New research suggests that Twitter’s growth in Africa is being driven primarily young people using mobile devices and that South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt are the continent’s leading tweeters.

Source: memeburn.com

Link infographic

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The more people see our projects the bigger the chance we can make these projects work. This means we need you and your network to help us raise awareness. If people all over the world share and enthuse their network at the same time, we can get this ball rolling. Remember, one single tweet can make the difference!

Therefore we created, together with Schepnet, this very cool ‘Facebook Photobooth‘. Take a picture or upload a photo, put your name in it and show it to your friends!

Without our community there’s no 1%CLUB. It’s as simple as that. The crowd uses 1%CLUB to share challenges, come up with solutions and get things done. We need to be humble and let our story be told through the projects and the community.

The more people change their Facebook profilepicture, the more people will join us.

YOU make it work!

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December 1st GoedeWaar.nl, a Dutch consumer organisation, launched a
mobile website that ranks over 325 fashion companies on sustainability.
Visit m.goedewaar.nl to see how sustainable your favorite pants are!

THE QUEST FOR SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTION

Of the thousands of products that are available in shops, the
majority is made in countries where sustainabilty is not a primary
focus. For consumers this raises many questions: under
which circumstances are my jeans made? Is it really necessary to use
chemicals to produce cotton? At GoedeWaar.nl, we are looking for answers
to these questions. Not only because the consumer has the right to make
a fair and ethical choice but also because the buying behaviour of
conscious consumers can ultimately lead to sustainable development, fair
trade, and the reduction of poverty.

Now more than ever, people want to know the circumstances under which the
products they are buying are produced, and if they are made
responsibly. Goedewaar.nl collects, analyses, and publishes information
about the sustainability of products and production practices.

PARTICIPATE IN IMPROVING SITE

One of the key features of the mobile website m.goedewaar.nl is that you
can filter the search results by the sustainability issue that you find
most important (“mijn voorkeuren”).

More features and options will be added in later versions of this mobile
website. We are still developing. All suggestions and ideas are welcome!
You can use the feedback form, under the info-section at m.goedewaar.nl
An English version of the website is one of those features still under
construction.

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In interactive Solution Centres established professionals from non-profit organizations, knowledge institutes, the corporate, and public sector will present their biggest bottlenecks in dealing with international development cooperation. We will solve these bottlenecks together and make deals to implement these solutions in 2012.

The animation was made by ViveVisuals (vivevisuals.com) – a startup visual effects company that does high-end motion graphics for film, commercials, and a broad range of visualizations. ViveVisuals is based at NaiLab/Nairobi.

A Call 2 Action is an open movement where people can find each other to work on the transition of “traditional development aid” towards mutually beneficial international cooperation, that affects all aspects of (global) society and is not bound to specific institutions. People of all different disciplines and backgrounds, can join!

Check the program and register for the 10th of December!

See you this Saturday at A Call 2 Action.

P.S. You can already start the conversation online: #ac2a on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

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We’re now just a few days away from going live with Openaid.nl, the new web interface that will allow people to explore the Dutch government’s international aid portfolio in a much more dynamic way.

It’s the latest step in our work to support the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard.

Akvo has steered the project, following a successful pilot early this year to bring some of the Ministry’s aid data-sets online. The openaid.nl platform has been designed and engineered by Siem and Tristan Vaessen from Zimmerman & Zimmerman in close cooperation with Akvo’s Mark Westra and Peter van der Linde. On Wednesday I interviewed Siem and Tristan about the project.

For the IATI / development geeks, there’s also a quick deep-dive geek overview by Siem on what they’ve done at a technical level here.

It’s the culmination of a great year helping open up Dutch aid data, and the beginning of a process that eventually will see an IATI-compliant Akvo RSR system, with the ability for everyone involved to see and contribute context on top of the core IATI information, including photos and video. Our partners will also be able to enter project data directly into Akvo RSR, which can then be output in an IATI-compliant format.

Here are some milestones in Akvo’s work on IATI this year:

9th February 2011 – Overview of Dutch aid situation – “The fog clears to reveal a new generation of aid”. (by Peter van der Linde)

4th April 2011 – Akvo’s Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson participates in panel discussion at the launch of Sweden’s aid transparency website, Openaid.se. Read more here. (by Thomas Bjelkeman on the Open for Change blog)

2nd May 2011 – IATI makes it into the Akvo RSR development roadmap.

