I am pleased to announce that Solving Africa will be published in Nigeria by Kachifo Limited. They publish some of Nigeria’s best authors, and it’s an honor to sign my first-ever book deal with them. Manuscript due in 6months. Yikes!

Jr.

On Saturday Feb. 6, 52 people braved the winter to attend Solving Africa’s 2010 Kickoff event. Our vision is to have three or four events like this every year that follow this format:

1. Three Africans present their ideas for projects they’ve been thinking of launching in their communities in Africa. These ideas usually fall into education, health care, or the general pool of entrepreneurship.

2. Attendees choose a project to work on for the evening. They brainstorm, create project deliverables, and build a steering committee to get the idea up and running.

3. After the evening, participants meet offline and continue working on these projects, giving ongoing feedback to the larger group and asking for whatever help is necessary.

In this fashion, between 9 and 12 new small scale projects will be launched each year by people from the communities they want to serve.

By Tomi Lamikanra

Call it culture shock but I was in a daze here for the first few days of getting into the American classroom! It was not the blackboards or the nice seats, afterall we have those where I was coming from in some schools:), and who has not seen a blackboard before? Even children in Kewu classes have blackboards! It was the attitudes of students to the teachers and the teachers to the students that made me stare so much. Continue Reading

George Ayittey is a professor of economics at the American University in Washington D.C. He is from Ghana and champions the idea that since independence, Africa’s leaders have been deterrents of change whose main goal has been to maintain the status quo of the colonized countries handed to them as a way to keep money in their pockets. He calls them the hippo generation. Ayittey contrasts this group with the rising crop of young leaders today in Africa – the Cheetah generation – they are tired of the ineptitude of the hippos and are racing to transform the continent one initiative at a time.

I agree with you that our governments are a joke. What do people like you and I who may have very little by way of social or political capital do in the meantime? Continue Reading

I first met Ory Okolloh (photo courtesy TED.com) as a forwarded link in my email in mid-November 2008. My friend Jagila had sent me her 2007 presentation at the TED Conference in Arusha, Tanzania where she talked about her experience using the internet as a tool for activism.

The 33-year-old is a mother of two, who used to consult on legal matters for nonprofits. She has since left that to focus her energies full time on turning Ushahidi into a free open-source platform so that other activists are able to use the software to monitor everything from NGO aid delivery to elections. Ushahidi was used by Al Jazeera to monitor the war in Gaza when all media personnel were ordered out of the region. It was used again by the UN to monitor the War in Congo and is being used in monitoring relief efforts for the earthquake in Haiti.

She stands at about 5-feet 10-inches and wears her hair the only way a female African activist does – curly and natural. This is an excerpt of a longer interview in which she discusses where education in Africa is failing its people.

Name: Tolu Itegboje
Age: 22 going on 23
City: Lagos, Nigeria
Educational history: Primary school @ Yaba College of Technology Staff School; Secondary @ International School, Lagos; University/College @ Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

When did you start hashing the plan to come back home?
It was never really a plan. It was just something I figured I’d eventually do. I actually kind of dreaded it. The plan was get a job on my OPT after graduation, work for one year, apply to film school in between, get accepted, and go to film school after the one year was up. I had however planned to visit Nigeria in the summer, before film school would start. Unfortunately, like all human plans, mine didn’t quite materialize the way I wanted it to. I didn’t get accepted into film school, the job thing worked out and then didn’t , my OPT was about expire, and what essentially was supposed to be a visit home ended up becoming an extended stay. Continue Reading

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Patrick Awuah (photo courtesy of TED.com) founded Ashesi University, the first liberal arts college in Ghana. He recalls what it took to start the university, challenges with re-acclimating to life in Ghana after decades in Seattle, and his experience dealing with corruption – not just something prevalent in the older generation, but a serious problem with young people also.

Please excuse the sounds of planes leaving from the airport in the background.

photo: Jos Main Market. Courtesy PlateauStateGov.org.

Jos, the city I grew up in, is fighting. Again. No one is sure why the fighting started and already, 149 people have died. One story says the fighting started when residents opposed the rebuilding of a Mosque that had been destroyed in the 2008 riots. Another report says angry Muslims went to St. Michael’s church and started shooting people as they left church. None of these stories makes heads or tails. The Muslims I know are not angry people, so where exactly is this coming from?

Why is no one asking?

- How were people so readily armed? I know the parts of the city where this fighting is happening. Those guys can’t afford the kinds of specialized weapons and uniforms that all of a sudden appear as if on demand when a fight breaks out.

- Who is supplying the weapons being used to terrorize my city? One friend theorizes that it’s the surplus from army reserves being sold by dirty officers on the black market. That’s a theory. The truth would be nice.

- This started in 2001, again in 2006, and 2008. Why has the governor not investigated the previous riots and come to the bottom of it?

- Yes it’s a safer response to leave the city entirely. But what is the best response? When those who can afford to relocate do so and leave the city in the hands of people who don’t mind burning it down. What then?

Read the story here (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100118/ap_on_re_af/af_nigeria_violence)

OSK stands for the Other Side of Kobo.  A kobo is the smallest denominator of Nigeria’s currency, the Naira.  The firm, started by three graduates of Baylor University who returned to Nigeria, is a full service financial information company.

Starting with Nigeria, they aim to make it easier for people to invest in Africa by:

1. Organizing Africa’s financial information
2. Making it that information universally accessible and acceptable; and
3. Setting accountability standards in the financial market.

Their vision is to establish a well-informed and equipped investor lifestyle in Nigeria by making the facts of the market available and easily accessible.

The most appropriate reaction to Nigeria’s name on a list of 14 countries to watch in the war on terror is not the one that most Nigerians and I have had. It should not be dismay, shame, or outrage. Instead, it’s times like these that we need to hunker down and get to work on making our home a place that isn’t so easy to ridicule. And this applies to every person from the continent of Africa.

I think I’m done talking and thinking about the entire AbdulMutallab incident. We have an ailing continent to build and all this talk isn’t necessarily getting anyone closer to that goal. There is little room for dissension to the fact that creating strong education, healthcare and business systems in every single African nation with or without the help of the government is a priority.

As much as is in our hands to do, Africans, Nigerians, what’s your role in moving your country off the so-poor-and-dysfunctional-it’s-easy-to-ignore-them list? The thing is, when we start answering that question and implementing those solutions, the activities of extremist crazies are less likely to have a voice to drown out the idealism, hard work and plain-to-see results of millions of individuals working to build their piece of home.