Month: September, 2015
Africa/Global: Climate Action Beyond Paris
| September 30, 2015 | 8:48 pm | Africa, Analysis, Climate Change, political struggle | Comments closed

Africa/Global: Climate Action Beyond Paris

AfricaFocus Bulletin
September 30, 2015 (150930)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“Temperatures over subtropical southern Africa have risen at more
than twice the global rate over the last five decades.” – CSIR,
South Africa. *** “To date, 436 institutions and 2,040 individuals
across 43 countries and representing $2.6 trillion in assets have
committed to divest from fossil fuel companies.” – Arabella
Advisors, USA. *** “Kenya is emerging as a hotspot for off-grid
solar power. A 2014 study by M-KOPA Solar and InterMedia shows that
14 per cent of the surveyed population use solar as their primary
lighting and charging source.” – The Nation, Kenya

For a version of this Bulletin in html format, more suitable for
printing, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs15/clim1509.php, and
click on “format for print or mobile.”

To share this on Facebook, click on
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While news media in coming months may focus primarily on the global
climate summit coming up in Paris two months from now, it is already
clear to everyone that governmental commitments to reduce carbon
emissions to be made in Paris will fall short of that needed to curb
global warming short of catastrophic results for the planet [See
http://tinyurl.com/nq3m2wt for summary and links to a report on the
“intended national determined contributions” (INDCs).]

Even more than the results in Paris, however, the race to save the
planet and to limit the damage to regions already most affected,
particularly those in Africa, will be determined by actions before
and after Paris, around the world. Shell’s decision to stop drilling
in the Arctic in response to massive public pressure is one example.
The quotes above point to a few of the other places that action
is making a difference and can make more.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains two short articles and one
excerpt from a longer report on different fronts of the fight for
significant action on climate change and climate justice: global
fossil-fuel divestment, Africa-based and Africa-specific research on
the rapidly mounting damage from global warming, and one example of
the accelerating growth of off-grid solar power, particularly in
East Africa (See M-KOPA website at http://solar.m-kopa.com).

Another relevant article not included here is “55GW of Solar PV Will
Be Installed Globally in 2015, Up 36% Over 2014; Solar will account
for roughly half of new electricity capacity out to 2020.”
GreenTechMedia, June 17, 2015 http://tinyurl.com/pkkkttq
Note that GreenTechMedia (http://www.greentechmedia.com/) is a
fundamental source for following global technological developments
in renewable energy.

For talking points and previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on climate
change and the environment, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/intro-env.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

Measuring the Growth of the Global Fossil Fuel Divestment and Clean
Energy Investment Movement

Arabella Advisors, September 2015

[Excerpts only. For full report visit
http://www.arabellaadvisors.com/ – direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/o6ng6p5]

Executive Summary

To date, 436 institutions and 2,040 individuals across 43 countries
and representing $2.6 trillion in assets have committed to divest
from fossil fuel companies. The divestment movement has grown
exponentially since Climate Week in September 2014, when Arabella
Advisors last reported that 181 institutions and 656 individuals
representing over $50 billion in assets had committed to divest. At
that time, divestment advocates pledged to triple these numbers by
the December 2015 Paris UN climate negotiations. Three months before
the negotiations, we have already witnessed a fifty-fold increase in
the total combined assets of those committed to divest from fossil
fuels.

* Pledges have spread to sectors not traditionally associated with
divestment, including pension funds and private companies. In 2014,
foundations, universities, faith-based organizations, NGOs, and
other mission-driven organizations led the movement. Today, large
pension funds and private-sector actors such as insurance companies
hold over 95 percent of the total combined assets of those committed
to divest.

* While historically based in the United States, the divestment
movement now spans the globe. In 2014, 78 percent of divesting
institutions were US-based. Today, 57 percent are US-based.
Institutions that have chosen to divest represent more than 646
million individuals around the world.

* Climate risk to investment portfolios is helping drive the
exponential growth of divestment. Reports by Citigroup analysts,
HSBC, Mercer, the International Energy Agency, Bank of England,
Carbon Tracker Initiative, and others have offered evidence of a
significant, quantifiable risk to portfolios exposed to fossil fuel
assets in a carbon constrained world. The leaders of several of the
largest institutions to divest in the past year have cited climate
risk to investment portfolios as a key factor in their decision.

