Discussion of All Things Political

Herman Chinery-Hesse, Founder of theSOFTtribe I

David speaks to Herman Chinery-Hesse (founder of theSOFTtribe) about Ghana's Information Technology industry.

Innovator, disruptor, and West African software pioneer, Herman Chinery-Hesse wants to make Ghana the “Singapore of Africa”. Given he’s already created one of Ghana’s most successful software companies and is spawning innovations that solve barriers to trade between Africa and the rest of the world, he has a good chance.
Herman Chinery-Hesse is an anomaly for western media who can’t see beyond that stereotype that exists for those who don’t know this continent, and reduce it to clichés pulled from a pool of nouns that include dictator, corruption, conflict, hunger and Mugabe.

The western media call Chinery-Hesse the “Bill Gates of Africa”, a moniker which gives off-shore audiences who see the continent as one amorphous “country”. A successful Ghanaian technologist whose software company, the SOFTtribe, spawned systems that empower much of West Africa, it is Chinery-Hesse’s disruptive inventions that are making the world sit up and take note.

A generous man, Chinery-Hesse doesn’t mind the nickname that the likes of the BBC and Inc. Magazine have given him. “I am flattered, but I haven’t achieved what Bill Gates has achieved and I certainly don’t run around wearing this on a T-shirt,” he says. “It is positive and it motivates younger people, but I certainly don’t have the kind of wealth that Bill Gates has,” Chinery-Hesse adds before breaking into a deep belly laugh.

“I am an African innovator. I am a man who’s trying to change the continent, make things better and I’m trying to help myself a little bit while I do that.” Chinery-Hesse’s dream is to turn Ghana into the next Singapore, an ambition that can only be appreciated once you know who he is, where he’s come from and the contribution he’s making to Ghana and the continent.MORE

I'm having a hard time believing this, but these women are wearing clothes actually made with real milk. Yes, the liquid white stuff. The milk fabric was created by 28-yo German biologist and fashion designer Anke Domaske.

Domaske and her team have found a way to turn sour milk into a environment friendly yarn in a very easy and clean way. They eliminate the liquid from it, extracting a protein found that solidifies and then is ground into the threads that form the fabric. Domaske finds the whole thing fascinating, do I:MORE

Nigeria's latest Earth observation satellites have returned their first pictures.

The spacecraft, launched on 17 August, give the African nation a powerful new capability to map its own lands and other parts of the globe.

NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X will also assist the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.

This UK-managed fleet of spacecraft is used to picture regions of the Earth gripped by natural calamities.

These might be catastrophic floods or a big earthquake. Images sent down from space will often be critical to organising an effective emergency response.

The first picture released from the Nigerian pair is of New Zealand's biggest city, Auckland.

It was acquired by NigeriaSat-X, and reveals the buildings and the landscape surrounding this major urban centre.

It is just possible to see the wakes of ships passing under the harbour bridge that joins downtown Auckland with North Shore City.

The satellite is equipped with a multi-spectral imager for general mapping, agricultural monitoring and disaster relief work.

Nigerian engineers built NigeriaSat-X with the help of their British counterparts

The resolution in this picture is 22m per pixel. Vegetation is picked out in red.

Both NigeriaSat-X and NigeriaSat-2 were designed and built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford, UK.

What is interesting about NigeriaSat-X is that the work was undertaken by Nigerian engineers themselves. The skills they have learnt will now be taken home so that they can build future spacecraft in their own country

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GOESAN, South Korea (AP) — Outside the classroom a hot summer day beckons, but fourth-grade teacher Yeon Eun-jung's students are glued to their tablet PCs as they watch an animated boy and a girl squabble about whether water becomes heavier when frozen.

The small scene in this rural town is part of something big: South Korea is taking a $2 billion gamble that its students are ready to ditch paper textbooks in favor of tablet PCs as part of a vast digital scholastic network.

France, Singapore, Japan and others are racing to create classrooms where touch-screens provide instant access to millions of pieces of information. But South Korea — Asia's fourth-largest economy — believes it enjoys an advantage over these countries, with kids who are considered the world's savviest navigators of the digital universe.

A 2009 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-headquartered grouping of wealthy nations, found 15-year-olds in South Korea scored highest in their ability to absorb information from digital devices, beating runners-up New Zealand and Australia by a large margin.

