Thanks to Sue for the invite to share a little bit more about me and what I do.

I am a member of our local AIDS Society SOLID, Saltspring Organization for Life Improvement and Development.

In the fall of last year we hosted a conference we titled Community to Commuity ~ practical tools to tackle HIV/AIDS in Africa. Thru that effort and others, we raised funds to twin and help out a community in South Africa. Our delegates are there now and I have been posting their updates in the thread Letters from the Front Lines.

Okay, so a little short on the about me but what you got was the important part.

:D

Thanks Sue for taking this initiative. I have always felt there is a lot of us (Africans and Non-Africans)who have the passion, skills, desire and will to make a difference in Africa. We are all spread out working on thousands of projects with no system or mechanism in place to coordinate our efforts so we can efficiently utilize the scarce resources.

Lets meet "Kijiweni" (pavillion) share these beautiful ideas and build allies. I believe we can build a strong network. Let us create that environment so individuals like you and me can compliment each others' efforts for the good of Africa.

I look forward to sharing with you the ICT project that I am working on in Tanzania and also various other projects of interest from colleagues.

The end goal for most of us is the same, Poverty eradication/reduction.

Kijiweni! I've been hoping that someone would help me discover an African term that embraces the ideas of a pavilion. Thank you, Mbaki! I'm so glad you've joined us here, and thank you, Meron, for sharing more about the project that you are engaged in.

Mbaki, you have captured the essence of what may be possible here: to create a place to connect and share ideas about what's working, and how to scale those things up, and also to explore things that do not seem to have a particular solution yet, and to collaborate and innovate around that.

Yetunde Aina once said that at times it seems like "the sound of one hand clapping". There are a number of us who do not live in Africa, and who at times think we know what's best for the people that do. This can create a well-intentioned by imbalanced gift.

More than anything, I am hoping that the many folks who have reached out to me from Africa these past weeks will connect here and become the guiding voice. What are the issues from your own point of view, and how can we best be of use to you in collaborating to meet the needs best?

Ubuntu!

I want to share a little bit about someone else who will be joining us here shortly. A quick note from Firoze Manji:

I am happy to sponsor this group. Hope it goes well, and look forward to participating.

If I am silent for the next week, it's because I am traveling - I'm in Rwanda running a workshop on the role of the media in the Rwandan genocide.

Keep in touch.

Firoze.

I'm looking forward to Firoze's return. I suspect he'll have a number of interesting things to share when he does.

Kudos Sue on starting this discussion, some of the members from Africa have rich experiences that will educate other members in the network. I look forward to sharing my experiences on the network with other ON members.

Thanks

Eric, I'm so glad that you've joined us here, and I was really excited to see that you linked your name in the Friends & Allies list to a workspace about the things that you are working on and what you hope to do. I hope more people will do this :^)

Looking forward to connecting with you more here!

Hello everyone. I'm Ted.

I have a full-time job in Chicago and am also a volunteer with the Humanist Movement. For the last few years I've been traveling to Africa 2-4 times per year for 1-3 weeks each trip, organizing people, also as volunteers. I've been in South Africa, Zambia, Ghana and Liberia, mostly Zambia and Ghana. I'm going to Ghana again on April 21st. I really look forward to hearing people's experiences and sharing more about what's happening that I know about as well.

peace,

ted

This pavilion looks like proposinging a comfortable spirit for its goals. Thanks Sue and allies.

I've never been in 'black Africa', just two times in north Africa (Tunisia). I've just had one time the occasion to act for Africa with an operation I've organized to raise funds for helping Angola. That was specially positive because I worked with the UN refugee agency for the come back of Angolan refugees after years and years of war : they needed money but not for running away but for coming back and building a new 'home sweet home'.

• I'm specially interested in finding the different issues for giving more voices to people in Africa. A large number of countries in Africa have French language as an official language, and, very often, French is the only language they have to communicate with occidental countries.

Here is the list of African countries where French is an official language : Benin, Burkina, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo.

Here is the map of French speaking countries

In this countries, there are around 100 millions people who are alphabetized and understand French.

• like everybody here and like everybody should wolrdwide, I'm very hurry to find a way for going out of the Darfur massacre.
• I'm ready to look for all the different way for taking advantage of the specially good dispositions of our president Chirac for all Africa and for peace issues VS war.

Don't be afraid about this political issue : I wear 'Humanity before politics' on my heart, so I just consider politic as a tool, just like money. . . when I have an opportunity to have a good universal peace impulse from this tools, I don't 'spit in the soup'.

I'm looking forward ideas, positive energy and everything that can help to help Africa and build sustainable solutions.

Welcome, Ted and Gregoire! Good to find more and more allies connecting here.