* Thanks to increasing commitments to invest and a proliferation of
fossil free products, more capital is flowing toward climate
solutions. Globally, investment in clean energy reached $310 billion
in 2014. Among those pledging to divest, many are also committing to
invest in climate solutions: those institutions and individuals that
have pledged to both divest and invest in clean energy collectively
hold $785 billion in assets. Other Key Areas of Growth:

* The faith community is making a strong case for the moral
responsibility to act on climate and to provide clean energy access
to the world’s poor, bolstering the divestment movement. Faith
leaders of diverse religions and creeds are demanding our world’s
leaders take meaningful action to curb climate change at the UN
climate negotiations in Paris in December. Many are also divesting
their own assets of fossil fuels: 126 faith-based organizations with
a collective $24 billion in assets have committed to divest.

* University commitments have nearly tripled in the past year, as 40
educational institutions with $130 billion in assets have pledged to
divest. A number of prominent universities have committed in the
last year, including the University of California, Georgetown, and
Oxford. The University of California is the largest higher education
commitment to date, with a $98 billion portfolio.

* Divestment by state and local governments worldwide is also
growing: The California General Assembly voted this month to divest
its $476 billion public employee pension funds from companies that
get at least half of their revenue from coal mining. Providence,
Rhode Island became one of the largest cities to commit to divesting
all its funds from top coal companies. In Australia, the city of
Newcastle— home to the largest coal port in the world—voted to
divest, as did the government of the Australian Capital Territory.

* Foundation pledges have grown rapidly since September 2014, as 116
foundations with over $10 billion in assets have committed to divest
from fossil fuels.

The surge in the divestment and investment movement comes at a
critical moment, as the world’s leaders converge on Paris in
December 2015 to negotiate an agreement to curb catastrophic
warming. The growth of divestment is adding to mounting pressure
globally for governments to make meaningful commitments to
transition to a clean energy economy. Divesting and investing in
clean energy has offered millions of individuals across the world an
opportunity to take direct action on climate. A large and mobilized
constituency is now demanding political and financial action on
climate, and this pressure will likely continue to build
irrespective of the outcome of the negotiations in Paris.

A History of the Divestment Movement

The fossil fuel divestment movement was born when climate advocates
decided to directly challenge the fossil fuel industry. Inspired by
the moral arguments of the historical anti-war and anti-apartheid
divestment campaigns, a group of students launched a coordinated
series of divestment efforts on half a dozen college campuses in
2011, calling on their administrations to divest endowments from
coal and other fossil fuels and invest in clean energy and “just
transition” strategies to empower those most impacted by
environmental degradation and climate change. By spring 2012, the
campaign had spread to an estimated 50 campuses. Since then,
students, alumni, and professors have launched sit-ins, rallies, and
occupations of administration offices on campuses around the world.

The movement gained steam as the moral arguments of the student
divestment campaigns converged with an increasing recognition of
financial risks associated with investment in fossil fuels. In the
summer of 2012, author and longtime climate activist Bill McKibben
published “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” in Rolling Stone,
forging a link between fossil fuel divestment and the need to keep
global warming under two degrees Celsius (2° C). Drawing on the
groundbreaking analysis “Unburnable Carbon” by the London-based
Carbon Tracker Initiative, he argued that a broad-based global
movement should directly confront the fossil fuel industry because
its viability is rooted in existing carbon reserves that cannot be
burned without severe consequences for the climate. McKibben,
350.org, and other leading climate organizers threw their support
behind the student divestment campaigns, launching a global
divestment effort.

The movement quickly grew beyond universities as new sectors
responded to the call to act. A diverse group of faith
congregations, environmental NGOs, municipalities, and health care
organizations signed on as early adopters of divestment. Led by the
Wallace Global Fund, 17 foundations—controlling $1.8 billion in
assets—launched “Divest-Invest Philanthropy” in response to the
movement’s charge that foundations should not hold assets in a
fossil fuel industry that worked in direct opposition to their
stated missions. Ten cities, led by Seattle, announced they would
also divest from fossil fuels. “Cities that do so will be leaders in
creating a new model for quality of life, environmental
sustainability, and economic success,” argued Seattle Mayor Mike
McGinn.

As the broader climate movement reached a crossroads in the fall of
2014, the divestment campaign won global recognition as a critical
component of climate action. In September 2014, the world’s leading
climate advocates converged on New York City for Climate Week, which
included the “People’s Climate March,” an unprecedented event that
saw 400,000 people take to the streets to demand that the world’s
leaders act on climate. The week of action coincided with the United
Nation’s Climate Summit, which sought to catalyze meaningful climate
action in advance of formal international negotiations to reach a
global climate treaty in 2015. During Climate Week, divestment
advocates announced that, as of September 2014, 181 institutions and
local governments and 656 individuals representing over $50 billion
in assets had pledged to divest from fossil fuels. A report by
Arabella Advisors (http://www. arabellaadvisors.com/) found that, in
just three years, the divestment campaign had mobilized billions of
dollars in capital and engaged a broad segment of society in its
efforts to accelerate the transition to a clean-energy economy.

