This post is inspired by the whole KONY2012 debacle and in particular by Teju Cole’s piece “The White Industrial Saviour Complex”, which is a fairly searing indictment of those who seek to do good in far away places. A piece all the more cutting for being close to my white bones.
The idea for AfTerFibre is simple enough. Distribute the load of gathering information on terrestrial fibre optic cable projects in Africa by creating an online resource that anyone can contribute to. When I conceived of this project, I just assumed there would be an easy way to this. After all, we have Wikipedia, Ushahidi, Fusion Tables, and loads of rapidly growing Open Source GIS initiatives.
Fair warning, this post is a slightly intemperate and possibly ill-advised rant but sometimes you just have to get something off your chest if only to enable someone else to tell you how wrong you…
This is a short summary of progress and learning from the first couple of months since launching AfTerFibre, a project to map terrestrial fibre projects in Africa. From the beginning AfTerFibre has been designed as…
I had a chance to sit down and chat with Jeremy Leggett last week at the Skoll World Forum. Jeremy is the Chairman of SolarAid, a social enterprise that delivers solar solutions to rural Eastern…