At Sosu Elementary School in Goesan, principal Jo Yong-deuk speaks of a future in which his students interact in virtual reality with Ludwig van Beethoven and Abraham Lincoln. In the classroom, the children scribble answers in their tablet PCs with touchscreen pens as they watch the video clip explaining the scientific properties of frozen water.
"I liked this chapter, but my favorite clip is one where they show how flowers blossom and trees bear fruit in spring," 11-year-old Jeong Ho-seok said with a wide grin.

More than 60 primary, middle and high schools are now using digital textbooks as part of their curriculum, according to the state-run Korea Education and Research Information Service, which provides technical support for the program. Seoul believes it can finish the $2.1 billion program to build a single computer network packed with high-quality digital content by 2015. Replacing textbooks with tablet PCs will account for a quarter of that budget. MORE

The newly created organization within the UN, UN Women, led by former president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, (Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director) dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women which was established to accelerate progress on meeting the rights of girls and women worldwide, has released their first report yesterday, Progress of the World’s Women.
The report can be downloaded here (link goes to PDF file) and the facts sheets (also in PDF format) are available here.
In the interest of brevity for this post (and you will notice that brevity has not been achieved given the amount of data I went through), I have specifically gone through the fact sheets and not focused on the overall report. I might collate the data in the report itself (which deals with specific cases and studies in each region) for a future post.

( Read more... )

It is not much to look at - a small pitted brass coin with a square hole in the centre - but this relatively innocuous piece of metal is revolutionising our understanding of early East African history, and recasting China's more contemporary role in the region.

A joint team of Kenyan and Chinese archaeologists found the 15th Century Chinese coin in Mambrui - a tiny, nondescript village just north of Malindi on Kenya's north coast.

In barely distinguishable relief, the team leader Professor Qin Dashu from Peking University's archaeology department, read out the inscription: "Yongle Tongbao" - the name of the reign that minted the coin some time between 1403 and 1424.

"These coins were carried only by envoys of the emperor, Chengzu," Prof Qin said.

"We know that smugglers would often take them and melt them down to make other brass implements, but it is more likely that this came here with someone who gave it as a gift from the emperor."

And that poses the question that has excited both historians and politicians: How did a coin from the early 1400s get to East Africa, almost 100 years before the first Europeans reached the region?

When China ruled the seas

The answer seems to be with Zheng He, also known as Cheng Ho - a legendary Chinese admiral who, the stories say, led a vast fleet of between 200 and 300 ships across the Indian Ocean in 1418.

Until recently, there have only been folk tales and insubstantial hints at how far Zheng He might have sailed.

Then, a few years ago, fishermen off the northern Kenyan port town of Lamu hauled up 15th Century Chinese vases in their nets, and the Chinese authorities ran DNA tests on a number of villagers who claimed Chinese ancestry.

The tests seemed to confirm what the villagers have always believed - that a ship from Zheng He's fleet sank in a storm and the surviving crew married locals, meaning some people in the area still have subtly Chinese features.

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The survival of a mobile phone network in eastern Libya, where the communications crackdown has driven the price of Libyana SIM cards to around $111 on the black market, is almost an accident.
Al-Madar, the country's other mobile provider, has been shut down in the east since the revolt began. Gaddafi's government in Tripoli not only ordered the General Post and Telecommunications Company to switch off access from the main offices in the capital, it also severed Libya's main "backbone" fibre optic cable, which connected eastern phone and internet networks to the main servers in the west.

Faisal Safi, who runs telecommunications in Benghazi, said internet service will return in days [Al Jazeera]

The cable, which runs under water along the coast from Tobruk in the east to Ras Ajdir in the west, was cut – either physically or electronically – somewhere between the cities of Misurata and Khomas, the engineers said.

That killed the east's access to Madar and the Libya Telecom and Technology company (LTT), the country's internet service provider.

But Libyana got lucky. Founded in 2004, eight years after Madar, it was less centralised and less beholden to the regime-controlled management in Tripoli. Best of all, engineers in Benghazi had their own HLR, or home location register.
The HLR stored subscriber information for every Libyana user. When a Libyana phone turned on and dialled a number, the HLR recognised the phone's ID and connected it to the network. Such databases are essential to a functioning mobile phone system, and Madar's were in Tripoli. Libyana had kept one in Benghazi as a back-up.

"I think Gaddafi made a mistake by leaving all that equipment here," said Faisal Safi, the local telecommunications and transport chief for Benghazi's opposition council.