The movement’s growth was heralded by world leaders and covered
widely in the global media. Prominently featured was a notable
commitment by the heirs of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller
to divest the Rockefeller Brothers Fund endowment. The divestment
and investment movement was recognized in the UN’s formal climate
summit proceedings as one of many important actions to catalyze the
transition to a clean energy economy. At the same time, Archbishop
Desmond Tutu issued a stark call to action on climate, calling for
“an end to the fossil fuel era” and an “apartheid- style boycott to
save the planet.” In a press conference announcing that the
divestment movement had exceeded $50 billion in total assets of
those committing, leading advocates set the bar even higher for
2015, pledging to triple the total assets by the 2015 Paris UN
climate negotiations. Since then, the total combined assets of those
committing to divest has increased, fifty-fold, expanding in scope
and scale in ways no one fully anticipated.

****************************************************

CSIR projects drastic temperature increase over Africa

11 September 2015

CSIR climate modellers believe that 2015 is on its way to be the
warmest year ever recorded. This is partially due to climate-change,
and partially due to a massive El Nino event currently developing in
the Pacific Ocean. Temperatures over subtropical southern Africa
have risen at more than twice the global rate over the last five
decades.

Moreover, further warming of between 4 – 6 degrees C over the
subtropics and 3 – 5 degrees C over the tropics are projected by the
end of the century under low mitigation, relative to the present-day
climate. This was revealed in a CSIR study using a regional climate
model integrated on a powerful computer-cluster at its Centre for
High Performance Computing (CHPC), to obtain detailed projections of
future climate change over Africa.

This study comes ahead of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s 21st Conference of the Parties (CoP 21),
due to take place in Paris, France in November 2015. This meeting
aims to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on
climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2 degrees C.

“If the negotiations fail to ensure a high-mitigation future, we are
likely to see rapidly rising surface temperature across the
continent,” says Dr Francois Engelbrecht, CSIR Principal Researcher
and leader of the study entitled, “Projections of rapidly rising
surface temperatures over Africa under low mitigation.”

Africa is particularly vulnerable to excessive temperature increases
due to the continent’s dependence on subsistence farming and rain-
fed agriculture. “For many regions, the impact of temperature
increases on the agricultural and biodiversity sectors may be
significant, stemming from temperature-related extreme events such
as heat-waves, wild fires and agricultural drought,” explains Dr
Engelbrecht.

Heatwaves are rare events over Africa under present day conditions.
The highest number of heat wave days occurs over the Limpopo river
basin region in southern Africa, the eastern interior and east coast
regions of South Africa and the Mediterranean coast of North Africa.
Drastic increased occurrences of heat wave days may be expected
across the continent under climate change, contributing to decreased
maize crop yield through the exceedance of critical temperature
thresholds increases in livestock mortality and adverse impacts on
human health. If a heat wave occurs during a drought, which dries
out vegetation, it can contribute to bushfires and wildfires.
Wildfires cause large financial losses to agriculture, livestock
production and forestry in Africa on an annual basis.

“Globally, Africa is the single largest source of biomass burning
emissions,” says Engelbrecht. “It is very important to understand
the impacts of increasing occurrences of fires on the African
savannas, as well as potential feedbacks to the regional and global
climate system”. Moreover, Engelbrecht and his co-authors point out
in the paper that general reductions in soil-moisture are plausible
to occur across the continent, as a result of enhanced evaporation
that occurs in response to increasing surface temperatures. “In the
subtropics, this effectively implies a longer burning season and a
shorter growing season”, says Engelbrecht.

Considering the fact that African temperatures in the subtropics are
projected to rise at 1.5 times the global rate of temperature
increase (an estimate that may be conservative) and the aim of the
upcoming UNFCCC negations seeking to keep global warming below 2
degrees C compared to pre-industrial temperatures – the Long Term
Global Goal (LTGG), Engelbrecht is of the opinion that the trends
and projections of rapidly rising African temperatures should be a
key consideration at the UNFCCC negotiations. “The relatively high
rate of temperature increases over Africa should be considered when
deciding on the suitability of the LTGG of the UNFCCC in terms of
climate-change impacts in Africa” Under low mitigation, the world is
likely to experience an increase in global average surface
temperature of 3 degrees C or more, and the relatively strong
temperature signal over Africa is of particular concern within this
context.”

The full paper, which has been published in Environmental Research
Letters, is available here: http://tinyurl.com/qxlzq59

***************************************************

“M-KOPA Solar connects 250,000 homes to power in East Africa”

Daily Nation, September 23, 2015

http://www.nation.co.ke – direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/oyof6hz

In Summary

M-KOPA is one of the fastest growing power providers in the region,
connecting solar to over 500 new homes each day.

