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TEDx Johannesburg – Unique African IT solutions

Headlining this year’s final session of the TEDxJohannesburg talks was Kenyan-born Juliana Rotich, an IT professional who helped to develop the open-source Ushahidi crowdsourced crisis-management system, as well as a router designed specifically for the unique conditions of African life.

She spoke about Kenya’s 2008 media blackout around the country’s disputed presidential elections, and how Ushahidi helped to create a visual representation of ongoing events in real time, created by placing emails and SMSes sent by eyewitnesses on a Google Maps map. It completely bypassed reliance on traditional media and gave people a way to find out what was going on and even find lost family members. She said “Ushahidi” means testimony or witness in Swahili.

Due to its open-source nature, the Ushahidi platform was later used to help manage the crises in Haiti and Japan by others, and she has been surprised and humbled that the system she helped develop has been used in ways she and her team hadn’t even imagined when they first conceived of it by people from around the world.

When she moved back to Kenya in 2008 from Chicago, she noticed that the country was often plagued by blackouts due to its unreliable power grid, which played havoc with internet connectivity. The team behind Ushahidi then put some thought into designing a router specifically for African use that would address the problems of unreliable electricity and infrastructure.

From that the Brck was born, a robust modem router with a built-in 8-hour battery that can use just about any type of network to get online, including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G mobile networks, with the ability to jump between networks when it detects weak signal. It was essentially designed to address the shortcomings of unreliable infrastructure, while maintaining connectivity in even the most remote of locations. The router was successfully Kickstarted in June 2013, and the first Brcks are expected to be delivered in November 2013.

Rottich put the Brck forward as an affordable and reliable internet solution not only for coders, but for small businesses and rural areas too. The idea, she said, is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship, and both need to be nurtured in order for Africans to bring African solutions to African problems.

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