For those of you who weren’t able to be at the TED Global conference in Arusha earlier this year, there are multiple opportunities for you to catch up on the event you missed. TED.com is posting talks from the conference on their website: the most recent talk posted is a provocative speech by Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda. The talk so incensed Bono, who was sitting in the audience, that he spent a good part of his time on stage attempting to rebutt Mwenda, with limited success. Very much worth watching for anyone interested in the potentials for reframing and rebranding Africa, or for anyone who wonders why so many young Africans are upset about the recent history of attempts to aid Africa.

One of my very favorite talks at the Arusha conference was Franco Sacchi’s talk about his film, This is Nollywood. The film explores the creative and fiscal challenges of making films very quickly, very inexpensively, for audiences throughout the continent. Sacchi’s film is screening in the Boston area on the 6th and the 13th - I’m trying to shuffle my schedule to see it, because the parts of it I saw were truly excellent - you should check it out if you can.

I’m very gratified by the response to my post last week about live conferenceblogging (or “conference liveblogging”, if you prefer), and to all the suggestions and ammendments to the tips I posted. But I got the sense from some comments that I make the process of blogging these conferences sound like less fun than it actually is.

The truth is, while it’s hard work to blog big conferences, they give me ideas to think about for the next several months to come. I’m wrestling with a constellation of ideas about infrastructure’s role in development and questions about whether African approaches to building infrastructure a piece at a time represent a new model for international development… a train of thought that never would have entered my brain but the convergence of a couple of talks at TED and a couple at the World Economic Forum.

The good folks at TED have begun posting video of the talks from the TED Global Conference in Arusha. The first set posted is an excellent introduction to the debates that took place in Arusha about the role of aid, government reform and entrepreneurship in transforming the continent. I recommend starting your exploration with Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, who condemns a generation of African leaders as “hippos” and talks of his hopes for “the cheetah generation”, whose independence and speed was exemplified by many of the conference speakers. Ayittey’s frame was adopted by many of the speakers and listeners at the conference, and his thinking about African development have had a profound influence on conference curator Emeka Okafor.

You might follow Ayittey with former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who complicates any discussion of aid versus entrepreneurship with a profoundly moving story about caring for her sick sister, and the aid worker who saved her life. Or with Euvin Naidoo, who is profoundly optimistic about investment opportunities on the continent.

But I strongly recommend wrapping up an hour’s explorations with William Kamkwamba’s talk. William, you may remember, is a remarkable Malawian inventor, who built his first windmill at age 14, working from a diagram in a library book, and provided light to his family’s home. With the help of a number of TED attendees, he’s now attending school again and has started blogging.

There’s more to come - it was a four day conference, after all - but these videos should whet your appetite and, I hope, give you some new thoughts to chew on as well.

When I was about seven years old, my father taught me how to score a baseball game. We were probably in Florida, combining a trip to a spring training game with a visit to one of my grandmothers. He explained the basics of the hieroglyphic system that both professionals and fans use to score games, the numbering of the position players, the difference between a forward and backwards “K”, and set me loose to scribble on a scorecard while he made his own illegible notes in his wire-bound, leatherette scorer’s book.

I’ve scored games ever since - only when I’m actually in the stadium, but religiously on those occasions. When scoring at our local ballpark, the elegant and ancient Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, MA, I sometimes get asked by other fans why I’m scoring the game. “Are you a scout? Are you a reporter?”

“Nah, I just like to score ballgames.” If pressed, I’d tell them that scoring a game forces me to pay attention, to be in the moment, to keep at least one eye on the action rather than on the hot dogs, the beer and the people I’m sitting with. I miss something if I’m not scoring a game. And I like being able to glance down in the seventh inning and see whether the man at the plate is 0 for 3 or 2 for 2 with a walk.

This may help explain my anti-social and obsessive attitude towards blogging at conferences. I’ve developed something of a reputation for blogging the conferences I attend with fairly obsessive detail. Some of my colleages are grateful for this “service”; some of my readers have stopped subscribing to this blog due to the volume of conference posts. If you ask me why I do it, the answers are similar to my reasons for scoring baseball games:

- Because David Weinberger does it, and David is someone worth emulating. Ditto Bruno Giussani.
- Because it gives me a record of a gathering that I can work from, quoting speakers and ideas in later blog posts.
- Because it forces me to pay attention to what’s going on at a conference, not just to visit with my friends, chat in the hallways, enjoying the spectacle.

