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Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT) is pleased to announce the first annual DOT Innovation Festival. A celebration of partnerships, imagination, and ideas, Innovation Fest is a new and exciting approach to DOT's creativity festivals, and will showcase the creativity and ingenuity of youth from around the globe.

The DOT Innovation Fest 2011 will be held to coincide with Global Entrepreneurship Week (November 14-20, 2011), the world's largest celebration of innovators and job creators. Participants in DOT's Innovation Fest will have the opportunity to get involved with both events, and stretch their creative and innovative brain power.

What is the DOT Innovation Fest 2011?

DOT Innovation Fest 2011 is a creative competition for DOT program participants, beneficiaries, alumni, interns, and staff. Festival participants will pitch their innovative concepts for growing a business, growing an idea, or getting creative with mobile technology. In a collaborative series of events, participants will have the opportunity to refine their ideas before entering a final submission to the competition.

Winners will have the opportunity to work with world-renown experts in entrepreneurship and mobile technology to pitch their businesses or develop their proposals, and DOT will support the winning teams and individuals to help them make their ideas become reality. Additional prizes include online courses, video cameras, and other fun incentives.

DOT's Innovation Fest 2011 kicks off on November 1st and runs until December 4th. For more information, please visit http://friends.dotrust.org/innovation.

About Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT)

Digital Opportunity Trust is an innovator in enabling people to access and apply information and communications technologies (ICT) to create educational, economic and entrepreneurial opportunities. DOT transforms and supports young women and men as they become leaders of economic and educational change in their societies.

DOT currently operates sustainable programs through local offices in 11 countries in North America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. To date, the organization has mobilized more than 3,500 young Interns who have trained and coached more than 600,000 people in communities and schools around the world in 21st century skills, the use of technology, and entrepreneurship.

For more information about DOT or for media requests, please contact:

Heather Marshall,
1.613.667.5854
hmarshall@dotrust.org
http://dotrust.org

About VC4A Questions:

VC4Africa seeks to connect entrepreneurs with the network, capital and knowledge they need to build promising businesses on the continent. We have members from 156 countries that network via our online platforms and offline via our VC4Africa Meetups. Our matchmaking site VC4Africa.biz is a tool for entrepreneurs to publish their venture and connect with possible business partners and investors. Our matchmaking program further supports entrepreneurs in their business planning and support entrepreneurs seeking venture finance. So how do we support the community with knowledge?

Building a business is hard and having access to the right knowledge and information is critical. Unfortunately, in the African space information is too often lacking. What do the changes in local tax code mean for the tech sector? What are the import duties for heavy machinery? What are the key points investors look for when reviewing a cash flow prognosis? What are the legal issues I need to consider when expanding across borders? VC4A Questions is a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by the VC4A community. Together we are building a community generated database of knowledge. A few points that make VC4Africa Questions & Answers unique:

A Growing Knowledge Base

People use VC4A questions to document their African business adventures. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know about doing business in Africa is available in the system. The information is organized, the history of the questions is archived and the information is freely accessible for anyone with the same question today or tomorrow.

Community Managed

Each question makes use of tags that make them easier to find across multiple search queries. This also helps members link new questions with existing discussions and further centralizes the conversation. Members can find similar questions they can borrow from when outlining additional context. Each question and answer is also rated and sorted by the users. This ensures that only the most pertinent questions rise to the top of the landing page and search results. It helps push prominent issues into the forefront and crowds out any unwanted messages or noise.

Follow Discussions

Members can follow topics they are interested in. Any updates are automatically forwarded per e-mail and this helps maintain an active dialogue. Members, the VC4Africa team and officers can also ‘recommend experts’ with certain questions and encourage them to share their expertise and input. This further serves to mobilize an active network and adds to the growing knowledge base.

VC4A Reputations

VC4A Questions is linked directly to member profiles. The system tracks who posted a question, who responded, how many responses were recorded and whether or not the questions and answers were valued by the VC4A community. This feedback is part of a reputation the user builds via the system. This helps other users appreciate the quality and level of a user’s contributions and serves to recognize the members who contribute the most and are otherwise experts on certain subjects or specific fields of interest.