12th May 2011 – Akvo presents its IATI pilot project with DGIS, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the Open Data Development Camp in Amsterdam. Read the blog here. (by Peter van der Linde)

13th May 2011 – Overview of our Spring 2011 transparency pilot for Dutch Foreign Affairs. Read the blog here. (by Mark Tiele Westra)

9th August 2011 – Akvo attends IATI workshop in London, hosted by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

13th September 2011 – Dutch government publishes development data. Stresses its commitment to IATI and encourages initiatives that will help to visualise the data. Highlights Akvo. Akvo commits to launch Openaid.nl by Busan. Akvo’s Mark Westra gets on TV (again). Read the blog here. (by Peter van der Linde)

15th November 2011 – Aid Transparency Index 2011 is published. The Netherlands ranks 4th overall, praised in particular for recent major improvements in the amount of information available. Read more here. (by Publish What You Fund)

29th November 2011 – Openaid.nl to go live. Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness opens in Busan, Korea.

IATI is about shifting from hierarchical control of data to something much more open and networked, and it’s been driven by a network, too. I’m grateful to all the people we’ve met over time who helped us navigate along the IATI path.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo.

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Alexander, who is the head of Marketing at Nokia, covering several countries, including Switzerland, Cyprus, Israel and Austria was impressed at how Kenyans have revolutionized mobile phones using it to transfer money and also make purchases using the MPesa and Zap system.

He shares his story at a TEDxVienna, on why and how Kenyans are doing things better when it comes to using mobile phones not only to call, text and downloading apps.

The senior marketer with 13 years Management experience in telecommunication and consumer electronics industry sheds light on how a simple phone can be used as a mobile payment platform, just like Western Union and MoneyGram. All one needs is to register for legal purposes and locate an MPesa agent from who to withdraw or deposit money. Kenya is a developing country with a population of over 40 million, with 14 million using the mobile payment at least once a week to transfer funds. The system has evolved with time and one can now settle their electricity and water bills, pay for shopping and even buy a movie ticket using MPesa.

Alexander got to interact with a number of Kenyans and got to see how mobile phone payments has made life easy for them, from paying bills, to using them as banks and transferring funds at anytime within Kenya. Mobile payments have been instrumental in almost all the sectors of Kenya.

Months back, the Kenyans For Kenya campaign, which was raising funds to buy relief food for the famine stricken northern part of Kenyans used MPesa and Zap to meet the target of 500 million shillings, with MPesa winning a number of awards globally.

He also shares the M-Farm story, of three women who won the 2010 ipo48 boot-camp event, beating other 37 ideas with their start up that target Kenyan farmers. MFarm enables farmers to inquire current market prices of different crops from different regions, aggregate their needs and orders and connects them with farm input suppliers.

Now you know… ‘Why Kenyans do it better’

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From the  reputable key speakers to meeting other 113 participants, some of which you only interact online. The inaugural Word Camp Kenya event which took place at Crayfish Camp in the breathtaking Naivasha not only attracted bloggers and techies, but poets and people who have never actually blogged. The Nailab was one of the sponsors alongside reputable online firms in Kenya.

Dealfish Regional Manager Moses Kemibaro set off the presentations in a journey mode, taking us back to 2005 when he registered moseskemibaro.com. As he puts it, nothing came out of the blog. Years later, Moses has been a source of information for the media and companies that would want reviews of products and services and rakes quite a good amount from it and gets invites to conferences. He is listed as Kenya’s second best blogger according to Afrigator and he was kind enough to get his presentation online here we go, download

Francis Waithaka who is a SEO consultant shared on how one can use social media to enhance traffic for their blog. Does your blog have a share button?  Is it user friendly? How fresh is the content? How often do you get to blog and what do you blog? Here is a copy of his presentation

The camp not only drew speakers from the tech community, but also life coaches and people who have been involved in resuscitating dying brands. Njeri Rionge challenged the attendees on how they use their blogs;  do they help generate a good income  worth the time invested or are they vessels that suppress others?

