Meet Eyram Tawia of Leti Games: http://www.letigames.com as he discusses what it’s like being a game designer in Ghana.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/v/eYRUJuacrMs

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.

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.

Born and raised in Ghana, Femi Adetola graduated in May 2006 from Wesleyan College in Georgia. Although her family name traces back to the Yoruba sub-nation of Nigeria, Femi’s family has been Ghanaian for generations.

She moved home in November of 2006 and while completing Law School at the University of Ghana, she launched her restaurant, Red Chilli. Just over a year old, the business employs 12 people and makes at least $1200 per week (on a bad week). Hear her thoughts on leaving America for life back home and what it’s like to launch a business at 24.

Wairimu, a female college senior whom I’d interviewed on the morning of my last day in Nairobi, insisted on a visit to the Mathare slums where she lives. Wairimu’s mother is HIV positive. Since learning of her mom’s status almost two years ago, Wairimu started a Mathare Vision Center, a leadership and community development program that educates Mathare’s youths about HIV/AIDS. Her center also seeks out funding to support slum residents who have been accepted to universities but cannot afford it.

“You have to meet Sammy Gitau,” she said. “He also runs his own community program and helps out a lot with the Vision Center. So we went to see Sammy at the Mathare Resource Center.

Mathare is a collection of slums off Thika Road on the way to Kisarani, a blue-collar suburb of Nairobi. Like Wairimu, Sammy was born and raised in the slums. The 32-year old started Mathare Resource Center. The center is an old shipping container fitted with donated old computers, radio, and video equipment. Although litter seemed to be everywhere in Mathare, the outside of the resource center was swept clean and the dusty earth was a clear light brown in front of the container.

Trash changed Sammy’s story definitively. As part of his community development work, Sammy organizes groups of young men to clean the litter around Mathare. One day, he found a discarded prospectus for Manchester University in England. Based on the merit of his work at Mathare and with the recommendations of advocates he’d met at community development conferences, Sammy was accepted into a Master’s program in development without ever having completed any formal education.

When I asked about his dream for Mathare, he answered, “I want this place to become the Hollywood of Kenya.”

Given the feat he’s accomplished, he might very well have his next dream come true.

Solving Africa began as a traveling project by a freshly grad-schooled twenty-something-year-old who decided it was time to travel and get to know the land of his ancestry. On the spur of the moment and with low expectations, he created the site, www.solvingafrica.com, and asked friends and strangers to fund his trip to Tunisia, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria. Within a week, the donations started and the journey began before he could change his mind.
The book recounting his experience on this journey will be completed in fall 2010 and it looks at the role that individuals can and are having in changing the African continent. It aims not just to entertain as a collection of stories, but also to spark a thought revolution in the way people address Africa’s development.