A24 Media is Africa’s first online delivery site for material from journalists, African broadcasters
and NGO’s from around the Continent. The organisation is committed to building the
capacity of reporters and photographers to compete globally for share of voice for African
issues and is thus solely structured with the journalist’s needs in mind.

Content generators will send their material to the main office in Nairobi where it will be
verified and re-edited as necessary to create a slick, marketable and branded story. The
stories will be checked and verified for balanced, accurate and independent content, and
will be of the very highest technical and journalistic quality. Feedback will also be provided to
the contributor in order to promote a culture of journalistic excellence.

A24 has allready opened an office in Berlin, headed by Kani Tuyala.

Thousands of voices about poverty. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently.

For me, for example, poverty is another word for nothing to make money with. Its another word of the absence of business. Do business in Africa. Do business with Africa. And you can fight poverty. Dont give people something to eat. Let them work for their food. Give them the opportunity to make money and buy food. That is, what Open Source Africa will do in the near future.

Just stay tuned. And leave a comment, whats your opinion is about poverty.

I think, GEFs Outlook is the most interesting one. his newest blog entrance is about China in Africa: Invasion or the New Face of Globalisation - a topic I also have already written about.

In short: you see a Nigerial blogosphere come to life in a very early stage. Highly recommended…

“While America is preoccupied with the war in Iraq (cost: half a trillion dollars and counting), and while think-tank economists continue to spit out papers debating whether vital resources are running out at all, China’s leadership isn’t taking any chances. In just a few years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become the most aggressive investor-nation in Africa.”

My question: What does Germany, what does Europe do? (I think, they just spent money and hope, the Africans will think good of them.)

The World Bank report says, that “China’s investment in the power sector is crucial for Africa’s future and is exactly what Africa is missing”. China has been investing in hydropower schemes for the last five years.:“Once completed, these schemes will increase the total available hydropower generation capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa by around 30 percent.”

China is the largest construction market in the global economy. This explains why the concessional loans given to African leaders for infrastructure programs have a special clause that stipulates that construction supplies and 70% of the workers involved in the project should come from China. In 2006, China & India & the Arab League invested 8 billion dollars in Africa while the whole ODA + private investment + concessional loans + lines of credit coming from all the OECD members only added up to 5.3 billion dollars.

The credit lines given by the Chinese Ex-Im Bank to different state and private companies reached US $20 billion in 2005, making this bank one of the largest export credit agencies in the world. The report gives the best description of the new economic strategy that became known as the “Angola mode” (which basically means that a government that has a poor credit can repay a loan in natural resources). By 2005, the total value of trade between Africa and China reached US$36 billion dollars up from less than US$10 billion dollars in 2001. (page 3)

Chinese financing commitments in infrastructure projects in Sub-Saharan Africa amounted to a total of 15,968 million dollars over the past 6 years.  While 36 African states have signed an economic deal with the Chinese government, around 70 % of Chinese financing commitments go to only four African states: Nigeria, Angola, Ethiopia and Sudan.

The report found that growth would be driven by mobile data services, fuelled by the greater availability and wider variety of rich-media content coupled with lower browsing costs. However, it noted that regional operator-billed voice revenues were likely to peak in 2011 and would subsequently fall away due to increasingly competitive pricing in that sector.

According to Juniper Research report author Dr Windsor Holden, “While the downward trend in regional ARPU will continue as adoption increases amongst lower-usage customers, we expect the decline in voice ARPU to be partially offset by an increase in data revenues, both amongst 2.5G and 3G customers.”

The report also observed that the region was likely to witness a surge in the growth of mobile financial services, with a raft of operator-led payment initiatives such as M-PESA and mobile banking providers such as WIZZIT having already gained substantial user bases.

Other findings from the Juniper Research report include:
• The Middle East/Africa mobile user base is to grow at an average annual rate of 10.5% between 2008 and 2013
• Mobile data services are expected to contribute 24% of operator-billed service revenues in 2013, against just 9% in 2008.
• Saudi Arabia will provide the largest share of cumulative regional revenues over the forecast period, followed by Nigeria

The goal of the short survey was to get a feel for the technologies favored by the attendees. Of the 52 completed surveys, 21 respondents (40%) cited php as one of their primary programming languages.

27 (or 52%) cited one of the common scripting languages (perl, python, php, ruby). The fact that c# was more popular than python, ruby, and perl, is probably indicative of the local IT job market as well. Windows and Linux garnered almost the same number of users:

More than half the BarCamp attendees develop for mobile phone platforms: 27 responded Yes (52%) when asked whether they do any mobile phone application development.

“For me it’s really interesting to see, that the Mail&Guardian seems to drive the South African blogosphere quite strongly, not only by creating amatomu, which claims to generate 10% of the total SA blog traffic, but also by being present with two popular top blogs. Even if also German publishing houses have started their own blogs, none of them plays such an active role within the blogosphere, like the Mail&Guardian seems to play in South Africa.”

The analysis shows, that Africa is strong in Web 2.0:

The top blog in South Africa, adii, has a Technorati rank of 1288 and the German top blog, Basic Thinking, has a Technorati rank of 1896 - therefore the quantity of discussions within the blogosphere about what other blogs are writing seems to be pretty equal, regarding the top blogs.