As I’ve gotten better at conference blogging, there are at least three other reason:

- Conference blogging gets me invited to conferences I couldn’t otherwise afford to go to, and which I enjoy being present at.
- Other bloggers link to my conference posts, which raises my Technorati profile, my google juice, etc., and makes it more likely people will read my original writing.
- People expect me to. (This is a good and bad thing.)

A few kind friends have asked for thoughts on how to blog a conference in detail. I’m not convinced that there are many tricks to it, but here are a few things that help me keep pace at conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, where the talks come fast and furious:

The kit: I come to conferences with my beloved Mac, two charged batteries, a power strip, a digital camera and cables, granola bars and a lap desk. This last item is totally essential - I’ve turned my car around when driving to a conference to retrieve my lapdesk, knowing that burned knees and backpain await if I try to blog with the laptop directly on my lap.

The location: Bloggers rarely sit in the front row to blog conferences. We’re distracting to the people around us, especially people sitting behind us, watching our screens. It’s usually better to sit to a side, near the power plugs. The really big conferences often have “overflow rooms” where some of the audience can watch a talk on simulcast TV. These are a gift for bloggers. I learned this from Ndesanjo Macha, who blogged 2005 Pop!Tech almost entirely from outside the main hall, glued to a monitor and power outlet.

Some conference organizers are particularly good about creating a physical space for conference bloggers. TED in Monterey provides a table with power strips facing a monitor in their downstairs overflow lounge - it’s a great place to blog that conference, if you can wedge your way between me and Bruno.

Preparation: Conferences usually give you a speaker program ahead of time. Use it. Over breakfast before the day of a conference, I’ll type the names of each speaker and their talk title into a text file. If I’m really good, I’ll do quick Google searches on each of them and link their names to their blogs, research institutions, arrest records, etc. Prepare sufficiently and you’ve got the first paragraph of each post written ahead of time.

Macros: I write my blog posts - and, frankly, everything I write - in BBEdit, a remarkably powerful Macintosh text editor. One of several thousand reasons to use BBEdit is a feature called “Glossaries” or “Clippings”. This is a way of storing pieces of text that you use frequently and linking them to key combinations. My friend Daniel Beck turned me on to this powerful feature and developed a couple of basic clippings for me, which I use heavily.

So when I want to add a hyperlink to a document, I copy the address from Mozilla, highlight the text I want to link, and then type Shift-Apple-Comma, which inserts the following text into my file:

< a HREF="" >< /a >

around the highlighted text, and positions the cursor between the quotes. Press Apple-V and I’ve got a formatted hyperlink in two keystrokes. I have keys linked to blockquotes and to URLs I reference frequently, like Global Voices and this blog. I’ll sometimes create a glossary entry for the technorati tag associated with a conference, associated with shift-apple-T-R, or for the main website for a conference.

Even if you’re composing online, within your blogging platform, or if you don’t feel comfortable setting up macros, it can be a big help to put some useful snippets of text in a text file and cut and paste them into blogposts.

Keeping Up:
I have a hard and fast rule for myself - I complete posts on a conference session within fifteen minutes of the end of that session. This isn’t because I’m obsessive about getting up the first post on a topic - it’s because I will miss the next session if I’m still writing the former post. Better to put up an incomplete and imperfect set of notes than to miss another speaker.

Many conferences break up speeches with “lighter” interludes - videos, music, or other less-bloggable forms of content. These are excellent times to finish blog entires. I will frequently use question and answer sessions to finish posts as well - this makes Pop!Tech easier to blog than TED, which provides less time for Q&A and squeezes in more speakers per day.

I have, once or twice, been forced to give up on a talk because it’s clear that I can’t transcribe it in time. I’ve never successfully transcribed a Yochai Benkler talk - he simply packs too much into a speech for a mere mortal to document.