Each M-KOPA Solar home is calculated to save $750, compared to using
kerosene over a four-year period.

The battery-powered 8W home system has three lights, a phone-
charging facility and a chargeable radio.

By Edwin Okoth

A local ‘pay-as-you-go’ off grid energy provider has announced
connecting 250,000 homes across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to a
solar power system.

M-Kopa Solar which provides payment plan for supply of a solar
lighting system, a radio and phone charging apparatus said the
achievement was in line with its target to connect one million
customers by 2018 to its solar power systems.

The firm’s Managing Director and Co-Founder Jesse Moore said the
growth in connected customers was satisfactory as the region renewed
focus on renewable energy.

“Last September we celebrated 100,000 customers, and a year later we
are already at a quarter-million. With hundreds of great customers
coming on board every day, we are helping East Africa leapfrog over
the grid to enjoy cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable solar power,”
Mr Moore said.

Off-Grid Solar Power

Kenya is emerging as a hotspot for off-grid solar power.

A 2014 study by M-KOPA Solar and InterMedia shows that 14 per cent
of the surveyed population use solar as their primary lighting and
charging source.

M-KOPA is one of the fastest growing power providers in the region,
connecting solar to over 500 new homes each day.

The battery-powered 8W home system has three lights, a phone-
charging facility and a chargeable radio.

The savings generated by using off grid solar over kerosene are said
to be substantial for individual households and the broader East
African economy.

Alex Nduati, an Athi river resident became the plan’s 250,000th
customer when he purchased an M-KOPA III solar home system.

“I am so excited to take home a solar system that will give me much
more value than kerosene, and with M-KOPA’s daily payment plan it is
affordable for me. I purchased this system for my rural home where
there is no access to electricity,” Mr Nduati said.

Each M-KOPA Solar home is calculated to save $750, compared to using
kerosene over a four-year period.

This means that the combined projected savings by the 250,000
households using M-KOPA Solar is $187 Million.

The Nairobi-headquartered, M-KOPA Solar now has a network of over
1,500 direct sales agents and 100 customer service centres across
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

*****************************************************

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
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The internet in Africa
| September 21, 2015 | 7:43 pm | Africa, political struggle | Comments closed

Africa: Internet Usage Rising Rapidly

AfricaFocus Bulletin
September 21, 2015 (150921)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

The ways in which disruptive technologies change the world are often
unpredictable, and how much the results are positive or negative can
be debated. But there is no doubt that they give scope for human
creativity to have greater impact, for both good and evil. Internet
growth, giving new opportunities for African
creativity, has already changed Africa significantly. And, notes
Russell Southwood of the leading industry newsletter Balancing Act
Africa, further changes are coming rapidly.

For a version of this Bulletin in html format, more suitable for
printing, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs15/ict1509.php, and
click on “format for print or mobile.”

To share this on Facebook, click on
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This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the lead article “The African
Internet Effect” from the latest issue of Balancing Act Africa, as
well as two short briefs from the same issue, one on South Africa
and the other on Uganda.

Also of interest, but not in a format that can easily be reproduced
here, are the latest estimates on internet penetration in Africa (as
of mid-2014) from Internet World Stats (available at
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm). These estimates,
compiled from different sources, are admittedly approximate, as the
site admits. But they are the most recent comparable data easily
available on the web. [Official estimates from ITU, in a much less
user-friendly format, are available at
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/statistics/Pages/default.aspx]

The site estimates that there were approximately 298 million
internet users in Africa as of June 30, 2014, equivalent to 16.5% of
the population, as compared to 45.2% of the population in the rest
of the world. A breakdown by country show that the countries with
the highest level of penetration were Madagascar (74.7%), Morocco
(61.3%), Seychelles (54.8%), Egypt (53.2%), South Africa (51.5%),
and Kenya (47.3%).

The countries with the largest numbers of internet users in Africa
were Nigeria (23.6% of the total in the continent),  Egypt (15.5%),
South Africa (8.4%), Kenya (7.1%), and Madagascar (5.8%). No other
country makes up more than 5% of the continental total.

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on information and communication
technology, visit http://www.africafocus.org/ictexp.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

The African Internet Effect – Everything it touches turns different

Balancing Act Africa
Issue no 795 18th September 2015

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/en/issue-no-795

[Note: original article available at link includes many links to
other relevant material]

There’s been a lot of individual pieces of news and a slowly
building awareness of the scale of Africa’s Internet users but no-
one has yet taken in the breadth of the momentum building up.
Russell Southwood tries to get grips with the pace and variety of
what’s happening.