I just wanted to post a short note to tell you that Moses Kariuki will also be joining us here. He is another good soul, but in the middle of exams right now, and hoping to connect with us here perhaps on Monday.

Keep a warm thought for him as he completes his exams ;^)

Here's a handy way to keep track of new discussions that may be introduced within the pavilion as we continue to connect with each other:

http://www.omidyar.net/group/africa/news/watch

If you click on the link above, it will add the central discussion list to your watch list. That way, even if something new is introduced that you're not tracking yet, you'll be alerted to it in your watchlist.

Just thought this might be helpful to new folks.

I've never been to Africa. Only twice across the Atlantic at all, once to Europe and another time to Ireland. Ted has told me some stories of his trips. Perhaps I too will travel there someday, maybe even sail across to Africa if I'm ever brave enough and rich enough to prepare a good boat.

I am really happy to see a growing number of Africans at O-net and that Sue created this group (we should connect it with the O-net Bond group too). And good luck to Moses in his exams. I'm sure he doesn't need much luck with a mind like his.

Hello and welcome all.

Gerry,

Yes we are growing in the ON as Africans...lets all link up and share ideas and experiences and try to work out solutions that will alleviate sufferings by our brothers and sisters here in Africa. Perhaps you may consider visiting Kenya, my country...this also goes to Ted who has been to many countries in Africa. Kenya is a true representative of Black Africa.

gregoire, ?a me fais plaisir de vous rencontrer encore ici a o/net, dans notre "kgotla" virtuelle.

and to all others i shall look forward to learning and sharing. the continent is vast, and for myself i will try to withold any grand statements and large ambitions. i am hear to listen and to learn, perhaps through some of my relations and skills i can contribute to whatever emerges.

might i ask a question of everyone here? my question is, when you envision "Africa" in 25 years, what comes to mind? seriously. please take a moment to take your hands off the keyboard, close your eyes. ask the question one more time. when you think of "Africa" in in 25 years, what comes to mind? i'd really like to hear your authentic response. thank you!

Sue this is a great discussion that you have started. O/N believes that each one of us can bring a change. But how?. If we could just take the problems in Africa as a sample and find the solutions and extrapolate them we could have solved more than half of the world problems.

This is a critical discussion at a critical time. Over the past two or more decades we have seen merciless acts towards humanity and they are still going on. I believe our voices are the key to these problems. When united we are like stone but when divided we are just but sand. It is quite encouraging seeing the number that has and still joining this group. Although very few Africans have joined O/N we are enough to share the experiences and find a way out of it. After all we are one world. If we fail to see the unity of life, that there is only one life coursing through the air, waters, soils and fires of our planet, then we will never learn the true lessons of existence. We will continue drawing boundaries saying this is "mine" and that is "yours". Thanks to O/N members they are united. Sue something good will come out of this. It's a timely idea.

Lars am still closing my eyes and when i open i will tell you what i think of Africa in 25 years.

I am very curious to know the results of each one of you on how you see Africa in 25 years. I keep getting a blurred vision of Africa in 25 years. There is soo much potential and am confident as individuals we do have what it takes to move this contintent forward at a much faster pace but unfortunately the development pace of this continent is very much in the hands of those we are indebted to(IMF, World Bank and Rich Nations).

This is a critical time for this continent. I consider myself very fortunate to be surrounded by brilliant minds/hearts with passion to support the continent.

To my fellow African brothers and sisters. It is time we step up to the plate. What can we do to build back the confidence among our people that we can pull ourselves out of this deep hole? We can not keep hiding from our own individual responsibilities by continously blaming corruption and undemocratic systems.

Those challenges which are very real should not stop us from executing our individual responsibilities especially when we have very good support from individuals outside the continent.

Africa, America, and all the continents and oceans are all at grave risk in the next 25 years. Our vision is blurred because we will follow one of several paths not all of them hopeful. In the worst scenario we do nothing to change the trends in population growth, polution, war, disease, consumption and so on, and our waste quickly overwhelms the ecosystems resulting an new Gaian Epoch with entirely new flora and fauna. In the middle scenarios, we start to fix the worst problems slowly, population goes to some tens of billions but we will have a high probability of having some five, ten or more percent die and all of us suffer from serious effects of ecological and other degredations.

I don't like to think of those scenarios and instead imagine what might be possible if we can only amplify what is good and what works and tap ancient wisdom of our stories and cultures. What is needed is nothing less than a shift in what it means to be human. I was just arguing with a friend about human nature. In my view, human nature is that we are the learning animal. This means that there is not a single human nature because we must learn how to be a human being from our parents and our communities.

