ICTworks by Inveneo

Educational Technology: So much talk these days about educational technology in the developing world and whether it’s really an efficient tool for improving education or just another techie fad. Don’t miss TechChange’s next online course, "New Technologies for Educational Practice," offered February 20 – March 16. Early bird deadline is February 1, regular deadline is February 20.

The Heavy Hitters Weigh In: The Brookings Institution and UNESCO have taken an active role in the ongoing debate about ICTs and education. A New Face of Education: Bringing Technology into the Classroom in the Developing World is an in-depth study that looks at all levels of education in the poorest countries of the world, from Sub-Saharan Africa to South and West Asia to the Caribbean, and comes up with some encouraging conclusions . Transforming Education: The Power of ICT Policies looks at a number of countries and their competencies, motivation, and teachers’ working environment, and offers insights and guidance to help policy-makers integrate ICTs in education more effectively.

Become an ICT4D Champion: The University of Manchester’s Centre for Development Informatics is offering several world-class graduate programs in ICT4D at the Master’s and Doctoral level. The Centre has a particular interest in candidates working in areas such as mobile finance, micro-enterprise, gender issues, and e-government and civil society, among others. Learn more here about this fantastic opportunity.

Business Fighting Poverty: *iHub, the tech leader in open space innovation and development in Kenya, is hosting IEEE Webinar: Leveraging ICT Business Models to Help Reduce Poverty, which promises to provide insights on how ICTs can provide access to education, healthcare, agro-services, and financial services to the BoP. January 26, 10-11 EST

Are You an African Developer? The funding is out there for your startup, you just need the right ideas and the know-how to sell them. Affrinovator tells you how

African Internet Progress: If you’re interested in ICT4D in Africa, it’s important to keep up with the development of the Internet across the continent. Some thoughts from oAfrica.com

Using Mobiles for Effective ICT in Kyrgyzstan: FrontlineSMS and IREX work together to improve communication with teachers far and wide. In this case texting proves better than email.

To get these links faster, follow me on Twitter: @SabinaBehague

In the American and European technology space there’s a growing problem. There’s so much funding available for early stage startups that everyone and their college dropout buddy is starting-up, leaving no one out there to hire.

It’s one of those first world problems: "We just raised 4 million dollars for our social network for redheads but we can’t find any developers…frowny face."

If Silicon Valley is having trouble hiring top tech talent, then it means that there’s also a drought in the NGO space. Even the biggest non-profits are suffering from the same lack of technical resources.

If you’re an African developer, this is a huge opportunity. I am Jonathan Gosier, and I say you should focus on acquiring (or maturing) some of the following skills. Talent in these areas is elusive even in the U.S. and Europe, being good at them will make you far more employable (or fundable if you want to start a company), globally as well as locally:

For Technical People

1. Ruby on Rails A lot of web startups use RoR because it’s a great language and it also impresses investors. However, they quickly realize that it impresses because Rails developers regularly command high salaries due to such high demand.
2. Python and or Django The Jan Brady to Ruby’s Macia. Actually, Python is probably more in demand these days simply because more developers are competent in it. It’s also great for mobile app development which makes it useful for all those SMS apps local firms are dying to build.
3. iOS – the iPhone continues to dominate the smart phone arena. It’s less relevant if you’re targeting a local audience (there go with Android or stick with Java), but if you are building apps that you want to sell internationally then there’s no app store with a richer economy for developers than Apple’s.
4. Data visualization All that ‘open data’ out there is irrelevant. What’s relevant is data that can be used by anyone at any organization, with minimal fuss. Visualization makes it easy to relate complex datasets to those too busy (or too lazy) to analyze them. Data vis goes beyond any specific programing language, but it is a skill and it’s one that Africans can find a great deal of opportunity in.
5. Math/Statistics Before one can visualize anything they need the components to visualize. If you’ve got a strong grasp of statistics and analysis, distilling information so that it’s actionable for others (who usually don’t share this skill) is a highly lucrative path to pursue.
6. Semantic Analysis Despite what everyone thought, the semantic web is here to stay. It hasn’t become a ‘new web’ like some once thought it might, but semantic technologies (sentiment analysis, natural language processing, text parsing) have become the methods that are routinely used to power some of the web’s most popular applications. These skills are incredibly lucrative. The growth of the ‘Big Data’ industry is fueled by them.
7. NoSQL & NewSQL Modern web apps require a great deal of backend engineering to deal with and keep track of all the byproducts of social, sharing, and content creation. There’s two schools of thoughts on this: one is that by doing more of the work on the application side (on request), applications can scale faster while handling more operations from more users. That’s the non-relational approach. The other school of thought is that there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things, which stores data with the values the application uses for retrieving them later. The challenge was that this created a bottleneck at the database level which often lead to slow or stagnant apps. The new thinking around NewSQL is to keep the relational model and simply build better database software that allows for more throughput. Entire companies are being built of each type of database (see: Cloudera, Vertica, 10Gen), pick the one that makes sense for you. Also, this is the fuel for the Big Data/Open Data rocket ship.
8. jQuery/Javascript/Ajax Modern web apps do most of their processing on the front-end. As I mention above, this often means the application side is where most of the logic for the web app lives, while the database becomes a place to store and retrieve. For these types of web apps, front end logic is critical. Given the rise of the Jquery framework this is probably obvious, yet solid front-end developers are few and far between.
9. Hardware Engineering The ‘maker’ movement amplified by Afrigadget and Maker Faire Africa highlights another opportunity on the continent, the localization of manufacturing. Whether it’s bicycles or mobile devices, companies local to the continent that design and build things are scarce.