I ran a session on online content at Capacity 2015, the wholesale
bandwidth meet-point and conference in Dar es Salaam. I will be
charitable and say it was lightly attended but I don’t take it
personally. Those doing the business of business are often focused
on the short-term in the form of next month or quarter’s sales
targets.

Those selling wholesale bandwidth make most of their living from
corporates and fixed and mobile telcos. Since neither of the latter
are yet making a great hand of selling content and online services,
they are in the unfortunate position of being in the back seat of
the car, largely unable to influence the journey. But they have a
massive wholesale fibre inventory and every day that passes means it
has lost value, particularly those selling capacity from
international fibre pipes.

Consumer online content and services will be the next big bump in
growth for those selling wholesale bandwidth. But with notable
exceptions (see at the end of this story) they all seem remarkably
passive about making it happen.

The African Internet Effect is rippling out and affecting everything
it touches. The first shocks of this earthquake have been quite
gentle but its power will build for two reasons.

Firstly, the African “digital change” generation are 18-30 years
old. In the next five years as they get older, there will be a new
tranche of “digital native” Africans. They will themselves move into
positions of power and decision-making.

Secondly, in the more advanced African markets 50% of phone users
will have access to a smartphone or a smartphone-like feature phone.
In other markets, a significant number of users will have
smartphones. Argon Telecom will offer a US$40 smartphone next year
and all the talk is of when a US$30 smartphone will arrive.

There are two big clusters which will have an enormous impact over
the next five years: film and TV and music. Operators have enormous
problems implementing them but let’s look at what’s happened so far:

Film and TV: Online has reduced the barriers to market entry and
there are now over 100 online film and TV platforms. Not all of
these will survive but some will dig themselves significant niches
by focusing on local content. A couple of examples that have had
less airplay than others include Ghanaian film-maker Juliet Asante’s
Mobilefliks and the soon-to-be launched Tango TV in Tanzania. Much
of the talk at Capacity 2015 was about the lack of local content:
don’t get me started, local content is either already there or will
follow. Nigerian diaspora performer T Boy demonstrates what can be
done with a talent for comedy and You Tube. Safaricom has appointed
a broadcast content person to head up its BigBoxTV service and
Netflix will soon be in South Africa.

Music: As with VoD platforms, there are now over 100 online music
platforms jostling for attention, the larger of which include Simfy,
Spinlet and iROKING. Local contender in Tanzania Sune Mushendwa
spoke at Capacity 2015 and is one of the more interesting
operations. In our report on music platforms we calculated that
there were already 10 million users across the continent and that
these numbers were set for considerable growth. However, these
numbers are soft in that they are not always active users.

One of the biggest barriers to the expansion of these services is
payment. This is a combination of mobile operators’ terms of trade,
the lack of clear, easy-to-use systems and consumers trust. But that
is not to say the numbers are not there:

e-Commerce: Both Jumia and its rival Konga in Nigeria each have 1
million customers. At the moment this is hybrid e-commerce: the
customer orders online and pays cash on the doorstep for what he or
she has ordered. But that will change….

Media: About the same number or more people read newspapers online
than they do the print versions. The qualitative research we did as
part of a larger study for the New Venture Fund revealed two key
things. When asked what had changed most about media in the last 5
years, those interviewed said there was more media and there was the
Internet. Increasingly they checked news throughout the day online.
Africa’s online media ranges from the conventional but impressive
News24  to the new and much less conventional Battabox.

Radio: Radio is Africa’s key medium because TV is not widely
accessible. Many mobile users already listen to an inbuilt radio on
their mobile phone. The next step? Streamed radio. South Africa’s
Iono.fm has already got a million talk radio programme streams in
South Africa and will be expanding across Africa soon. Cyprien
Josson is a Nigerian in France whose day job is teaching but his
passion is Nollywood Radio which already has a significant audience

Livestreaming: With bandwidth Africa is now beginning to build
businesses from livestreaming something that would have been
unthinkable only a few years ago. Graham Wallington’s Wild Earth
which streams animals in the wild has gone from strength to
strength. Eban Oliver’s Skyroomlive which streams concerts live is
just starting out.

Publishing: Conventional wisdom says that Africans don’t read books
but Worldreader’s 125,000 active mobile readers offers tantalizing
evidence that things may be changing. Kenyan TV writer Ndinda Kioka
had her first short story published on an online site before
appearing in a print short story collection that led to funding that
will allow her to complete her first novel

Art: Nobody ever thinks of art when they talk about online but there
are now two online art galleries selling work made by Africans:
South African, Ex-Googler Julie Taylor’s Guns and Rain  and
Senegalese Valerie Konde’s Pavilion 33

Games: GamersNights in Kampala is a group of multi-player computer
gamers who have been helped by Liquid Telecom to expand the reach of
their players’ network across East Africa. Wherever I go in Africa,
there are small pockets of gamers, most of whom play offline with
pirated copies but might be persuaded at the right price by an
online service.

