one of Jon’s founding principles for the company was to create an open working environment for businesses and entrepreneurs to “nest” while they are trying to grow. This makes for a fantastically diverse and exciting work environment, where almost every day, the office will be graced by the presence of an interesting individual who is working on some form of ground-breaking project in Uganda. These “visitors”, who are all allowed to make use of the office’s internet and power supply, quickly become part of the Appfrica “family” and will often share experiences or provide feedback on the current topic of discussion. Jon is further developing this concept into what will be referred to as 10K Spaces as part of Appfrica’s 10,000 Hour Initiative. This is a truly inspiring model for how to run an office of a small start-up.

Doing Well in Africa takes You Very Far

The point I am trying to bring across here is one that I have discussed many-a-time with a number of young entrepreneurs in Kampala. The continent is filled with opportunity and there is almost always a chance to do things better, in whatever industry you happen to be working in. Therefore, getting your hands dirty and investing your time and resources to put your ideas into practice can take you very far, even with little experience. Appfrica’s team members are not 10-year industry professionals, but they also don’t need to be.

Wherever there is a lack of experience, there is determination and competence, which has lead the team to be well-versed (or at least familiar) with an incredibly large number of programming languages, technologies and techniques. Therefore, building a start-up with minimal resources, experience and a team of recent university graduates very much paid off in Apprica’s case.

Providing Basic Resources

The office is theoretically equipped with what is considered one of Uganda’s better internet connections. I say theoretically, as their ISP seems to have a lot of difficulties consistently delivering the speeds it promises. Oh, and the power can drop out without notice as well! I quickly learnt how to work around these limitations, however, and now I create two to-do lists each day splitting my internet tasks and non-internet tasks. This allows me to remain productive even if the power is out. When the Internet does work, it is a vital resource for the company’s operations. Every so often large software development kits or programming guides need to be downloaded, along with the occasional TED video for the day’s source of inspiration. I have learnt that investment into basic resources like good internet and computers, although expensive in this part of the world, really pays off and creates a more productive working environment overall.

No Shortage

Working for a software consultancy with a development focus in Uganda has re-confirmed my original belief that there is no shortage of passion, skill, creativity and unique opportunity in this continent.

Oliver Haas can be reached directly at here.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Now that my schedule’s calmed down a bit, we’ve started to make some major changes…

A New Hire

Until a few weeks ago Appfrica was 98% written by myself with a few contributions from guest posters like Derrick Kwagala, Aaron Timothy, Ben White and Appfrica Fellow, Joshua Goldstein. So what’s changed?

Well first, the Appfrica.net blog has hired it’s first part-time employee, Theresa Carpenter Sondjo the blogger behind of SubjectVerbObject. We’ve known each other for sometime through Twitter but about a month ago we began formally working together to turn the Appfrica blog from a hobby, into a sustainable business of it’s own, separate from Appfrica Labs. I’ve paid some of the Ugandan volunteers off and on over the past year, but it was always just enough to compensate for their time, and it was never much, as it was all coming out of my pocket.

What Theresa Carpenter brings to the table is not just a strong enthusiasm for Africa, technology and social media, but also an her strong sense of aesthetic and design. It’s also great to have a contributor in West Africa (Benin) as she’s got insight into some things I don’t like the internet being down over there. I’m excited to have her on board and I’m looking forward to the outstanding possibilities opening up before us.

Separation of Church and State, Blog and Lab

Appfrica is more than just a blog. My startup software incubator, Appfrica Labs, has been the business that people have come to know me for. The fact remains that Africa needs to continue to have positive spaces highlighting it’s efforts, exposing the masses to it’s accomplishments and occasionally exposing Africans to the work of other Africans. Appfrica.net is by no means the only place to do this. That’s a good sign. For a continent this size, as more of us come online, we need to continue producing massive amounts of local content (local to our continent, our country and our respective cities) to ensure that all of Africa is truly represented on the web.

As much as I like to discuss the work of everyone in the African tech space, I was spending a lot of time blogging about our work at Appfrica Labs. Now all that content has been moved over to our new website AppfricaLabs.com, a good move both sides of the company. This way people interested solely interested in our work as a software development and seed capital company can find all that content without digging through the hundreds of articles on the blog. Likewise, people looking for an independent news source about African tech can look no further than Appfrica.net where our goal is to share journalism, research and news related to emerging technology in Africa.

Theresa and I joke that it’s like the separation of ‘church and state’. By some philosophies, the two need to remain clearly divided for the sake of each other. Here it’s now known as the separation of ‘Blogs and Lab’.

What else is new?

New Look

You also may have noticed that this weekend we completely redesigned the blog. This was all Theresa’s doing! It helps to have an editor who’s a blogger as well as a designer! We find the new site much easier to navigate and it’s much quicker to scan for new content.