Hard Talks:
One of the reasons I’m able to blog so many talks at conferences like Pop!Tech, TED, Idea Festival or PUSH is that the talks are, for the most part, really, really good. Experienced speakers are easy to blog - they follow a narrative path through their talks, speak at a pace the audience can understand, emphasize key points with visuals. Write down the points that they’re starting sections with or emphasizing, and you’ll likely have a finished post with little need to edit.

It’s much harder to blog inexperienced speakers. Some will speak too fast or too technically and many won’t have a clear path through their material. With an inexperienced speaker, I’ll often take notes on the talk and try to structure it into a blogpost afterwards, doing the work the speaker should have done before giving his talk. I do this often with panels, which rarely have as much structure as a formal talk and often need you to add a narrative after the fact.

If a talk is truly out there and hard to follow, I might skip it, or blog it really briefly, summarizing it into a few lines or combining it with the next talk. Don’t be afraid to give up on a hard talk . It’s the speaker’s fault if he or she can’t interest you in the material, so long as you’re paying attention and ready to listen.

Use your commenters:
Because I’m blogging ten or more talks a day, I get things wrong. Sometimes I get things egregiously wrong. Comments allow other attendees - and sometimes the speakers themselves - to correct me. I check comments religiously while I liveblog, and I try to thank commenters who correct my errors, as they’re doing me a major service. “Mental” notes that blogposts, when commented, critiqued, linked towards, can serve as “the blogger equivalent of a peer reviewed professional article in a professional journal” - that’s only true if your peers are working with you to make your posts better.

Collaborate:
“Hash”, writing about bloggers at the TED Global conference in Arusha, used the Swahili term “harambee” to describe the ideal operation of a group of bloggers at a conference:

Harambee is a Swahili term that means “pulling together”. That mentality, the willingness to work together, was what made it possible to cover a busy event like TEDGlobal… Some of us decided to take pictures, some did interviews between sessions and others decided to summarize the day. Everyone who blogs has their own voice, and I think it showed in the coverage. What could have been an amalgamation of everyone saying the same thing turned into a fairly well-rounded coverarge of the event.

My goal in blogging a conference is not to be the sole, authoritative voice of the blogosphere. It’s to do what I enjoy doing: writing detailed summaries of each sessions. But that means I can’t take photos of the speakers on stage, can’t interview speakers between sessions, can’t monitor coverage of the conference in the blogosphere. At TED, we were able to split up the tasks, so that Hash and Andrew took photos, Ndesanjo blogged in Swahili, Juliana did interviews, June monitored blogosphere coverage, etc. It’s a whole lot more fun to blog these events in groups, even if that means sitting next to someone trying to liveblog at the same time as you are, arguing about how to spell a word the speaker has just uttered.

Digest:
I go to conferences because they give me a wealth of new ideas to wrestle with, sometimes for weeks or months to come. I try fairly hard not to wrestle with these ideas as I’m writing about them - it’s hard for me to form opinions while talks are going on, and harder to express those opinions articulately. (This isn’t always true. The occasional conference will include strong opinions I feel compelled to disclaim are the speaker’s, not my own…)

So that I have a chance to wrestle with the big ideas, I’ll often try to write a summary or reactions post a week after a conference. These summaries are generally a great deal more opinionated than my reactions to the original talks. Good conferences have big themes that aren’t always apparent when you’re sitting in the hall… and these themes are frequently not the themes the organizers intended.

Have Fun:
Not everyone enjoys blogging at conferences. I have many friends who’ve tried it and discovered that it stresses them out or detracts from their enjoyment. There’s an easy solution to this: don’t do it. Most people don’t keep score at baseball games. That’s okay, as there’s an official scorekeeper, a scoreboard and at least one journalist in the stands. We don’t need everyone to become a conference liveblogger - just a few more of us.

If you’re a liveblogger at conferences and have tips that keep you productive and sane, please feel free to share them in the comments. If you try some of these out and find them helpful - or, especially, if you find them unhelpful - let me know in the comments as well. Thanks in advance.

One of the consequences (intended or otherwise) of the TED Global conferencein Arusha, Tanzania last month is that many of the bloggers I read regularly are spending a good deal of time thinking about the classic questions of development economics: What makes some countries rich and others poor? What’s the critical missing ingredient in development: more aid? better governance? infrastructure? entrepreneurship?