Advertising: The shift to digital advertising is well under way as
brands begin to realize the important of social media in general and
Facebook in particular. This shift has created new business for
everyone from the large digital agencies like Quirk, bought by JWT
or smaller, independent agencies like the one set up by Ugandan ex-
radio DJ Seanice Kacungira

I’m not arguing that’s all’s well in the African online world so
onwards and upwards. Significant problems need to be overcome but
this is the end of the beginning.

Even as the telecoms operators struggle to take on board what’s
happening, a couple of bandwidth wholesalers have understood it.
Liquid Telecom that supported GamersNights in Kampala are mentioned
above. The launch of PCCW Global’s ONTAPTV.com in South Africa is
mentioned in Internet news below. Others really should join the
party.

One sales person from an international fibre company was joking with
me that he was suggesting to a customer that they would sell
bandwidth on the basis that they got a cut from the songs
downloaded. But he was serious about trying to make things happen
and more should try it.

[Innovation in Africa is a fortnightly e-letter that covers: start-
ups and investment; energy; ICT4D; 3D printing; and innovation in
Africa and its cities. We have already produced 49 issues and these
can be viewed here (http://tinyurl.com/pdz8uhq):

Essential reading for those interested in new start-ups and
innovation that will change Africa. If you would like to subscribe,
just send an email to info@balancingact-africa.com with Innovation
in Africa in the title line.

*******************************************************

WeThinkCode democratises education in South Africa

WeThinkCode will train world-class software engineers in a peer-to-
peer problem solving learning environment in a period of two years

Africa 2.0 is excited to announce that it has partnered with
WeThinkCode

“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of
tomorrow.” This quote from American educator John Dewey, captures a
major issue facing South Africa. In a country with the legacy of a
two-system which excludes a major part of the population, how does
one narrow the gap and build an inclusive education environment
accessible to all?

Africa 2.0 is excited to announce that it has partnered with
WeThinkCode , an innovative peer-to-peer tech institution launching
in Johannesburg in 2016, dedicated to transforming technology
education in order to bridge the gap between undeveloped talent and
the desperate IT skills shortage in South Africa. In partnership
with Ecole 42 in France, WeThinkCode will train world-class software
engineers in a peer-to-peer problem solving learning environment in
a period of two years.

WeThinkCode aims to democratise education by removing barriers to
access and providing opportunity to all young South Africans. The
program is free and open to all talented and resilient candidates
aged 17 to 35; regardless of previous education, socio-economic
background or financial means. Student applications open on 1
October 2015 (http://www.borntocode.co.za).

WeThinkCode is a non-profit social enterprise, its partnerships with
South African corporates ensure a sustainable business model.
Corporate partners benefit from being able to identify and access
exceptional human capital and IT expertise.

#BornToCode: Tech Leader Challenge

The Top 100 tech leaders in South Africa are being challenged to see
if they are #BornToCode in the Tech Leader Challenge 2015. The aim
of the challenge is to raise awareness about the potential of South
African youth to become world-class programmers regardless of
previous education or socio-economic background.

The rapid evolution of the digital era has a profound impact on
business and society in Africa. The IT skills shortage, however,
hampers the economic growth and social transformation that could be
generated. South Africa currently has an estimated 200,000 vacancies
in the ICT sector, while 3.4 million youth between 18 and 29 are
unemployed. WeThinkCode aims to tap into this pool of untapped
talent to source and train the country’s future tech leaders.

The inaugural #BornToCode event, taking place on Tuesday, 29
September 2015 will give tech leaders the chance to join the
conversation and demonstrate their coding talent. The country’s
foremost tech champions will be challenged to take the student
aptitude test game and compete for the top 10 positions of the
#BornToCode Tech Leader board.

WeThinkCode calls on all business leaders who are passionate about
making a significant impact in education and believe in the
potential of developing the software engineering industry South
African to join its #BornToCode Tech Leader Challenge and sign up at
http://challenge.borntocode.co.za/

Tech leaders are required to donate a minimum of R25,600, which
covers a stipend to help students through their studies. All funds
raised will go toward opening the WeThinkCode campus in January
2016. More than 20 tech leaders have already signed up, including
Mamadou Toure, Founder of Africa 2.0, Stafford Masie, Founder of
thumbzup and Peter Alkema, CIO of FNB Business.