Moving forward,

Please visit the new section of the website http://vc4africa.biz/questions/. We encourage you to take a look and play around with this new tool. Please add your own questions or share feedback with the community. We look forward to building this resource together and for the benefit of the entrepreneurs and investors working to build promising businesses on the continent.

Regards and happy networking!
The VC4A Team

Let us start by agreeing that technology has great promise in increasing the economic empowerment of youth in the developing world. We all believe it. But what is that promise in reality? Which technologies hold greater promise? What innovations work? That was the issue we discussed at the Technology Salon on Youth Economic Empowerment with ICT with Fiona Macaulay and Linda Raftree (Join us at the next Salon)

Youth and ICT

First, let us define youth as young people ages 15-24, which is the UN definition, but in certain countries we can expand that age range to 15-35. Why? An example is Sierra Leone, where those 25-35 were denied opportunity during the civil war and therefore are only now reaching the status afforded to youth much younger in other countries.

And let us recognize that youth are already finding economic opportunity with ICTs. Linda Raftree did an informal survey among some colleagues working in Africa and found that:

Making money from movies in Nigeria

In Egypt, colleagues said that youth are repairing cell phones, serving as DJs at wedding parties, setting up photocopy shops and internet cafes, selling phone calls and airtime, running shops that provide children and young people with the opportunity to play games, and using computers to make flyers and posters for certain producers and products in the communities. They also provide satellite connections for poor families to access national and international TV channels - this service is not legal but generates good income for young people.

In Kenya you'll find youth managing Mobile Phone Kiosks popularly known as 'Simu Ya jamii' (community phones). These double up as phone charging points. Pirated music is big business for some youth and phone unlocking services are increasing. One colleague noted that youth are not really creating applications, but in some of our programs, they are involved in piloting new applications, and thus influencing their development. In Zambia, you don't see much of this type of activity in rural areas, according to a colleague there. But there are village telcos being operated by youth groups and some village groups are setting up banks of solar chargers to support solar lighting. (Cool result: When they set them up at a schools, encouraging women to come each day to charge their lights, they found that school attendance increased).

In Burkina Faso it's common to see youth selling telephone scratch cards, renting out their phones, offering video services to film at private events, charging up phones for a price. In Senegal, some take phones from one area to another to charge them up for a fee. All over Africa you see video pirating and movie houses, video game houses, video downloading to mobile phones, music on flash drives and flash drives that plug into radios in cars and in collective transportation vans and busses.

So how can we increase their economic and social gain in these activities and new ones?

Financial Literacy

One way is to increase the overall financial literacy of youth - their ability to understand the value of money, the profitability of different ways to earn it, and the logic necessary to manage it. Work by the Population Council even suggests that financial literacy should start as young as 8-12, when ideas around money and math are first formulated. In fact, financial literacy was seen as a basic building block for any level of economic empowerment for youth.

ICT can of course make it easier to reach youth to inform them about financial literacy. Radio, TV, even Facebook are all educational mediums by which youth can learn the value of earning and saving financial assets.

Souktel services in the Middle East

Entrepreneurship vs. Employment

Once we start talking about gainful employment, there is often an overriding focus on entrepreneurship, or the starting of microenterprises. This should not be taken as a view that most youth are entrepreneurs by choice, but that often employment opportunities are so rare that they must become micro entrepreneurs by necessity.

And here, basic education on career development and employment choices can help inform youth on the realities of the labour market and help them form realistic job expectations, which can lead to better choices in education and job search activities for the jobs that do exist.

Direct employment efforts like SoukTel's JobMatch, which connects job-seekers with employers who are looking for staff using SMS, level the playing field of access to jobs that many youth face when they are not in the active workforce.

Micro Tasking

For those outside the formal sector - the majority of economic activity in most developing world countries - there are increasingly technology-driven opportunities. One is micro tasking, or small jobs that can be done by anyone with basic skills. Sites like CrowdFlower, CloudCrowd, and Amazon Mechanical Turk allow youth to perform simple online tasks for payment. SamaSource is similar but specifically focuses on engaging workers from the developing world.