Local Content

Appfrica remains one of the only blogs published in Luganda on the internet. In fact, we’re so passionate about producing local content that Appfrica Labs recently volunteered to translate google.co.ug into Luganda as well! But it doesn’t stop there. Thanks to a handful of awesome volunteers, we’ll soon be able to offer Appfrica in French, German and Swahili in addition to the Luganda version that’s been around for sometime.

New Content

Some of the things familiar to you here will change. For instance the weekly digest now has a different format, and is called Africa’s Tech Week Review. You’ll notice some other modifications, I won’t spoil them all, just consider them easter eggs. =) You’ll also notice that we dumped a lot of the dead weight like the forums which never really caught on.

Mobile Version

If you like to visit Appfrica from your smart phones, there’s now a mobile version available. There’s no special url, just visit the site and you should see it optimized for your device thanks to a nifty wordpress plugin.

Sponsors

Quite a few sponsors have been eager to support Appfrica.net in exchange for advertising. In a time where online ad spending is down, it’s good to know we can rely on you guys to support where you can.

More Writers

My goal is to grow this blog to the point that it sustains more writers who get paid for their time. If you’re a potential sponsor, that’s right where your money will go, employing African writers. If you’re a blogger who’d like to work with us, just email blogger@appfrica.org.

More Changes to Come

You’d think after this much deep surgery on the blog we’d be done. Actually we’re only halfway finished. Watch this space for more announcements!

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Josh Goldstien, blogger, activist, former Googler and Tufts University alumni has joined Appfrica Labs as our very first fellow! When I announced the Appfrica Fellows program earlier this year, I thought it would take some time to convince someone to participate. After all, who wants to come to Uganda to work as a software developer? It turns out, a lot of people do as my inbox was immediately with applications and information requests. Of course, it’s not possible for everyone to participate. There’s a signifgant cost to getting here, as Appfrica can’t afford to pay for transportation to the continent. Still, to know that such support is out there is great!

For those who don’t know about the Appfrica Fellows program, the idea was very much inspired by GeekCORP which I don’t beleive is active any longer. I thought their mission was brilliant, knowledge-sharing opportunities and field experience in developing countries for software developers and other tech people is very rare. Likewise the barriers to entry are high. We offer people the opportunity to gain such experience while making local wages and working alongside Ugandan software developers as peers. Although, I really value volunteerism, I’m idealistic about paying people for their time and I think it’s important for foreigners to experience sort of the capital contraints of working on a local wage.

Although the call was for developers, Josh was one of the people who insisted on being involved regardess. Because I’ve admired his work for a long time (his blog In An African Minute is fantastic) and since he happened to be here in Kampala for the next few months, it only made sense to allow him to participate! His official title while working at Appfrica Labs is Head of Business Development for Status.ug (an Appfrica startup that recently received investment capital). However, being the proactive person that he is, he’s also been working on business development across our various startups including Status.ug and Appfrica Labs itself.

From his personal bio:

I’ve been a fan of Josh ever since he introduced himself to me at Barcamp Africa where he went way out of his way to allow me and David Kobia (of Ushahidi) to have a beer and eat some pancakes with Google’s Andrew McLaughlin. I’m excited to have him on board and everyone at Appfrica Labs is now proud to call him family!

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

The team of translators assigned to the AnLoc project (Emmanuel, Denye, James and James Olweny) have finished their work creating a dictionary of English to Luganda software strings and definitions. The project was completed in partnership with AnLoc and Kamusi.org and will lead to more translation projects in the future. We have immediate plans to work on applying these strings very soon.

Staffers Moses Mugisha, Jerry Opolot and Dennis Senyonjo all graduate this month. They’ve all been doing good work and I’m excited to see what the next few months bring for them.

The Question Box pilot we’re doing with Open Mind and Grameen has been extended until August. Thus, part of our office will remain dedicated to the call center set-up specifically for that partnership.

This places the current number of people on staff at ten.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

This week I spent some time highliting the achievements and applications of the people working Appfrica Labs. We took several of our ideas public this week to give everyone some idea of the types of innovation coming out of our incubator. Not to mention the fact that I think my staff are brilliant and deserving of the spotlight for a while.

Spotlight on Appfrica Labs

Life As a Software Developer in Uganda
It all started last week with the most recent Appfricast. Featuring nearly thw whole team, developers here offer insigh as to what they need, why they work here and what they hope to accomplish.

What is Question Box?
Question Box is an initiative I’ve been rooting for ever since I heard of it. Luckily for me, I got to join the project very early. Here’s some background on the project, and examples of how Ugandans are creating the software solutions to solve their own problems.

Answerbird Flies High
Felix Kitaka’s Answerbird attempts to crowdsource questions and answers in Uganda using the social network everyone here already knows… Facebook. It’s not hard to see how effective a tool it might be if interfaced with something like Questionbox!

Status.ug: Tell The World What’s Up!
A local mobile portal for Facebook also developed by Felix Kitaka.

Deploying OhmSMS in Uganda
An application so simple that it could be deployed anywhere in the world and be just as relevant, and useful.

Editorials

How to Save Money As An African Startup
It’s not cheap to startup a business here, how can you save capital? Find out.

