In an all too familiar style I’ve been useless at blogging recently. So as it’s the new year I will make no false promises. I don’t promise to blog every day or to do anything like that. I do, however, hope to continue this blog in some form or another. So do please keep checking back.
It would have been far more apt at the end of 2011, but I did want to quickly mention the interview I recorded with National Geographic Weekend – a fantastic radio programme coming out of Washington DC. Don’t worry, you can also listen online – It was great fun chatting with Boyd Matson and you can listen to me squirm and mumble through my time on the other side of the microphone here… if you like!
It’s a great fantastic programme. Please follow National Geographic Weekend on twitter too
Africa’s ccTLDs. (Country code top level domains) On the map they’re scaled to represent the number of millions of internet users in each country.
Before Egypt’s so called ‘Day of Anger’ on the 25th January 2011, when in retaliation to widespread protests, the government shut down the internet, Egypt was number 1. According to internetworldstats.com there were just over 17 million internet users in Egypt in February 2010. (Read more about Egypt and it’s ‘moment of silence’ on Appfrica’s blog )
Other big players are Nigeria and Morocco, numbers 2 and 3 . Kenya and Uganda are also up there at numbers 7 and 9 respectively.
But what about the others, as the map shows there are many of them. In June 2010, Ethiopia had 450 thousand internet users. Only 0.5% of the country’s population. In comparison, 33.4% of Moroccan people were using the internet in December 2009.
Of course, these figures are changing all the time, and with constantly increasing speed. But huge disparities remain and the reality is that even in countries with higher stats, many people are living without internet. – Difficult for us to grasp, glued to our monitors, blogging and tweeting away.
Connecting people is powerful. So in places that the internet can’t reach, projects like FrontlineSMS see mobile phones as having an important role to play.
Aid20 has won an award! A BJTC award for best radio feature to be precise. I was over the moon when I found out a few months ago. Last week I went and picked up a certificate from the radio legend Simon Bates – a very kind, funny and interesting man. You can see some […]
Happy New Year! In an all too familiar style I’ve been useless at blogging recently. So as it’s the new year I will make no false promises. I don’t promise to blog every day or to do anything like that. I do, however, hope to continue this blog in some form or another. So do […]
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the […]
Send A Cow farmer Regina Regina’s interesting mobile phone project is simple. She lives in a remote community outside Busia in west Kenya, and is a one of Send A Cow’s peer farmers (which means that due to her success with organic farming, she now trains other farmers in agricultural techniques.) As more and more […]
Aid 20 