Kelvin Jayanoris from Dukapress, showcased how their product has grown since its inception in 2005 currently has had over 22,000 downloads. Dukapress is an e-commerce system that quickly and easily helps one set up a fully featured online shop to sell digital or physical goods to customers all over the world. Want to make money as a developer in Kenya? Here is some advice from Kelvin and his team.

Day one came to a close with presentations from Angela Oduor from Ushahidi who showcased how wordpress has been integrated into the Ushahidi system for efficient communication.

Come evening and a nature walk was sufficient. You don’t get to see such a remarkable sunset everyday. Later in the evening, the camp took a poetry turn when Wamathai and Njeri Wangare took to the stage and showcased their skills, and perhaps the best one was one touching on how technology has affected our daily life.

Day two and Eric Kotonya from CrossOpen set the ball rolling on how to wordpress can be integrated with other platforms and used to collect data from the public. We all know how corporates have ‘invaded’ the online world to sell and gather feedback on their products and services.

Renowned photojournalist Boniface Mwangi took to the stage and shared on how he uses his photos and blogs to educate the public. The award winning photo-journalist is a TED FELLOW and the founder of Picha Mtaani, a UN-funded initiative that focuses on reconciliation through photographic exhibitions and debate.

One Huston Malande left the crowd in stitches when he got on stage and the projector read “Sina Powerpoint” (I don’t have PowerPoint). Huston is the lead of a branding and web development company and he challenged the participants on the kind of jobs they take on board and how they do these jobs to the satisfaction of their clients.

…and there was a contest for the best blog, which was won by ICT consultants. Read about it here.

Photocredits: Ewamak Designs, posted here.

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Last week at ActivSpaces we had a fun and eye-opening workshop delivered by 1% Club’s very own Niels Jansen. In an opening demonstration of ease in our social connectivity, Niels introduced each of the participants at the workshop with humorous data he’d obtained on them via a Google search. The significance is clear, we are more closely connected than ever before within a mesh of social media. For enterprises of all sorts, digital storytelling  is one of the most important components of a communications strategy.

what Niels found when he Googled me

The Revolution of Social Media
Niels showed us a popular video that illustrates the effect that social media is having in our world as a whole. 96% of millennials are actively involved in a social network, a good amount of search results for products and brands turn up user-generated content and almost everybody prefers to buy based on peer recommendations. The future is clear, consumers will no longer have to find products & services, products & services will find them.

Promoting Your Projects
The purpose of the Digital Storytelling Workshop was to edify a growing community of social entrepreneurs on how to use digital tools like blogs, social networks and feeds to get the word out on their projects. We learned that since ancient times storytelling has been a major medium of promotion and the technology we have at our disposition today only enhances its effect.

Niels breaking down AIDA

Embracing Technologies, Sharing Stories
One thing Niels helped me identify as a key to the successful use of digital storytelling is the willingness to wholeheartedly embrace the technologies that make it work. Basically he accomplished this by pushing a camera in front of my face and having me do an impromptu pitch. I got him back though

Check out this video clip

The Gift
The video clip above was recorded with a brand new Flip Mino HD that Niels gave to ActivSpaces. I imagine he’s going to miss seeing us in motion so it’s a little something to morally oblige us to keep him updated. Willingly we will though, because we’re definitely missing Niels too. I think the real gift was from the 1% Club and Niels creating the time to share their knowledge and resources with us. The 1% spirit will go a long way.

ActivSpaces co-founder Fua toying with the Flip

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What can I say? The 1% Event was a great success, filled with work, fun and more fun. We had about 65 guests in attendance, with more walking in at various points of the day. Our three local cases were based on issues that affect Kenyans directly and that could possibly be solved by an ICT solution.

As Nailab staff in conjunction with Jasper Grosskurth, we had come up with business cases that that directly affected Kenyans in one way or the other. The cases were the public education system, the transport industry and how to prevent the 2007/08 post-election violence from recurring in next year’s elections. The international business case belonged to a business owner in Amsterdam and it involved converting their project results into visually attractive reports (“Team Text to Change” is my name for them ).