Source: APO

****************************************************************

Uganda: Female Ugandan Students Have Created an App That Detects
Vaginal Bacteria

A group of five female students from Makerere University in Uganda
have successfully created a test kit connected to a smartphone app
that is able to detect harmful vaginal bacteria that cause bacterial
vaginosis and other infections.

In a video posted to YouTube, the team known as Team Code Gurus
explain exactly how they created the app. The test kit, known as Her
Health BVKit, consists of hardware and a software application.

The hardware is the actual test kit that connects to the smartphone
app via Bluetooth. By placing a urine or vaginal discharge sample
onto the kit, PH values can be sent to the application. The app then
interprets whether the user has healthy or unhealthy amounts of
vaginal bacteria. If there are unhealthy levels of bacteria present,
the application recommends that the user seeks medical attention and
indicates where their nearest doctor or clinic is.

The team’s programmer, Ndagire Esther explains that the team would
like to work with NGOs and other health facilities to supply rural
women with the kit:

“We plan on marketing our application through NGOs, clinics and
pharmacies. We hope the NGOs can help us reach rural areas where
women who don’t have the opportunity to test their bacteria will be
able to use our application.”

She goes on to explain that the idea is to make the hardware and
software to make it easy to use and widely available for women to
test themselves every month for harmful bacteria that could indicate
infection.

Source: News24 14 September 2015

*****************************************************

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providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
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Thoughts on Greece from ex-chairman Sam
| September 11, 2015 | 7:47 pm | Communist Party Greece (KKE), Discrimination against communists, Greece, Syriza | Comments closed

Editor’s note: This article is offered not as an endorsement of the opportunistic positions of the CPUSA, but as a springboard for discussion. Please send comments, reactions, discussion to PHill1917@comcast.net for possible posting on this website.

 

http://peoplesworld.org/thoughts-on-greece-syriza-and-its-left-critics-part/

Thoughts on Greece, Syriza and its left critics, Part 2

assets/Uploads/_resampled/CroppedImage6060-sam.jpg

September 11 2015 

gr

This is part two of a three-part series. See part one here.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” – Karl Marx

“What childish innocence it is to present one’s own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!” – Frederick Engels

If any of us wants to judge the conduct of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Syriza in their negotiations with the Eurogroup (the finance ministers and heads of state that make up the Eurozone) in July, a close look at the concrete situation in Greece and Europe is necessary. At the core of any analysis is an examination of the distribution of power among contending class and social forces, the larger socio-economic matrix in which these forces collide, and the parameters and limits of social change.

That may seem obvious and not require mentioning, but I’m afraid it’s a method some on the left seem averse to and thus avoid.

Click to read more: http://peoplesworld.org/thoughts-on-greece-syriza-and-its-left-critics-part/

The man who knew too much
| September 7, 2015 | 8:10 pm | political struggle | Comments closed

Legion of Tech Volunteers Lead a Charge for Bernie Sanders
| September 7, 2015 | 6:21 pm | Bernie Sanders, political struggle | Comments closed
SEPT. 3, 2015
Source:New York Times
Dawn crept into Daniela Perdomo’s Brooklyn apartment, her bleary eyes still focused on her bright computer screen. The founder of a nearly three-year-old communications start-up, she had been up all night again, orchestrating the work of more than 100 other developers, web designers, researchers and writers.

Daniela Perdomo volunteers as an organizer of coders who are developing sites and apps for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times But they were not working for Ms. Perdomo’s company. They were not even being paid. Instead, the all-night sessions were devoted to the Aug. 12 unveiling of FeeltheBern.org — a website they created to explain Bernie Sanders’s positions on issues in the 2016 presidential campaign.Throughout the summer, a largely unseen legion of technology professionals across the country — software developers and designers, product managers and more — has been moonlighting online on Mr. Sanders’s behalf. The participants have been applying their initiative, creativity, organizational skills and, above all, technical prowess in their off hours to support an underdog candidate who has been more than grateful for the help.  They have built interactive maps of campaign events and are working on an automated flier generator to spit out polished promotional materials with a few clicks. They have set up an app to let volunteers and staff members at Mr. Sanders’s huge rallies use iPads to collect donations by swiping supporters’ credit cards. They have pioneered a tool to pair volunteers with lists of voters to call, automating what otherwise requires many paid campaign workers. And they have built dozens of websites for supporters of Mr. Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, like Ms. Perdomo’s.Like so many online minutemen, they have given Mr. Sanders an enormous lift in his campaign for the Democratic nomination. But this is no ragtag militia: The people who have enlisted include top-flight digital talent.

