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Afrimakers begins its continental hackerspace hike

A crowdfunded mission to bring Raspberry Pis, Arduino boards, microscopes and mini robots to the tech hubs of Africa has begun its two month journey across the continent, as the team from Afrimakers met with members of IceCairo and IceAlexandria this morning.

We’ve written extensively about Afrimakers before, and its energetic founder the Romanian tech expert Stefania Druga. The plan is to stop off in seven countries over the next seven weeks, calling in at Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana as they work their way southwards down the east of the continent and then back north over on the other side.

Afrimakers raised around R500 000 to buy ‘Maker Boxes’ which contain all the hardware a tech hub or school would need to run classes on hardware hacking, building robots and making ‘smart clothes’ on a low budget. The parent organisation, HacKIDemia, has a proven program for teaching kids and adult mentors over a few days’ to create self-sustaining educational classes.

The idea is that once a Maker Box is dropped off, the number of people who use it grows exponentially as trainees become trainers and so on. The ultimate goal is to help bolster local STEM education and encourage hardware entrepreneurs.

As the tour progresses, updates will be posted to Druga’s Google+ page, over here, and via a Medium blog here.

Druga sends word that she’s still looking for volunteers to help out and learn the HacKIDemia way, and sign-ups are over here.

Need convincing this is an awesome project you should be involved with? Check out the video from last year’s Hackidemia Nigeria below.

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