Team Text to Change

A few guests started trickling in even before ten o’clock. Due to the traffic jam on that day (Nairobi Show), the event started slightly late. But people were ready to work and as soon as Sam Gichuru and our local business cases owner Gregg Mwendwa briefed the guests on the tasks at hand, everyone was ready to go. People broke out into four different groups, depending on which business case they wanted to work on. Once they settled, they introduced themselves to each other and started to work. You could see the intensity on people’s faces, while at other times, laughter broke out spontaneously, easing the mood of otherwise intense topics.

Team Ma3

We had invited a matatu driver and conductor to narrate to their team (TeamMa3) their experience in the transport industry. The laughter in this group was more evident than in any other group. I suppose it’s because all of us have had humorous moments riding on matatus and buses. The laughter was punctured by serious conversations and taking of notes as they tried to note down the issues that were prevalent in the industry.

At a nearby table, (Team Read with Us) was graced by the presence of a teacher, the deputy head of Milimani Primary School. She was able to give firsthand information on the plight of her school and primary schools in general, as well as the government’s role in the education system. The discussions around this table were heated as the state of the public education system is a sensitive issue not only among teachers, but also parents who are complaining about its dwindling status.

Team Read With Us

The emotions at the last team’s table (Team Wale Wasee) were clearly evident on their faces as they sat down with two people who live in Kibera slums and were directly affected by the Post-Election Violence in 2007/2008. Relieving that experience was motivation enough for this team to try and come up with solutions to avoid a repeat of the same event in the upcoming 2011 elections.

Team Wale Wasee

It was interesting to see how engrossed everyone was such that they did not want to take a lunch break, but rather preferred a working break, as they continued working on their projects. Time moved rather fast as it was soon time for presentations.

Wale Wasee’s main message was that everything starts with us as Kenyan citizens changing the way that we think, act and speak. They urged the audience to think about the creation of a national campaign supported by the mainstream media, mobile and offline groups spreading peace, and propagating information positively. They also felt that it was important to keep politicians accountable for their actions and speech, not just on a national level but in the grassroots too.

Fun and Games

Team Ma3 was on point, highlighting how the transport industry had deteriorated and most if not all Kenyans have been angered at one point or another with something happening on the road. Their ICT solutions were fresh and innovative. One of them was to create a “Name and Shame” group (http://namendshame.blogspot.com/2011/10/1-event.html), whereby passengers can send an MMS through their phone that would be posted on a Facebook page that they had created. The content of the message was simply to report errant drivers, conductors, unroadworthy vehicles by stating the number plate of the vehicle and also taking a picture where possible. Another solution that they had in mind was group SMS’s for drivers, to alert each other on traffic, allowing for drivers to maybe find suitable alternate routes, or simply be prepared mentally as they approach high traffic areas. Hopefully team Ma3 will see their ideas through, they are after all, pretty cool.

Read with Us solutions to an embattled public system called for the government to really embrace technology as the key to the public education system disaster. Introduction of virtual libraries, podcasts, e-books, virtual learning centres and videos were some of the ideas that they had thought of. They called on IT developers to come up with platforms that would necessitate education through information technology. ISPs were also urged to provide affordable internet access to regions that were otherwise unable to afford it. Another solution that they had in mind was the creation of digital villages which would promote e-learning in different communities. They also addressed the shortage of teachers, and urged the government to employ more teachers, as it may be a while until the government decides to use ICT as a solution to the public education system.

@samgichuru talking about the NaiLab

To sum it up, the 1% Event Nairobi was a remarkable event. We had someone asking if we can make it a monthly affair instead of a yearly event. All our guests were overwhelmed at the welcome they received, and the opportunity to contribute their skills, knowledge and opinions towards solving different business cases. New friendships and connections were made, something that may not have happened if not for the 1% Event. From our business cases, it was evident that in Kenya that there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed and 8 hours are not sufficient to flesh them out. That being said, our 8 hours were productive and it’s our belief that this was the start of something new, and people will be motivated to think in new ways and be innovative enough to create solutions for the issues that are currently pulling us down as a nation. It was an intense day, one that forced us to think hard and engage ourselves in issues that for a while have seemed insurmountable. The 1% Event enabled us to see that together, we have in our hands the power to make a difference.

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