For Less Technical People

1. Design Look at the majority of African websites. Most websites made by African developers still look like they were made in 1999 using the GeoCities default templates (translation: Fugly). Blegh. There is a bounty out for good African designers. The mistake a lot of programmers make is they assume design is about technical know-how. It’s not – it’s about a sense of aesthetic and attention to detail. If you are a lazy designer, you’re not a designer. If you are a programmer who thinks design is superfluous to your application, then you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a dearth of design talent in the U.S. and Europe and a good designer can command the salary of a top programmer. Where are the African designers?
2. Writing You would be surprised at the number of people who can’t string together a well-written, cohesive, consistant thought in written form. Coupled with the rapid proliferation of social media (which, by the way, consists of mostly written messaging) the ability to write and write well has become incredibly important. I say this because you are not at a disadvantage if you are a non-native speaker. Example: Ariana Huffington is a non-native english speaker and she built a highly influential and powerful new media outlet that rivals old-school powerhouses like CNN and FOX on the web. It’s about being able to convey your thoughts cohesively and convincingly. It takes practice, so keep blogging!
3. Project Management Being the person who can cultivate the best traits from your team of peers is a huge asset that has always been rare. Many people manage, few excel at it.
4. Videography – We’ve all heard that there isn’t enough local content being produced for African audiences. One of the reasons is the lack of local producers. However, this is changing. More countries are becoming home to an African creative class who are producing film, television, and web shows locally. Can this be lucrative? I think so. As bandwidth falls in cost, eventually the demand for local content may not come from international viewers but the pan-African audience.
5. Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Deductive reasoning. The ability to deduce conclusions and the reasons why they have occurred. To do this, you have to be able to consider all sides and all aspects of a problem…even the ones that you don’t like. You have to be able to challenge assumptions, this includes your own. It is a skill to be able to analyze the intricacies of why things happen or if someone’s argument isn’t grounded in reality, and to be able to explain your conclusions to others. This will make you a better anything.

There are companies all over the world looking to hire people with aptitude in these areas, but being in Africa puts you in a position of power because there will be as great a demand for you at home as there is abroad. Does this mean you’d have to relocate to another country? Not necessarily, many of these skills can be outsourced to you or your company.

In 2012 learn the things that are in demand so you can build firms (or offer services) that capitalize on these global trends.

Jon originally published The Lucrative Skills African Talent Should Acquire in 2012 on Appfrica

This morning, I republished the post The 3 types of developers you will find in Africa by Richard Ngamita. He compared the software developer community to three controversial African leaders, Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe, and Idi Amin, using satire to point out the different styles of programmers and their stereotypical behaviors.

When I first read the post, I though it daring to use such leaders to categorize the technology community, but then I started reading the comments - now 60+ and counting - and I found that every single commenter saw humor in the post and many voluntarily identified with one of the figures.

This made me question myself: Why did I find this post so "daring" yet the commenters not? Was it because as an American, I see these leaders through the context of the ex-colonials who lost so much under their rule? Were the original commenters somehow lacking in their knowledge of history? Or is there an inside joke, a macabre humor that only an African could get after living with such leaders?

So, going with the earlier commentary as a guide, I republished the post (with Richard's permission) believing that the majority of ICTworks readers would have the same reaction as those that read the original post. Such is not the case.

Besides the comments below, I've received several private emails disagreeing with the use of these three Africans to describe the ICT field. Also, those that still live under one of the leaders have pointed out that such leaders don't take kindly to unauthorized, much less possibly unflattering descriptions or associations.

