It’s no surprise to see a bunch of tech companies and community members coming together for a 24 hour hackathon on September 24th in four French speaking countries: Côte dâ€Ivoire, Benin, Senegal and Cameroon.
What’s great to see, is that there are 6 tech labs/hubs that are supporting it in these countries:
Côte d’Ivoire : AKENDEWA
Sénégal : JOKKOLABS – ACT DAKAR – iHUBSENEGAL
Cameroun : APPSTECH
Bénin : ETRI LABS
It’s the “Tusker” Safari Sevens, but I guess they don’t sponsor it well enough to also sponsor the team – they are sponsored by Virgin. In fact, I hear that it might not be called the Tusker Safari Sevens that much longer – too bad. I like that name, Kenyan beer and an internationally recognized Kenyan tournament, it’ll be sad to see it go.
This year brought in the world champion 7’s team from Fiji, as well as the French team. The emerging ‘Boks (South Africa’s team) were there as well, and they’ve won the last 3 years. Kenya ended up having to beat Fiji (which rumor says, each player would get 50,000/= shillings if they did).
Kenya won narrow, and hard fought, games against Fiji and Zimbabwe to get to the final. Meanwhile, the Emerging Boks smeared their competition on their way to meet Kenya. Honestly, I thought Kenya would have a hard time in this game. Instead, they blew the doors off with 2 quick tries, and never looked back as they won 31-12.
Of course, the crowd was rowdy as ever, singing familiar Kenyan rugby chants and getting drunker by the hour. Prime Minister Raila Odinga showed up mid-afternoon, to much fan fair and noise – a politically savvy move. All in all, it was a fabulously good time that I hope to see again next year.
(Note: I took over 1000 pictures, a couple dozen can be found here)
I’ve finally been able to upload some video, you can find more on my YouTube channel. Here is a shot of the last try by Kenya vs South Africa:
Academic understanding of language barriers becomes real-life frustration for me as I try and cover the web and mobile space in Africa. For instance, I’d love to know more about, and do a write-up on the following:
However, it’s hard for me to track, contact and write about services like these that are popping up in Francophone or Arabic-speaking Africa, simply because I lack the language skills.
Sometimes I come across what looks to be an interesting blog – usually due to visuals since I can’t read it. I then filter that blog through a tool like Google’s Translation service and get back a nicely garbled bunching of English words that I then work towards deciphering into usable chunks.
PALDO – An African Language Initiative
These types of thoughts were running through my head, when I got an email about an upcoming meeting (April 2, 2008) and initiative called The Pan-African Living Dictionary Online (PALDO). They are attempting to create an interlinked multilingual dictionary for African languages. It is being built upon the foundation of the well-known Kamusi Project, which developed a useful online Swahili/English dictionary.
PALDO is particularly hoping for participation from programmers, linguists, database experts, lexicographers and past users with experience in other online dictionaries.
It’s encouraging to see that this is in partnership with Kasahorow, who is working to solve the problem of localized computer input methods for languages. Basically, create a keyboard that works for multiple language clusters.
A couple years ago I wrote a post about technology versus tribal languages in Africa. It’s a HUGE hurdle to overcome when creating web and mobile platforms that you would like to take to the whole African market. It’s why so many companies do great stuff in their local market, maybe even their region, but fail getting pan-African adoption.
It’s unclear how PALDO will solve some of these issues. However, I’m always interested in seeing how aggregation and visualization of data can be used to create better products, or bring insight into areas where things are so confused.
One thing is for sure though, PALDO won’t solve my personal communications issues – what I need to do is go learn French and re-learn Arabic.
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