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[MAP MONDAY] 100 more tech hubs in Africa located

A couple of years ago, members of the tech hub Bongohive in Lusaka, Zambia crowdsourced details of the first dozen or so tech hubs in Africa. It was a great example of how mapping resources like this can help people see a) how much tech-entrepreneur activity there actually is on the continent and b) how different hubs can link up and share resources.

Since then, it’s become something of a popular sport. Seventy-odd more hubs added their details to the Ushahidi-powered map, and the World Bank recently published its own map of African tech hubs using even more data.

The number of spaces mapped has grown slowly over two years though, hanging around the 100 point as new hubs have opened and old ones closed. Or at least, that’s what you might have thought up until now.

Anna Waldon-Brown, a Fulbright fellow with maker-outfit Fab Foundation in the US, has collated data from even more sources to come up with an extra 100-ish makerspaces and innovation centres to add to the list. She’s published it over here (with a Google form so you can request points to be added or removed) and we’ve made a map of it using Fusion Tables below.

As Waldon-Brown says, a lot of the spaces might have missed earlier maps as her remit was quite broad.

“We defined ‘innovation spaces’ very broadly,” she explains,  “In an attempt to involve everyone who’s working within creative, technologically-based communities. During my research in both Ghana and the US, I’ve been surprised by how insular innovation spaces can become, even if open-access is part of their mission… If this turns out to be too broad and our map gets overloaded with people claiming to have their own ‘innovative communities,’ I think it’s better to narrow down later than to miss out on exciting initiatives.”

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