To save our world, we must learn to be different about many things. We need to resolve conflicts differently, with compassion and respect. We need to allocate resources differently, with generosity, fairness and care for future generations. We need to treat our bodies differently, learning balance, and living in harmony with our environment.

That is the easy part, to imagine the better world. To live it ourselves and to have a critical mass of our brothers and sisters across the planet join us in this Humanist Project, that is the hard part.

What gives me the most hope is the potential for the Global Digital Network, what the Internet is and will become. In 25 years we should have already connected the entire planet and have local knowledge of how to access the GDN as a tool for both learning and commerce. The people I have met because of the Internet and the people I want to meet in person after getting to know them in the digital world are the real source of the hope. Together we can make it happen. In 25 years we can make it obvious to all that there is a better way, and hopefully the world will already have followed.

Moses, welcome to the discussion! I hope that your exams are going well. Gerry and Lars, I'm glad to see you've connected here too :^)

Lars, this is an excellent question, and one that I hesitate to answer personally for two reasons. First, I'm Canadian, and I really want to allow African voices to shape the discourse, so I'd like to make my role one of active listening for the time being to better understand how I might be of use. The second reason I had to think a bit before deciding to respond is the fact that, because I do not live in Africa, it is very difficult for me to have an accurate vision of the realities and issues there today, let alone being able to imagine what a preferred future might look like 25 years from now. I'm sure that our African partners will have lots of solid visions to share on this.

What I will share is just a little of what draws my heart to the African continent continually the past 10 years. It began with My friend Millicent Akinsulure from Sierra Leone, West Africa. A friend introduced us when she visited Canada some years back, and I my life was profoundly changed by her. She shared a set of realities with me that even today I can scarcely wrap my head around. She talked about the civil war in Sierra Leone, about the devastation of AIDS, and the resurgences of river blindness, malaria and typhus. She talked about pharmacists sometimes being the only healthcare professional around for 50 miles or more, and the daunting task of getting badly needed healthcare information and supplies. She talked about 5 year old children watching their entire families being butchered before them, and then being drugged and hauled off into the frontlines of a rebel war. She talked about great unrest, and the University she and her husband had built being burned down and many of the teachers and students being killed. She talked about young girls forced into prostitution in order to scrape together enough money to feed and clothe their families. I felt very naive. I have a life where these things are not any part of it at all. But I couldn't go back to being who I was after she changed my life.

This was when Africa first called me. I felt called again when I met Ashoka Fellow, Christina Jordan, who runs a wonderful microfinance program in Uganda. Christina is just one of those people who made it seem vital and alive for me, and made me believe that there was a way for me to contribute where African voices were placed first, rather than in something driven by well-intended westerners that often missed the mark.

A few years ago, my children and I also decided to sponsor a little boy named Stanley in Zambia. We seem to have so much, and we thought perhaps we could share just a little of it with him and his family. This also ended up in my accidental (serendipitous) connection with Dr. Tommy Clark, Ethan Zohn and Kirk Friedrich of Grassroot Soccer. They created an HIV/AIDS educational program for kids at risk in South Africa, in partnership with renowned behaviourlist, Dr. Albert Bandura, and the World Health Organization. This has perhaps been my most direct point of engagement, as I've worked with them to increase their financial capacity to grow the program so that more children might benefit.

So Africa remains a central calling in my life, and yet I feel like I am of service in only very small ways. In hearing from more and more friends in Africa, I thought it might be helpful to create a small, quiet space where we could gather, and they could take an active role in shaping the discourse. I want to discover more ways to be of better use, and I'm hopeful that this might be a good way of doing that with the right people guiding it.

I suppose to the extent that I have been called by certain things, my own hopes include an Africa without poverty, without war, without AIDS, without sickness, and with an ever-growing strength in their own voice and power to shape the destiny of their people and homeland. I am here as an ally in any way that I can be of use in cultivating those things, and other visions that our African friends may be able to share with us here.

I'm excited to see more people connecting here, and hope that will only continue.

Ubuntu,

Sue.

Sue Braiden said:

Would it help if we opened a workspace where we could begin listing some of the goals that are shared here?

I think it would help. Under each goals listed, fellows can add what they live and note in Africa and some ideas for helping (some new one or some other one that can be used like pattern ; and, of course, all the good one from other threads here on O.net that we can link on this specific goals).

Concerning Africa in 25 years, I need a few more time of thought.

Sue is indeed our greatest ally here in Africa and am glad for what he has shared. We all envisage an Africa without Diseases, poverty, illiteracy, tribal clashes...i think we are unanimous about this. Our point of departure should be to list all the goals and from there on start acting on them. I'm inspired by Meron Meroz SOLID group that has actually come to Africa and is on the ground fighting HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

As much as i would like to imagine an ideal Africa in 25 years, am tempted to imagine an extinct Africa. Where people will be talking about it in a history class..."That there lived a continent that was called Africa, its population became infected with diseases, engaged rampant in corruption, genocides and in its place a desert stands..." This is the situation on the ground, we need this platform more that ever before to address this issues otherwise history will judge us harshly.

