Notes from the talks of Africa Gathering taking place in London, England on 25 April.

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Martin Konzett – ICT4D Austria
ICT4D and grass roots approaches in Africa

Martin explains who we are and what we do

This is the trailer of our movie project

Our projects can be accessed in ICT4D.at wiki project page.

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Dave Mason – IntraHealthOPEN
How downloading a song can open the future of a continent

Dave comes from the open source community

IntraHealth uses open source – successful implementation of a HR system

Open source

• guarantees that the user has the right to copy, redistribute, use
• GPL licenses are actually protection licenses – the content is protected to remain free

In the health sector things like that can also happen

• Idea: let’s start a space where health care workers can share ideas & experiences
• Solve big health problems collaboratively
• Based on open source & GPL

A bunch of musicians were asked to remix a song, provide it creative commons for people to download to donate afterwards – Nas, Peter Buck, Youssou N’Dour, …

Q & A

Experience of NGOs – have a closed attitude. What happenend in IntraHealth to take this approach?

• NGOs are protecting their property as much as companies – with IntraHealth, people from the field asked for open source, experience with an open source translation tool was so good that it convinced many people

List of preferred open source versions that people use would be useful.

Music project is a campaign?

• Yes – to raise money & awareness

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Jürgen Eichholz
Afrigadget

Solving everyday problems with African ingenuity

Free blog – showing people a different picture of Africa, which has more to offer than meets the eye

Different examples of “AfriGadgets” – simple innovative useful toys

Ingenuity born of necessity – people invent things because they have to

Reusing tools which are thrown away in Europe or America -> upcycling instead of recycling

Mobile hardware & applications – created by people in Africa

AfriGadget tries to make people aware of small innovative things which are not obvious on first sight

The innovative part is the creation of something that will work on a local level

Maker Faire Africa – August 13-15, 2009, Accra, Ghana

Bringing innovative, arty, ingenious people together from all over Africa

Q & A:

Who looks at the site?

• Mostly people from the West – Europe, Asia, America

Observation: initiatives in most of the cases base on economic motivation, would they do it if they could buy the materials?

• People would do it in a different way, they “misuse” products already – it’s not just about economic motivation. People want to take something and change it. Also people think it’s fun.

If the people didn’t have economical urges – wouldn’t come out, would it? But this applies for us as well.