Made in Africa TV | AfriGadget TV | African ingenuity on the Air

The production company Made in Africa TV is taking AfriGadget to the East African airwaves to inspire millions of viewers to become active creators of new and ingenious products, themselves.

Made in Africa TV plans to produce AfriGadget as separate programs in each of the Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan television markets. A local presenter will host the program and introduce the correspondents and their stories. Combined, these stories offer a unique opportunity to discover a wide range of innovations, new products and different approaches to the same goal. The program will be broadcast on a weekly basis.

Each episode of AfriGadget TV will consist of five thoughtful stories from around the region, highlighting remarkable and unexpected hardware innovations by East Africans. These stories are inspiring mini-documentaries, portraying young and old, men and women, as well as high and low-tech innovators and their products.

Made in Africa TV is an East African social enterprise producing mass media with a social impact. We are in the process of setting up a network of video journalists from across Africa to produce the stories, which will be made available on the website as well. As an AfriGadget TV-correspondent you explore your local surroundings to find and capture the innovators and their AfriGadgets. If you are a videographer willing to become a correspondent for this program, or if you know of great AfriGadgets that should be considered for inclusion, please contact http://www.afrigadget.com

Filed under: Africa, Networks, News, Web 2.0, foss, ict4dev, media, tv

SADC launches new website: www.sadc.int

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat launched its new website www.sadc.int to the public on Monday December 03, 2012 at a function which was held at the SADC Secretariat Head Office in Gaborone Botswana.

The internet is a rapidly evolving technology, and to keep up with it as well as to remain relevant, SADC saw the need to revamp its website. The new website was launched under the banner ‘Our Face to the World” and is intended to be more outwardly focused while engaging relevant stakeholders in SADC Member States. Officially launching the new SADC website, SADC Executive Secretary Dr Tomaz Augusto Salomão said it the SADC website must be continuously maintained and information updated. He called on all the originators of information at the Secretariat to feed it to those who are responsible for managing the website content to ensure that it will not go stale to need another re-launch a few years down the lane.

Dr Salomão expressed his sincerest gratitude to the government of Germany with whose support the website was revamped as a joint effort between SADC and the German Development Cooperation (GIZ). He lauded the all-inclusive website revamping process that allowed all SADC staff Secretariat staff to participate, spearheaded by the SADC Public Relations (PR), and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Units under the leadership of Ms Emilie Ayaza Mushobekwa, SADC Deputy Executive Secretary for Finance & Administration and support from GIZ and Hatfield Consultants, which yielded the new world-class design and content.

Giving an overview on the new website at the launch, Ms Mushobekwa said that the new website was a necessity as it plays an integral role in SADC’s aspirations of becoming a world class organisation. “Realising the importance of becoming a world-class organisation, the SADC Secretariat included a benchmarking exercise as part of the review process. This exercise ranked the old SADC website and those of similar organisations such as the African Union and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa against good website practices. The results highlighted areas that needed most attention and the amount of effort needed to move ahead of the pack,” she said. Furthermore the website contains valuable information about institutional set-up, priorities of regional integration and common projects as well as progress and impact made by all 15 Member States and relevant stakeholders.

Filed under: ACP, Africa, Germany, Links, News, Technology, Web 2.0, SADC

Survey on how to design a climate agreement

The Center for Global Development launched a survey on how to design a climate agreement that is environmentally effective, economically efficient, and fair. The 15 questions about climate policy in this survey present you with some of the same choices that climate negotiators are weighing, and that global leaders will tackle at Copenhagen and beyond. An important goal of the survey is to discover on which aspects of a climate agreement people from different backgrounds agree, and on which they disagree. The Center hopes to discover on which issues there is agreement among people who share a commitment to development but come from different backgrounds, and on which issues a consensus has yet to emerge. http://www.join.cgdev.org/site/R?i=loPmIQsFmx3x-L5kZS-Nuw

Filed under: Environment, Networks, News, Web 2.0

DISCUSSION FORUM on Trade and Sustainable Development

Which factors are necessary to the achievement of a positive relationship between Trade and Sustainable Development?
”Trade liberalization and sustainable development are not unavoidably incompatible. Trade liberalization can advance sustainable development goals, just as it can retard their achievement. The same can be said for foreign direct investment. Appropriate investment can spur sustainable development, but much investment in developing countries has been environmentally, socially and often economically questionable.” (IISD Statement on Trade and SD). You will need to be logged-in to the Development Gateway to contribute. http://tinyurl.com/2pvlhv

Filed under: Networks, Trade, Web 2.0

Google.org names TechnoServe a Strategic Partner in International Development

Google.org has also awarded TechnoServe a new multi-year grant of $3 million to expand the organization’s private-sector development efforts. The focus of the strategic partnership is to spur the growth of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are vital to ending the cycle of poverty in developing countries. SMEs create the bulk of new ideas and jobs in most developed economies, but they are scarce in other parts of the world, mainly due to a lack of access to business training and capital. ”Small and medium enterprises are a powerful engine of growth, jobs and opportunities,” says Google.org manager Rachel Payne. ”We have chosen TechnoServe as a strategic partner because of the organization’s long track record of working with entrepreneurial people to give them the tools, training and access to capital that they need to create viable businesses.” http://www.technoserve.org/press_room/googlegrant.aspx

TechnoServe has launched a nonprofit channel on YouTube that will feature some of the entrepreneurs participating in our business plan competitions, as well as other videos highlighting TechnoServe’s impact in various sectors and countries around the world. The channel launches with seven entrepreneur profiles from TechnoServe’s Believe Begin Become national business plan competition in Tanzania. http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=BelieveBeginBecome

Filed under: Development, Links, Web 2.0