This second question is getting a workout as a wide range of commentators respond to the Bono-edited Africa edition of Vanity Fair. Several writers have pointed out that the issue falls squarely in the “more aid first” camp, featuring a largely uncritical portrait of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs’s Millenium Villages project, a project designed to demonstrate what could be accomplished with massive infusions of aid into rural communities. The governance-first camp gets widely discussed in World Bank and USAID circles, in my experience. And TED Global gave some good introductions to the infrastructure-first argument, with former Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala pointing out that China’s path to development has relied heavily on infrastructure investment.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the “entrepreneurship-first” path - possibly best exemplified by financier Idris Mohammed’s statement, “If you make Africans rich, they’ll be less poor. That’s my poverty reduction strategy.” Almost every discussion of business opportunity in Africa focused on the amazing growth of the mobile phone industry. That growth has been astounding, but it’s hard to know whether that growth will be replicable in other sectors. There’s a couple of circumstances that I think are critical to understand in the rise of mobile networks on the continent:

- You can build a mobile phone network one piece at a time. With a GSM license and a single tower, a company can begin earning revenue and start using this revenue to finance future expansion. An investment in the single-digit millions can turn into a multi-billion dollar business through reinvestment of revenues. That just isn’t true for creating container ports, major roads or large power generating facilities… or, at least, I’m not smart enough to figure out a model that allows me to build container ports a few million dollars at a time.

- Users financed a great deal of the infrastructure behind the mobile phone boom - specifically, they purchased the handsets, which represent the lion’s share of investment. (Thanks to Reuben Abraham for this important insight.)

- Sheer government incompetence helped the mobile industry by ensuring that most phone buyers weren’t replacing land lines with mobiles, but purchasing their first phones. It’s easier to sell someone a new, useful service rather than an improvement on an existing service, as mobile companies did in higher development nations.

I’m trying to figure out whether these criteria lead to an infrastructure investment strategy for Africa based on incremental infrastructure development. For-profit companies, many founded by expatriate Africans with a few million dollars, would provide the sorts of resources we’ve traditionally expected governments and parastatals to provide. Ideally, governments would work with these providers to bring services to areas of their countries not able to pay for them; given the mixed record of African governments in creating infrastructure, perhaps we’re better off hoping that most governments stay out of the way of innovative infrastructure providers.

Russell Southwood, the dean of African telecoms analysis, publisher of the indispensible Balancing Act newsletter, has evidently been doing some thinking along similar lines. In this week’s letter, he points out that African mobile phone companies are being forced to become power companies. In urban areas, phone companies have to equip every tower with diesel generators because of frequent power cuts. In more rural areas, where companies can’t rely on grid power, providers need to put in two generators - one to power the station, the second as backup. The cost of delivering diesel fuel to these locations is substantial - Southwood calculates that a grid and road-connected base station costs $2,500 a month to maintain, while a very rural station might cost $20,000.

It’s worth considering those figures for a moment - mobile providers have been expanding aggresively into lower-density parts of African nations. Sometimes they’re making these investments because their licenses require them to provide a certain level of coverage throughout the country; more often, they’re expanding because there’s money to make in these markets. That suggests that mobile telephony is so important to rural Africa that operators are able to make five-digit sums per month in fairly rural areas and recover the costs associated with providing this connectivity… talk about “bottom of the pyramid revenue”…

Southwood suggests that universal service funds - a tax on telephony revenue designed to subsidize deployment of telephone service in rural areas - could be used to build electric power networks, not just phone networks. He points out that these funds have raised $6.5 billion (on the continent, I assume), but that only $1.7 billion has been spent, leaving a large amount “in the pot” which could be redeployed.

If mobile phone companies - or a similarly entrepreneurial entity - could begin building larger, more efficient power generating facilities, they could service local communities with power as well as with telephony. If there were sufficient success for this model, it might start to resemble the “electranet” that some have suggested might alleviate African power problems.