Let me now close my eyes and think of an Africa in 25 years whose population has been empowered through education, its poverty reduced through sustainable development and free of diseases.

Sue is indeed our greatest ally here in Africa and am glad for what he has shared. We all envisage an Africa without Diseases, poverty, illiteracy, tribal clashes...i think we are unanimous about this. Our point of departure should be to list all the goals and from there on start acting on them. I'm inspired by Meron Meroz SOLID group that has actually come to Africa and is on the ground fighting HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

As much as i would like to imagine an ideal Africa in 25 years, am tempted to imagine an extinct Africa. Where people will be talking about it in a history class..."That there lived a continent that was called Africa, its population became infected with diseases, engaged rampant in corruption, genocides and in its place a desert stands..." This is the situation on the ground, we need this platform more that ever before to address this issues otherwise history will judge us harshly.

Let me now close my eyes and think of an Africa in 25 years whose population has been empowered through education, its poverty reduced through sustainable development and free of diseases.

Eric, that is a powerful call!

In reading your thoughts about sustainable development, I started thinking about a group of people that came together online a few weeks ago. Nancy White helped convene a "Global Public Good" conference on the web, and it was amazing! People from all over the world came together to talk about the things that were working, and some of the challenges that they faced in sharing those things more broadly. They talked about idea capital and how copyright laws often get in the way of people sharing some of the really good stuff that's happening. There seems to be a trend of hoarding information and ideas because the innovators often have to compete with each other for scarce resources to continue on (most especially funding).

I assisted with some of the technical support for this conference, and there was one speaker that really moved me deeply. Dr. Robert Day had a lot to say about the notion of working to create easier pathways between each other so that there could be a more free exchange of knowledge and resources. He made the solution sound so simple, and yet it was apparent that there are a lot of things standing in the way of creating bridges between all these islands of innovation.

I've reached out to Nancy White and asked her if she might consider joining us here at omidyar.net over in the "Bridges and Brain Gyms" group to talk a little bit about the "Global Public Good" movement. I also asked permission to be able to share Bob Day's audio clips here, because they serve as a powerful lens to some of the things that you are talking about, Eric.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Lars now i think i can open my eyes and try to come up with my view.UN studies indicated that in the next 25 or more years Africa is expected to report 89 million new cases of HIV/AIDS infections.Poverty has been there and still rampant.One conflict ends in Rwanda another is born in Sudan or Somalia.The economies though being termed as developing they are worsening.Population is also growing day and night.In Africa you find the longest serving leaders who have worsened the situation instead of improving given they have all that experience.WHO has also stated that the cases of Diabetes are expected to double. Lars we have not yet tackled the conditions caused by environmental degradation.We are setting long term goals of being industrialised in the year 2025 in many countries in Africa.Obvious there will be all sorts of emissions in the atmosphere.Global warming will be much felt.High temperatures will be there,new insects will come ,all sorts of cancer and many other illnesses will continue entering in the pool of problems. Over the many years Africa has never faced major natural episodes like those that have happened in places like Iran in this case earth quakes and yet it has all these problems. Birth rate of problems is higher than that of solving them;Lars what does this imply.

At one point maybe within the 25 years problems will overtake solutions.Am sorry to say if alot is not done Africa will be like Dinousars.Our great great grand children will have the pleasure of learning about Africa and how Man made problems can do to mankind.

Sorry if you did not expect such an answer;its the fact

Thanks Moses for your sober analysis of the situation. I would think you describe the middle scenario, what is most likely if we stay more or less on the same path. Things could be worse if the problems accellerate and nothing is done about them, or better if we start to actually change social and political systems for the better.

The rest of us should also realize that we will not escape the same fate if the worst events actually come to pass.

Habari yako, Moses?

I want to tell you that I am excited about the notes you have sent me since we first connected, and I hope that you will share more of things you are thinking about here in Kijiweni so that others can come around those ideas with a little help.

I have no context to relate to the daunting realities you describe, but I know they are important for me to try to understand.

At first glance, this seems like an impossibly grim picture, and I find myself wondering if there is a starting point to grab hold of?

What do you, Mbaki, Firoze, Eric, Frank and Samuel think need to be the simple initial conditions in order for just one of these things to begin to turn around? Do you see one thing being critical in order for the others to change? Where do you sense the starting point to be?

Thank you for continuing to share your thoughts with us here. I find myself looking forward to logging on each morning hoping there will be something new ;^)