Mahdawi, the top Libyana engineer in the city, worked with his team to install the HLR and configure it for use. No one had previous experience setting one up. After the team installed the hardware, Libyana service returned to the east, relayed via the existing array of antenna towers.

The engineers made mobile service free, but with Madar shut down, they experienced a surge of users, all of whom now had unlimited minutes.

The flood overwhelmed the network, and Mahdawi spent the next week at home, tweaking the system from his personal computer.
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Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Full Coverage

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GRASSROOTS CLIMATE JUSTICE IN CANCUN PART II MORE articles at the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Page

The short-cuts that the United Nations system is offering companies to profit from strategies against global warming were the target of loud protests on the Day of Action for Climate Justice.

Two separate demonstrations, of thousands of people each, were held Tuesday as the climate change summit that ends Friday in the southeastern Mexican resort town of Cancún enters the final stretch.

One of the protesters’ slogans, "País petrolero, el pueblo sin dinero" (In this oil-producing country, people have no money), referring to Mexico, underscored the main cause of the heating up of the planet: the burning of fossil fuels, a question that has been practically sidelined in the talks at the 16th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16). MORE

LE KRAM, TUNISIA — A crowd has gathered to ponder the black-and-white photographs which have been pasted across the face of building that was, until recent, the local offices of the former president's much-loathed party. "I have no idea what these photos mean. Do you know?" Meddeb Nejeb, a high school teacher, asks Al Jazeera. He might be yet to grasp the meaning of the photographs, but Nejeb wants to know more. For the artists behind what is one of the most ambitious contemporary street art projects to vibrate the Arab world, the artwork is about replacing the once all-pervasive presidential photography with mosaics of ordinary, anonymous Tunisians who rose up against their government. The group are using street art to kick-start conversations and to challenge their compatriots to see the familiar in a new, post-revolutionary, light. In the spirit of people-power, the project, titled "INSIDE OUT: Artocracy in Tunisia", features a hundred ordinary Tunisians, putting their images where only presidents once hung. The portraits were taken by six Tunisian photographers, in collaboration with the renowned French street artist known as JR and other international artists. MORE including VIDEO at link

Women workers comprise roughly 43 percent of the 450,000 labor union members in 18 local unions in Tunisia, according to Najoua Makhlouf, a medical doctor and president of UGTT's national women's committee. Union women work in five Tunisian job sectors: education, garment and textiles, health, municipal services and tourism. The majority of the women unionists are between the ages of 30 to 40. “I would like to underline working women’s role,” she said, “in the future of the country. We are being proactive to organize women so that they will be more aware of their rights and politically savvy.” A pivotal election for Tunisians is July 24, when they vote for a representative body to draft a new constitution, laws and election codes. MORE

RAS JDIR, Tunisia, March 25 (UPI) -- The number of refugees fleeing to Tunisia to escape the Libyan fighting surged Friday, border authorities said. Within the past 24 hours, as many as 1,145 people reached the border post at Ras Jdir, Tunisia, the Kuwaiti news agency KUNA reported. Border security sources said Friday 3,714 people had arrived in recent days, mostly Libyans but also Americans, four Germans and four Britons. Citizens of Sudan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Chad, Somalia, Eritrea and Tunisia also have been recorded. MORE

Tunisia's business community is trying to come to terms with the changed circumstances and aspirations of a post-revolutionary world, even as some of its members are dogged by the legacy of the former regime. "It's not every year we have a revolution," Hichem Elloumi of the UTICA, the Tunisian employers' association, argued during a radio discussion last week. "It's not even every 10 years. We weren't prepared for this." Following the overthrow in January of Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, president for 23 years, the Tunisian press published revelations about public and private sector corruption. The business interests of relatives of Mr Ben Ali and Leila Trabelsi, his wife, extended from car distribution and importing consumer products to retailing, cement, air transport, property, telecommunications, banking and the media. The central bank estimates that in a country of 10m people, about 180 companies were controlled by individuals either related to Mr Ben Ali or Ms Trabelsi, or close associates of their families. The Jasmin Revolution had uncovered a banana republic MORE

1) What is the World Social Forum?

The World Social Forum is an open meeting place where social movements, networks, NGOs and other civil society organizations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue their thinking, to debate ideas democratically, for formulate proposals, share their experiences freely and network for effective action. Since the first world encounter in 2001, it has taken the form of a permanent world process seeking and building alternatives to neo-liberal policies. This definition is in its Charter of Principles, the WSF’s guiding document.MORE