Southwood isn’t proposing something quite so emergent - he’s basically suggesting that the Universal Service revenues could subsidize creations of private power operators. I think Russell’s really onto something here. His closing paragraph is a compact statement of a potentially transformative idea:

In a nutshell, the mobile operators appoint a private company to build and operate a power transmission network. This company would have as its anchor customers at least two mobile companies. Whatever surplus power it generated would either be sold to the national grid operator or be sold on to retail customers. There are private investors in Africa wanting to put money into private power generation and perhaps they might also come in as investors. The mobile operators have shown that it is possible to get things done on the continent and to make money doing it. Perhaps they should now pick up the gauntlet that will allow them to address their high operating costs and get lower taxes at the same time.

In the meantime, mobile phone networks are turning to other creative solutions to power their towers in the absence of reliable grid power. Afrigadget reports that Winafrique Technologies in Nairobi is designing windmills that power remote mobile towers as a complement to diesel power, cutting fuel costs by 70-95% a year. These are relatively small windmills - 7.5 kWatts - but may serve as proof positive of the utility of wind for power in rural Africa. Helius Energy, a UK-based biomass energy company, is looking at the same market, building small power generation facilities that could power a mobile phone tower with excess capacity for local energy users.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if innovative wireless phone companies ended up as the key force to wire Africa for electric power?

Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review takes a swing at Vanity Fair’s Africa issue, alongside dozens of African and Afrophile bloggers, including yours truly. I found Beckerman’s framing of the issue very useful. Borrowing from Andrew Rice in The Nation, she observes that there are two primary ways in which discussions of African aid are usually presented: “the ‘governance-first’ camp ‘holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way,’ and the ‘poverty-first’ camp ‘believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor.’”

She goes on to suggest that the governance-first argument receives little attention in Western media - it comes out mostly in “angry and often cruelly written op-eds by one-time Peace Corps volunteer and travel writer Paul Theroux”. The emphasis instead is on the poverty-first camp, led by Bono and Jeffrey Sachs, which focuses on raising the consciousness of Western leaders and appealing on them to act on behalf of the continent. This can be a dangerous stance: “It’s a precarious role, one that can easily tip over into a paternalistic and condescending tone that’s not that far away from the worldview of colonial powers who saw themselves as engaged in a civilizing mission.”

I think Beckerman’s frame is a bit too narrow - specifically, it doesn’t address the dominant narrative we heard at TED Global: the idea that responsibility for Africa’s future rests firmly on the shoulders of individual African entrepreneurs, thinkers, writers and leaders. Both frames she and Rice offer leave individual Africans helpless - the problems are either the result of Western indifference or the incompetence of unaccountable leaders. In neither case can an individual hope to make a change - she or he is victim to forces beyond control.

It’s not Beckerman or Rice’s fault - these are, in fact, the dominant narratives over aid in Africa. But it opens the question of how to get this third narrative - the transformation of Africa will come from the entrepreneurial efforts, non-profit and for-profit, of Africans at home and abroad - into mainstream discussions of the continent. This perspective was thoroughly represented at TED Global in Arusha - quite possibly overrepresented - and yet it wasn’t well amplified in mainstream media coverage of the event. The Economist wrote a short piece on the event, but the author seemed troubled that there weren’t very many “hard-knuckle African politicians who often run the interior or defence ministry or act as kingmakers, sometimes bankrolling rotten presidents” at the event. That’s true, and it was a conscious decision of the organizers. As Hash of White African puts it, the Economist appears to be complaining “But, where were the Hippos?!“. He notes:

My question is why was this person from the Economist so fixated on there not being enough hippos? Is it because that’s the only way he sees things getting done in Africa? If he believes that is so, then he’s missing the bigger picture. The message at TED was that regardless of the hippos, the cheetahs will find a way to make change happen.

The story wasn’t that there weren’t any hippos at TED, it’s that they are becoming irrelevant.

I think Hash is optimistic - we’re a long way away from Hippo obscolenence, but I agree that’s the path we’re starting to follow. One of the challenges is to bring this Cheetah narrative into mainstream usage, so that we’re seeing stories framed in those terms, either embracing or challenging that concept, but not ignoring it.