“It really blows me away,” Mr. Sanders said of the coders donating their services. “The volunteers we’ve mobilized all over this country, especially all the young people, are helping our campaign move to the next level.”
They came forward of their own volition, with hundreds joining a Coders for Sanders thread on Reddit.
And they organized themselves so thoroughly that one built an Internet “bot” to help match newcomers to tasks appropriate to their skills.
They are a diverse bunch, too: Ms. Perdomo said FeeltheBern.org had grown to 125 volunteers “from every demographic I could imagine.”
They include former aides to Mitt Romney, self-described libertarians, high school students (“Because I’m young, I can’t vote, so this is a great way to get involved,” said Justin Zheng, 14, of San Mateo, Calif.) and even an Australian programmer, Jordie Bodlay, who said a Sanders administration would indirectly improve his own life in Sydney.
Nearly everyone interviewed had never been politically involved before, and most cited Mr. Sanders’s views on issues like income inequality or his unconventional style of campaigning.
Most are younger than 35, members of the so-called millennial generation, one that has been dismissed at times as too focused on “hashtag activism,” lazily posting harangues on social media while shying away from the difficult work of organizing. But several who described themselves as introverted to begin with said the chance to do valuable political work from the sanctuary of their computers was irresistible.
“When the opportunity came along to do something I love doing anyway to make a difference somewhere, I’ll always jump on that boat,” said Rob Pieta, 23, a mobile developer in Illinois.
Kenneth Pennington, the digital director for the Sanders campaign, said features like the donation app, which incorporates the Square credit card processing software, were “the kind of tech that other organizations would pay expensive app developers for.”
But Federal Election Commission regulations treat donated tech work like “the 21st-century equivalent of having volunteers build a stage for a campaign event,” said Brett G. Kappel, a partner at the law firm Akerman and an expert on campaign law.
“As long as the volunteers aren’t compensated for their services by anyone, their work is not considered an in-kind contribution.”
Other gifts to the Sanders campaign that could have cost tens of thousands of dollars on the open market include a custom interactive map of events and rallies, which wound up on the campaign website to promote a national organizing day and continues to be highlighted there.
“They asked, ‘What do you want for it?’ and I said, ‘Nothing,’ ” said Ralph Castillo, a software engineer from Queens who built the map over one weekend. “ ‘I just want my husband and me to meet Bernie.’ ”
The stampede of coders to Mr. Sanders’s aid can be traced to Kyle Pierce, a mobile software developer who, on a whim, created the Coders for Sanders thread on Reddit in June.
“I have a decent amount of free time, and I can put together a website in a few hours,” Mr. Pierce said.
He said he had been curious to see if he had much company.
Within weeks, hundreds more had joined in.
Their buzzing nerve center is not on Reddit, though, but on Slack, an online chat program popular in the tech world. The volunteers brainstorm at all hours, ask for help on projects, and swap code and design mock-ups.
To help speed the integration of new volunteers, Atticus White, a 26-year-old developer from Boston, built a bot — an app programmed to respond to chat commands — that points users in the right direction.
The tuxedo-avatared app, @butler, begins a conversation with new arrivals (often peppered with an encouraging “Awesome” or “Great”) about their skills and points them toward suitable projects.
Slack is also the volunteers’ pipeline back to the campaign. Sanders aides check in regularly there, offering feedback, encouragement, requests and guidance, like asking those building the flier generator to make sure that union shops were hired to do the printing.
Aides also ask that new sites be designed differently from the campaign’s own and include disclaimers saying they have no official tie to Mr. Sanders.
Unaffiliated or not, builders of those websites are free to amplify Mr. Sanders’s campaign message: “We’re regular people, unassociated with any super PACs or billionaires,” says the fine print at FeeltheBern.org.
Ms. Perdomo said she had been spurred to seek out coders who shared her admiration for Mr. Sanders after she contributed to his campaign and was laughed at. “I was telling friends that I donated this money and they should do it, too, and I got a bunch of L.O.L.s back saying, ‘He’s great and everything, but I don’t see it happening,’ ” she said.
Her website had more than a million page views in its first two weeks.
As their projects take off, or become absorbed by the Sanders campaign, the coders keep coming back for more.
The volunteers who worked with Ms. Perdomo, for example, are now putting together a message board aimed at helping people car-pool to campaign events.
“There were too many nights when I would go to sleep with the sun coming up, and I felt like a zombie and would question my sanity,” Ms. Perdomo said with a laugh. “But now, it’s so worth it.”

 

Warren Karlenzig – Collective Intelligence: Cities as Global Sustainability Platform
| September 7, 2015 | 5:49 pm | Climate Change, environmental crisis, political struggle | Comments closed

eBlack’s Philosophical Foundation