Arts and Letters Daily, a blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, singled out a World Ark feature as its “Article of Note” for November 8. “Can You Hear Us Now?“, by travel writer Frank Bures, takes a first-person look at technology as way to combat poverty in Africa.
“East Africa is in the process of reinventing itself. The government of Rwanda has invested heavily in IT infrastructure to bring high speed internet connections to even the most remote parts of this small, resource-poor country. Kenya, similarly, has ambitious plans to become a highly wired nation and attract a share of the growing market in international business outsourcing.”
“Will altered connectivity really allow firms in east Africa to become hubs in the global economy? Or will improved connections simply allow foreign firms to better exploit the demand in east Africa for IT services? Perhaps most importantly, who stands to benefit? And who will be left out of these transformations?”
“… Informal artisans who engage in the production of goods are known as jua kali (Swahili for ‘hot sun’) and have established entire ecosystems of production, from scrap sourcing to repair. …“The jua kali provide important lessons for Western economics that compel us to revise our notion of efficiency. … Indeed, instating these notions of efficiency will be necessary to foster a more sustainable and equitable form of development around the globe.”
Everyone stays busy these days, and carving out a whole day or even a whole hour to volunteer can seem next to impossible sometimes. Lucky for you, Jacob Colker is on the case. Colker is one of six young people earning a spot in the 2010 Rolex Awards for Enterprise Young Laureates Programme. Watch him in action here:
Announcing their first ever Young Laureate winners, Rolex pointed to Colker’s forward thinking. “Tapping into the latest trends in information and telecommunications technology, Jacob Colker has combined volunteering, the internet and mobile phones to pioneer a new form of activism in which almost anyone with a smartphone can devote spare minutes – waiting for the bus or to see the doctor – to a useful charitable or scientific task. Nearly 30,000 volunteers have now signed up for “micro-volunteering,” carrying out a wide range of tasks, from helping Nasa identify galaxies by examining their shapes to translating the CVs of newly arrived immigrants who are looking for work.” You can learn more about Colker’s idea at www.beExtra.org.
This Colker fellow is in pretty amazing company. The other five Rolex Young Laureates include Nnaemeku Ikegwuonu, a Nigerian who wants to help millions of farmers in his home country exchange information via radio, and Reese Fernandez, a woman in the Philippines who’s helping families earn money by turning scrap materials into fashion accessories.
The six winners earned $50,000 each, which is hopefully enough to keep them on the path toward real innovation that could improve an untold number of lives. To read more and watch video interviews with all six winners, visit http://young.rolexawards.com/