Web 2.0 Shutting Out Developing Countries
Developing nations are apparently hard to monetize and difficult to scale. I say it’s because some companies refuse to look at the obvious solutions.

Microsfot Validates Ushahidi, Invalidates Vine
Vine is a great tool that could very well change the world. Unfortunately Micrsoft has destroyed nearly all of the potential usefulness by making it proprietary.

Appfrica Around the Web

Ben White profiles my staff members Emmanuel Oluka and Jerry Opolot

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

It now looks more like a syndicated publication or web magazine would. This is to help people sort through all the content that get’s published here as the site continues to grow and evolve. Take a look at the screen shots below for a review.

New Layout

The site looks very different when navigating here through the home page. You’ll now find all the most relevant data and newest articles one click away. This includes Industry News, Featured Content, Editorials, Interviews, Mobile stories and Web articles. You’ll also find the most popular articles of all time right on the front page. I noticed when I was looking through my search logs people seemed to be trying to find the same content over and over again. This should help save them time.

Hot Topics Around Africa

If you’ll remember, I used to aggregate a number of popular Africa related blogs on the front page. This was to share all the news that I don’t cover and to help drive traffic to their sites. Because Appfrica is a ‘blog network’ of it’s own, a few people were confused and thought all those blogs (WhiteAfrican, TumbuktuChronicls, African IT News, BBC Africa etc.) were part of our network. So that area is gone. Instead what I’ve done is created a space called “Hot Topics” that aggregates all the most popular content on the web related to Africa. Each entry is then ranked using an algorithm that cross-references the number of Diggs, the number of Delicious tags and the number of Google Reader shares.

This was created using AideRSS and the Open Africa OPML file I gave away a few weeks ago. Only the most popular content makes it to the feed and of those 20 or so posts, only the top 10 make it to this page. The numbers represent each article’s ‘Post Rank’ for a quick visual of how popular each is. The links will take you directly to that content on the website they belong to.

Advertisements and Sponsors

The last new thing you’ll notice is that companies can now advertise on Appfrica.net. The amount of time and resources that I put into the blog are considerable and I feel this is a good way to promote regional businesses while keeping my efforts sustainable. If you’d like to find out more about purchasing ads on Appfrica.net visit the Sponsor page. The only stipulation is that your company or group have a presence on continent.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Online video chat by Ustream

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

I’ve mentioned before that I started Appfrica with no external financing, it’s all privately funded by my work as a web developer. For now at least, that’s been the best way to execute my vision for helping African software developers take advantage of opportunity, learn new skills and offer them a space and the tools to work outside of school. In preparation for Barcamp Africa I thought I’d profile the inner workings of Appfrica Labs for people who are new to the blog…

The Problems: Most East African students lack credit cards (because they aren’t available to the majority of the public period) and so they can’t buy their own web server space. School hours limit their working hours. Overcrowded computer labs render software security measures and ongoing projects rather useless as kids have to move from computer to computer….whatever is available. Furthermore, internet is sporadic and unreliable…even when the school labs are available. Internet cafe’s are expensive and not always a viable option.

Solution: I’m installing Damn Small Linux and LAMP on USB Thumb Drives and giving them to the kids I work with, to allow them to work from anywhere, as long as a computer is available. This isn’t the perfect solution as it requires access to a computer, but one problem at a time until more resources are available.

Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux is a linux distro that’s meant to be lightweight and flexible…so lightweight that the entire OS can be run from a 2MB flash drive! DSL can be started from within Windows or it can be used to boot up, allowing them to work on a project without worrying that files will be deleted or erased from their host machines at a computer lab or internet cafe.

LAMP
LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. The four together are the inner workings of most web servers. In order to run a web application you need several things: a physical web server with an OS, a web server (it runs the scripts and code that make up applications and web sites), and you more often than not need a database server. There are alternate versions of the stack configured for Macintosh, Microsoft and Sun with alternatives to Apache but the idea is that with any *AMP server you can develop, debug and deploy a web app from anywhere.

Right now I operate everything out of my house, with one or two students coming over once a week to work on whatever task may be at hand. These USB servers allow them to run secure, completely localized web applications from their USB sticks. They can walk around with their projects and work on them when they have the opportunity and they can also hand in their drives with their ‘assignments’. One developer, Paul Engulu (a PHP developer) has been using this model to come out every Saturday to work on Afridex and some other applications that he feels confident contributing to.

Until there is space, computers, and all the other things need to run a successful lab, this is how we will operate and so far it’s been a very formidable arrangement. Building an army of strong software developers, one flash drive at a time!

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

If you’re a regular reader who would prefer to sign up for just the weekly digest feed, point your feed readers to this link.

Another minor feature I’ve launched today is category specific RSS feeds. Appfrica covers everything from Web Apps and African Startups to ITC Policy and Finance. If you value some of the content of Appfrica but not all, you can now be more selective. Click here to jump to the new category specific rss feeds.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.