A key aspect of micro tasking is the ability to build an entire value chain, which youth can use to climb out of poverty. Digital Divide Data has been using the data entry and digital preservation needs of publishers and libraries to empower youth in Southeast Asia with competitive wages, subsidized formal secondary and university educations, and achieve incomes with other employers that are four times the average income in Cambodia and Laos.

In a sign that there is real money to be made in the microtasking industry, TxtEagle just raised 8.5 million in start-up funding for their mobile phone based system.

Baobab Health deskilled healthcare in Malawi

Deskilling

An interesting phenomenon, which could offer opportunity to youth, is the ongoing deskilling of complex jobs, where technology allows lesser-skilled workers to fill roles of skilled professionals when the latter are not available. Deskilling in the health sector is a great example.

By reducing the barriers to starting in a field, deskilling, like micro tasking, can be an important first-step for youth to gain entry into employment and build job skills that can be applicable in higher-order jobs that would otherwise require large investments in formal education.

Technology's Many Roles

Overall, we found that youth are already using ICT for economic empowerment and we can help by using technology to increase opportunity for them in finding gainful employment and entrepreneurship. There are three roles that Information and communication technologies can play:

1. An informer of job opportunities that may or many not have ICT, such as basic literacy and job ads
2. A means for direct employment, such as Internet cafes and digital music sales
3. A medium by which youth gain employment, such as micro tasking and deskilling

In all of these roles, technology is helping rearrange the social norms around youth and their employability, and in some cases, adding weight to the social standing of youth. At least in computer and cell phone operation and repair, youth are seen worldwide as the best experts.

And in international development, youth and technology are both sexy, and adding a logical, well-researched intervention into your next RFP response (a "mYouth" initiative!) could help empower you and the youth of today.

Wondering how? Then sign up to be invited to future Technology Salons - so you can participate in discussions like this first-hand.

In April I am travelling to Cameroon to visit the African Center for Technology, Innovations and Ventures (ActivSpaces), otherwise the leading technology incubator in the country. ActivSpaces is actually a project that has been in development since January 2009. The founders Valery Colong, Bill Zimmerman and Fua Tse unknowingly built what is likely the first technology incubator in Sub-Sahara Africa. Appfrica Labs based in Kampala Uganda, founded by Jon Gosier in March of the same year, being the other.

Like Appfrica Labs, ActivSpaces is building a model organization that serves to facilitate socially-responsible investment and the incubation of African small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This is a response to the generally accepted idea that SMEs in African countries have greater difficulty in obtaining the necessary financial support and mentorship services they need to effectively scale up and grow their businesses. Access to traditional growth capital, including debt and equity, is not only limited in developing countries but often prohibitively costly due to various factors such as insufficient legal and regulatory policies, and inadequate financial markets. Labs like this serve as a platform for the local tech community, helping to pool resources and generally serve as a launchpad.

Recently business incubation in Africa has emerged as a means of accelerating the growth of technologies, industries and business skills in otherwise challenging conditions. Combined with an incubator, ActivSpaces is also a coworking space with professional office services and income generating opportunities. The running costs are covered with a 10% on the invoiced commercial projects, giving members a chance to upgrade their skills and generate an income they can use to further develop their own concepts. All activities serve to foster collaboration between members. By using a flexible model, a qualitative approach and on-the- ground experience, ActivSpaces seeks to fulfill a broad spectrum of financing, business development and socio-economic needs.

The ActivSpaces vision builds upon the following core objectives:

- Support for SMEs with high growth potential
- Assessing a company’s risk profile
- Promoting innovation
- Developing products & services for the local market
- Employment & wealth creation
- Technology & skills transfer
- Enhancing links between universities, research institutions & the business community
- Adherence to and advocacy of the highest standards of business ethics
- Reputation as a socially-responsible and innovative firm

I asked Bill (my business partner in Sanaga Ventures – a combined effort that supports initiatives such as ActivSpaces, Afrilabs and VC4Africa) why he believes so strongly in ActivSpaces and he responded, ‘Based on my current analysis, observations and personal relationships, I increasingly believe the preconditions exist for rapid growth in the Sub-Saharan African technology sector. ICTs have many of the same features (i.e., they may be produced, bought and exchanged) as traditional commodity-based industries, but have a far lower barrier to entry and carry lesser capital requirements for young companies.’