TED organizer Chris Anderson responded to Hash’s post, characterizing the Economist piece as, “A lumbering, clumsy, hippo-like piece which completely missed the real story of TEDGlobal. Thank goodness for the blogosphere.” Indeed. And thanks to Chris for making sure so many bloggers were there document another narrative - it’s an object lesson for other conference organizers, especially those trying to engineer paradigm shifts…

If oil has the potential to destabilize or grow a nation’s economy, very few economists are concerned with the negative economic impact of wind power. While wind is a resource that hasn’t attracted mass investment yet in Africa, it’s often a great resource for isolated communities that have no other steady source of electrical power.

One of those areas is the Mastala Village in the Kasungu district of Malawi, where William Kamkwamba grew up. It’s a rural agricultural area about three hour’s travel from the capital, Lilongwe. Like many rural parts of Africa, there’s no grid electrical power. But there is wind.

William had to drop out of secondary school in 2002 because his family lacked funds to pay his school fees. Determined to continue his education, he started reading books from the primary school library, which had been contributed by USAID in a teacher training scheme. He discovered a pair of books on energy, one of which included the design for a windmill, and he began work on a five meter tall windmill near his family’s home, built from scrap timber, an old bicycle frame, and blades made from PVC pipe heated and pounded into flat blades. The windmill powers a bicycle dynamo, designed to power a bicycle’s headlamp. William ran the bicycle dynammo through a transformer, which provided enough power to charge a 12 volt battery. That battery in turn powers four lights, two radios and a mobile phone charger in William’s home.

Dr. Hartford Mchazime, the director of the Malawian training academy where William had found the books came to visit the village and was told about William’s windmill. He was so impressed by the young man’s ingenuity that he arranged for William to begin attending secondary school at government expense, and asked a reporter from the Malawi Daily Mail to report on the wind project. The Daily Mail story caught the attention of Malawian software developer and blogger Soyapi Mumba, whose post got picked up by Hactivate, Afrigadget and other blogs. Emeka Okafor from Timbuktu Chronicles - curator of the TED Global conference in Arusha - was so impressed that he arranged for William to come to the Arusha as a conference fellow.

William stands atop his windmill, which now is 12 meters high.

William’s work stole the show at TED, where he gave a three minute talk about his work and answered questions on stage from Chris Anderson. More than a few of the TED attendees were moved by his story and agreed to subsidize William’s education, both in and out of the classroom. Tom Rielly from the TED team is visiting Malawi with William this week to talk about the best ways to help William, consulting with Dr. Mchazime, William’s family and Soyapi and others of the African bloggers who’ve had the experience of moving from homes in rural areas to secondary schools in bigger cities. While the TED community is able to raise the money that would be necessary to send William to secondary school anywhere on the continent, Tom is looking for all sorts of opportunities for William to learn more, both formally and informally, both in classrooms and in machine shops.

William shows off his transformer and battery system in his house. Photo by Tom Rielly.

One important resource for William will be the brilliant geeks at Baobab Health. Soyapi and others have been building open source touchscreen health systems with Baobab, using retrofitted thin client systems. A recent volunteer project at Baobab helped build an 18m windmill - William visited the NGO yesterday and received a voltmeter and a 48 volt motor which is likely to be used in his next windmill system. Since William used his first computer only a few weeks ago, it might be a while before he’s regularly updating his own blog, but I suspect that if Soyapi has his way, William will be building power control systems in Ruby on Rails within about six months…

William’s push-button wall switch. Photo by Tom Rielly

Tom has been sending notes and pictures from the road to some of the TED community. It’s been very humbling to see what this young man has accomplished with hard work, patient reading and almost no money. The photo above shows a wall-switch for the lights in his family’s house that William engineered from PVC pipe, springs, wire and rubber from flip-flops. I take a certain amount of pride in my ability to build complex things from simple parts… but I’ve got a Home Depot down the road, disposeable income and a pickup truck. Ask me to wire my house using plastic conduit, bare copper wire and a used pair of shoes and I’d laugh at you. William would get to work and get the job done.

