Yes I did. I read it twice. The general impression is that a Nigerian entrepreneur is revealing the necessary understanding on how to align with African realities. But if you read it critically, you realize it is an advise to American venture capitalists (and those kind of forces) on how to tailor their entry to Africa with their surveillance nonsense.
In Africa, mobile numbers are people’s unique identifiers for digital services, as many users do not have email addresses which are often the default for enterprise systems in other markets. Therefore, enterprise solutions for Africa need to factor the use of mobile numbers as unique identifiers, where required.
Reading that article, I got the impression that they were marketing themselves more than anything. Africa
is not waiting for some polished solutions from outside it to thrive. The focus of this article on how organizations outside Africa need to customize their solutions to fit Africa raises an obvious question – why are homegrown solutions failing? Which are succeeding? But perhaps most striking is the obsession with surveillance technologies like Facebook website tracking. I am not surprised (Harvard Business, after all) but I am pissed off by these kind of assumptions that nothing is happening therefore outside companies must come and solve the problems.
Here you go, the PinePhone Pro
Updates: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2021/05/not-just-big-techbillc10/
Government Memo Shows Bill C-10 Targets News Sites, Podcast and Workout Apps, Adult Websites, Audiobooks, and Sports Streamers for CRTC Regulation
https://www.cornell.edu/video/james-scott-the-art-of-not-being-governed
For two thousand years, the peoples residing in Zomia – the mountainous region that stretches from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India – have fled the organized state societies in the valleys. Far from being ‘remnants’ left behind by civilizing societies, they are “barbarians by choice”, peoples who have deliberately put distance between themselves and lowland, state-centers.
And the ‘TOTAL’ chaos follows the oil people wherever they land.
Most communications with Palma and the surrounding area have been cut off by the insurgents, although some in the besieged town got messages out using satellite phones. The town is where many contractors have been working for a multi-billion-dollar liquified natural gas project by the French energy company Total.
Science and technology are not value neutral. It is driven by ideas of value, in this case profit:
But although this new therapy is extremely promising, there are still numerous barriers to delivering this care, one of them being cost. Therapies for rare diseases aren’t profitable, so all this is funded by donations, fund raising and charities, with many other children waiting for treatment.
One would think that with all the talk around ‘sovereignty’ the governments would see the dependency matrix they are fixing themselves in. They also do not come cheap – an email account on Xchange may cost over 10Dollars a month. It is puzzling how a low-income country would opt for a costly, dependence-inducing platform yet their technical people advise on fairly priced options that give them more autonomy.
I found individuals in tech-departments (the sys-admins) can play a disproportionate role in steering an organization or government office to FOSS or closed-source. While I see OSA has the right message, they are also funded by some of the main beneficiaries of closed-source surveillance software used by governments in Africa: Microsoft + Google. I hope the board offers more insight and capacity in how to deal with these structural issues.
The Garissa solar plant is doing 50MW - https://www.rerec.co.ke/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53&Itemid=234
I wonder what led to East Africa success in this area. I do not know whether it is relative to other regions but in absolute sense, they seem to be doing something right.
Seems the EV adoption is happening in the most unexpected spaces, like fishermen in Lake Nam Lolwe (or as the British called it, Lake Victoria): https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-56273602
You can get more info here - https://join-lemmy.org/news/2022-11-02-_First_release_of_LemmyBB
The code is on github so you can self host it yourself, if fedibb rules isn’t the place.