So I've removed the post. If you would like to read it and the original commentary, you can find it here: The 3 types of developers you will find in Africa.

Hive Colab is an open, collaborative, community owned, work environment for young tech entrepreneurs to focus on projects, access the internet, have a quiet professional environment to develop their ideas in, hold events and generally collaborate. Something very similar to what our friends are doing with the iHub in Nairobi.

It will be a space for nascent application developers to register as freelancers, if they are looking for paying projects that people need to be done around the world. An exclusive list of project and clients available through the pan-African consortium of incubators, AfriLabs.

Participant projects will remain wholly owned by their creators, although there there will be access to a network of investors looking to cherry pick some of the more promising ideas for investment, also through AfriLabs.

The only requirement to membership, is that applicants actually be working on projects, and thereafter they must be able to show progress on their ideas to retain membership. This is to keep energy high and to favour people who remain productive. There will be other types of memberships available to be announced soon.

For those who occasionally need space to host events and trainings relevant to the purpose, we are happy to offer Hive Workspace as an open venue. All applications to use the space will be approved by the board. Our goal is to establish the first Hive at the present location, and eventually expand by opening another Hive in a different parts of Kampala to make it a convenient resource for everyone.

It is important that the Hive operate independent of any contributing stakeholders, so that it is not any one person’s or group’s property. Thus, all decisions are made by a community board.

The Hive board currently consists of Teddy Ruge (Project Diaspora), Daniel Stern (UConnect), Solomon King (NodeSix) and Jon Gosier (Appfrica Labs).

Today, the gossip says that Apple will show off a 10-inch touch screen device with the amazing multi-touch gestures that make the iPhone such a breeze. It will also run iPhone apps as well as some mix of Macbook-sized apps and be priced somewhere around $800 USD.

The Apple Tablet is causing the most excitement in the book publishing world, where there is both fear and greed that the Apple tablet could do for downloading books what the iPod did for music - make it legal, easy, and profitable.

But what does all this Apple Tablet hype mean for Africa and African businesses and consumers? I think we'll see several long-term Apple Tablet impacts:

1. More, cheaper, high-quality books

Right now, its expensive to get a high-quality book in any African country - even South Africa. You can get poorly copied paperbacks anywhere, but the selection is as small as the quality poor. It took me three different books to find all the pages to Dreams from My Father in Nigeria.

With publishers like McGraw-Hill publishing 95% of textbooks in ebook format, and Amazon now selling more ebooks than real books, the Apple Tablet platform may finally make the distribution of knowledge simple, easy and cheap in Africa. Yes, there is still the cost of the device itself, but like cell phones, and even the iPod itself, prices are dropping as African incomes are growing.

2. More, cheaper, mobile broadband Internet

As AT&T has learned, iPhone users are data hogs. I know I push the limits of bandwidth in my usage, burning through a full iPhone battery in four hours or less when I'm liveblogging (thank god for iPhone battery extenders).

Now take the iPhone data usage and multiply it by the Apple Tablet screen size and you can quickly surmise that no matter how robust Safaricom's network, they'll need to invest in new mobile broadband bandwidth soon. Oh and before you think Apple Tablet will not have adoption rates like mobile phones, I have two words for you: Skype video.

All this demand for bandwidth will actually make it cheaper - more people using more bandwidth will stimulate more Internet service providers and greater competition in service, quality, and price.

3. Greater business opportunities for African developers

With what I expect to be robust growth in Apple Tablet sales, African software developers will have many new business opportunities. First, we should see enough demand for application development that Africans should be able to win new work. And soon enough, companies like Leti games will be building Afro-centric applications just for home markets.

But lets think bigger. Wouldn't the ultra portable Apple Tablet also drive a renascence in web development? New applications that utilize the larger screen and camera that I'd expect in a Tablet from Apple? Could this be real remote diagnostics for mHealth? Or produce grading and pricing while on the farm? What about whole new business models we can't even imagine now?

4. But only if the Apple Tablet is unlocked

There is just one concern I have with the Apple Tablet - how locked down it will be. If its like the iPhone, wedded only to certain carriers, or like the Kindle, one content provider, its usefulness across the many countries of Africa will be minimal.

Let's hope that Apple is following Google's lead, and selling the Apple Tablet free from service contracts or vendor lock-in. That users are free to get content from any provider, on any platform - WiFi to GSM 3.5.

Only then will Apple unleash demand like a sledgehammer did in 1984.

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