(Posts are ordered latest first.)
I dropped into Generic Supermarket A on Sunday to grab a bottle of water. As usual when presented to a vast array of essentially the same thing, I froze. During this freeze I noticed a few bottles near the top of the shelf, claiming to be good for penguins.
Belu is a mineral water company making [...]
I stumbled across this fascinating blog entry discussing the potential of Twitter in Africa. The fact that the entire service is designed around messages suitable for SMS (<140 characters) gives the potential for it to actually be used in a country like Malawi with 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of 12 million. [...]
The Guardian has an article today about an interesting experiment in foreign aid that Britain is carrying out in Northern Malawi.
The Department for International Development (Dfid) is providing £750,000 to fund a scheme to provide cash payments instead of food to tens of thousands of hungry people in northern Malawi via a sophisticated system of [...]
Appropedia is a living library wiki, focused on success in two global initiatives:
Reduce poverty through International Development
Increase Sustainability through the use of Appropriate Technology
Cool projects include:
Solar Powered Food Dehydrator - There are SO MANY mangos rotting away in Malawi. If people could build one of these, which doesn’t seem too complex, they could sell dried [...]
I spend a lot of my time thinking about development and developmental issues – the days in which I don’t ponder something in that area are probably in the minority. The obvious area of fascination is Africa.
Whether it’s horror stories from Darfur, or celebrity tattle from Malawi, Africa is everywhere nowadays. Newspapers debate about trade [...]
It’s about time I did some blogging about my final year project. It consists of developing an asynchronous voice communications device for illiterate developing world applications. Put simply: sending voice messages between people who cannot read or write.
So, why is this important? Let’s take a quick look at the big picture. Poverty is a vicious [...]
Over the summer, during my time at Aidworld, I helped contribute to a book: “How To Accelerate Your Internet“. Its written for anyone who wants to optimise their organisation’s internet connection - something of great interest to Aidworld with their focus on access to information in developing countries.
The book has now been released to the [...]
I’m currently flying along the east coast of Scotland in a GNER train heading for Edinburgh. They’re doing a trial service of their wifi access, which is utterly rubbish. It keeps crapping out, and when it does work for longer than 5 minutes, it’s no faster than a 56K modem. I had a better service [...]
Brief update…
Exams still looming. Coursework still to do. End is in sight.
Trying to sort out final year project for next year. Something to do with developing world technology hopefully - lots of good ideas - trying to distill into something practical. Ideas include asynchronous voice comms, bandwidth management box and spreadsheet/database handheld computer.
Well Fashioned was [...]
I can’t really remember if I blogged about The Perfect T-shirt before. The concept is… a company called Better Thinking decides they want to make the most ethical t-shirt possible, and sell it. They consult with experts, ask for opinions, write a blog and generally put lots of resources into making it the best they [...]
On Sunday, after a horrible train/bus journey experience, I was in Cambridge for an interview with Aidworld for a summer placement. And I got it.
I’ll be spending my summer months in Cambridge, working for Aidworld on one, some or all of their various projects. Could be a bit of a mixture of software (web based/not [...]
From Velorution:
Kona BikeTown Africa - This site will track the design, development and delivery of more than 200 Kona bikes, designed specifically to assist health care workers treating HIV and AIDS patients with the delivery of home health aids and services in two Botswana cities
Wheels of Mercy - Community development initiatives based on the [...]