Asked how some of the challenges in Cameroon could be translated into strengths he says, ‘Africa is a continent renowned for technical innovations conceived and built from limited resources. Countless examples exist of indigenous technologies borne from constraints (lack of infrastructure, poor governance, poverty, etc.) that have created sustainable SMEs. Among them, mobile money (M-PESA, Safaricom) is a profitable service created in Kenya whose model has only recently been prototyped in the West. Likewise, research and development in fields such as physics, chemistry, GIS & mapping, electronics, security, embedded systems, alternative energy and so on have good potential to be productized and spawn sustainable SMEs.’

He goes on to say, ‘for these reasons, ActivSpaces seeks to foster the growth of physical spaces for innovation, creation, research, development and collaboration. Popularly known as ‘Hacker Spaces’ there are 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United States, according to Hackerspaces.org, with another 27 U.S. spaces in the planning or building stage. Local demand exists for a Cameroon- based hacker space. This is integral with our vision and will be financed with a combination of member dues and profits spun off from ActivSpaces.’

As in many African countries, the population in Cameroon is young: an estimated 40.9% are under 15, and 96.7% are under 65. Outlets such as ActivSpaces are critical in leveraging the emergence of technology and the opportunities it presents local entrepreneurs. I am excited to see the space, to take part in celebrating their 2 year milestone, host two VC4Africa meetups, and to spend time interviewing and getting to know the team. It’s exciting times when you see projects emerging from ActivSpaces that carry the mission to ‘disrupt the SMS industry’ as Fritz plans to do with iYam.mobi. I look forward to working with ActivSpaces and the entrepreneurs part of its network.

VC4Africa.biz now has 91 ventures registered from more than 20 African countries and a surprising number of sectors. It is a nice representation of the sheer diversity in opportunities currently found across the continent.

Many of these projects are positioned for serious progress this coming year. For example I am interested to see what happens next with Uganda Medicinal Plants Growers, a venture posted by Teddy Ruge. UMPG is a commercial farming initiative based in Masindi and is designed to assist farmers commercialize their medicinal crops internationally. This is important work considering Uganda's economy is agriculture based, with agriculture employing over 80% of the population and generating 90% of its export earnings.

In Kenya its nice to see social ventures like the Recycling plastics and Empowering Youth. Kenya has a great need for low-cost housing and productive waste management. This recycling company will operate in the interest of the local community employing collectors using bicycle with trailers to bring various grades of plastics to processing units for ecologically-sensitive, efficient sorting, granulating and moulding (under low heat) into panels to be used for cheap housing. Not only is this an innovative approach that addresses a growing need, they are clearly taking the steps to embed the program and design it in a way that makes it socially sustainable and thereby economically viable.

A Nigerian based venture to watch is eHealth. This project supports the management of health facilities in Nigeria to influence health-related funding and policy decisions, and provides doctors with the patient information needed to improve decision-making before, during, and after care. This is not only a support service needed in Nigeria but I can imagine there are needs for their products in other African countries too. But given there are at least 85 listed hospitals in Nigeria there is plenty of work needed to get the company up and running.

A venture that caught my attention in Cameroon is Hot Ice. Hot Ice is a fashion company that specializes in supplying affordable African-styled fashion accessories for trendy suburban women. Hot Ice really looks to differentiate its brand and seeks to build a fashion culture that local consumers can identify with.

Finally Agro-Hub, Geofeed, Naijaborn and Hizonotes offer a nice sample of the web and mobile related projects we have in our network. More projects are signing up by the day and clearly 2011 is set to be the year of Entrepreneurship in Africa!