Kenyan Pundit

It’s a rainy lazy day in SF which means I’ve spent most of the afternoon indoors catching up with my RSS feeds and supposedly trying to clear my backlog of work. I’d like to think that this post represented some productivity.

- Unganisha is back with tales from Kampala.

- AfroMusing has a great round-up of the Kenyan blogosphere.

- You’ve heard about the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman or maybe even read it - now listen to an interview with the author via Open Source (and maybe attempt to make sense of the 100 or so comments the show elicted).

- Seems like there’s a female political leaders meme in the air or something. Jamaica to get it’s first female Prime Minister. According to one of her constituents, “She no fraid a nothing, no kind a war, no care wha kind a ruption a gwaan, she is always around in the constituency.”

- This should be a good read for the anti-Jeffrey Sachsers among us. Hat tip Meskel Square!

Popularity: 5% [?]

I fell-off the blogging bandwagon yesterday and this morning…for great round-ups check out Ethan’s blog.

- My favorites from this morning. Sir Ken Robinson and Majora Carter.

- Neat link: The Blair Watch Project (I’d love to see this happen in the 2007 elections).

Popularity: 11% [?]

Theme: Tales of Invention

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” - Winston Churchill

1) Speaker: Dr. Amy Smith (low-tech designer with MIT’s D-Lab).

- Another profile of her at World Changing .
- About 2 million kids die from respiratory diseases caused by indoor smoke from burning charcoal/wood when cooking.
- Works on alternative cooking fuels to reduce this problem. Produces environmentally-friendly charcoal from agricultural waste materials. Is also working to improve access to safe drinking water by low-cost water testing and treatment systems e.g. solar water disinfection (hey AfroM).
- Her presentation had me thinking about the local Jua Kali industry and how little we are doing to scale that up and harness that.
- Focus on enabling communities to create value for themselves (don’t try and design outside the community) and educating people not to stop being farmers but to stop being poor farmers.

2) Speaker: Joshua Prince-Ramus (Architecht)

Popularity: 6% [?]

Been in the works for the last few months and finally announced at TED.

When I was on the PopTech Africa panel last year, one of the things I brought up was a desire to see a Poptech-like event in Africa. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a couple of TED staffers who were in the audience had been thinking about the same thing…we ended up connecting and having conversations about the idea. TED is now going to make this a reality and I’m so thrilled.

The conference will be in Arusha, Tanzania from June 3-7 2007. The theme will be Africa: The Good News. TED will be providing 100 scholarships to make it possible for (young) African thought-leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, creative souls, bloggers etc., from the continent and the diaspora. They also hope to get those extraordinary individuals in the continent with deep pockets (they do exist) and about several hundred members of the existing TED community to come together and both experience the possibilities of the continent and think of creative new ways to unleash Africa’s (immense) unfulfilled potential.

Stay tuned for details.

OK. I’m blogged out. Off to search for a glass of wine.

Popularity: 6% [?]

This year’s TED Prize Winners

1. Cameron Sinclair (Director Architecture for Humanity and Eternal Optimist).
- All problems are local, all solutions are local.
- Focus is on social responsible design.
- They have a staff of just three – shows the power of a website. Started with $700 and a website.
- They advocate for good design; they instigate; they implement.
- His role is a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian crisis.
- Open source model e.g. designs in the developing world licensed with a special Creative Commons license that allows it to be replicated anywhere for free.
- His mantra: Design like you give a damn

2) Jehane Noujaim (Filmmaker)
- Thinks that as the world becomes smaller it is really important to learn from each other/building bridges. The biggest challenge facing the world is understanding the other.
- How to make this a reality? The power of the image. Connecting people through film – getting independent voices out there. How do you give power to independent voices to tell their stories?
- Her wish: Global Day of Film – platform for independent films to get out there and have a global audience; bringing the world together through film

3) Dr. Larry Brilliant
- His TED wish is to build an early global warning system to protect against pandemics.

Popularity: 5% [?]