I’m not the only one who found William to be an inspiration. Nii Simmons, a Ghanaian-American entrepreneur, points to William’s ingenuity, and his statement, “I saw, I make,” as an inspiration for his own work. Hash has a great version of William’s story on his blog as well, and Juliana has a great video interview with Simon Mwacharo, the founder of Craftskills, a group in Kibera, Nairobi, which is building renewable energy projects in African cities. It’s likely that Mwacharo will be a great resource for William in the future… and that William is an inspiration for Mwacharo and anyone who cares about African innovation and ingenuity.

William’s not the only new African blogger to appear on the web this week. Ike Anya and Chikwe Ihekweazu have both leapt onto the scene with their new blog, Nigeria Health Watch, which looks at public health issues and innovations in Africa’s most populous nation. Welcome, guys. It’s a great time to be a reader of African blogs - if you’re not getting your daily dose, take a spin by BlogAfrica, Afrigator or Global Voices and make sure you’re getting your recommended daily allowance of African innovation.

Bono wants the world to care more about Africa. So do I. After that, it gets a bit harder to see eye to eye.

Bono had a bit of a rough ride at TED Global in Arusha. In the first session of the conference, he found himself heckling Ugandan author Andrew Mwenda. When he took the stage in the next session, to defend the idea that increased aid would benefit Africa, he talked about the benefits of development aid to post-war Germany, an analogy that has some major flaws, as Germany was one of the wealthiest and best educated nations in the world prior to WWII. Most commenters, myself included, saw many of the TED speakers consciously challenging Bono’s idea that increased attention to Africa could lead to increased aid from the G8, and from there to political change. (According to commentator Brendan O’Neill, Bono has now become The People’s Republic of Bono, the ninth member of the G8 - we’ll expect to see his direct aid contributions increasing in the near future. Tip of the hat to Sokari for the link, found in her excellent dissection of Bono’s Africa efforts.)

While I enjoy a bit of Bono-bashing as much as the next guy, it’s worth noting that the rock star’s concern for Africa led directly to the remarkable conference that I and so many others enjoyed. Bono won the inaugural TED prize in 2005, and asked the TED community to help him provide internet connectivity to every school and hospital in Ethiopia. Chris Anderson and the TED staff consulted with a number of tech and development specialists, myself included, before concluding that the task wasn’t possible and was probably politically inappropriate, given Zenawi’s crackdown on political protest after the 2005 parliamentary elections. The TED Global conference focused on Africa in part as a consolation prize for Bono. That the conference had an entirely different flavor than Bono might have organized is a great credit to Chris Anderson, Emeka Okafor and the TED staff - that Bono appeared to have a pretty good time before heading north to yell at G8 leaders is, I think, a credit to him and to his willingness to be challenged by voices from the continent.

I wish the timing had been a bit different, though. It would have been great to see Bono engage with more of the extraordinary Africans who took the stage in Arusha. And I really wish he could have spent time with us before working with Vanity Fair on their July edition - maybe he’d have done things a bit differently. If you want to understand why so many Africans are upset about how they’re portrayed in the northern media, this issue wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Let’s begin with the cover. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, there are 20 different covers. (Collect the whole set!) Each features a pair of celebrities, shot in closeup in some form of interaction. The twenty are as follows: Don Cheadle, Barack Obama, Muhammed Ali, Queen Rania of Jordan, Bono, Condozeela Rice, George W. Bush, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Brad Pitt, Djimon Hounsou, Madonna, Maya Angelou, Chris Rock, Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, Oprah, George Clooney, Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, and Iman Abdulmajid. So… count along with me - that’s three Africans out of twenty cover subjects. Yes, it’s a great representation of African-American influence on American culture, but the actual African participation in the project seem, uh, limited at best.

Jay-Z and George Clooney discuss sustainable farming techniques appropriate for preventing desertification in the Sahel. You’d be surprised - Jay-Z is surprisingly knowledgeable about erosion-resistant ground cover.

In his video interview about the issue, Bono tells us what these twenty people had in common: “They’re passionate about Africa.” And most of them have highly recognizable faces, which never hurts when you’re trying to sell a glossy magazine to society matrons in Iowa. As Bono says, he was trying to “bring some sex appeal to wanting to change the world.” Well, Somali supermodel Iman helps with her attempts to climb out of her dress. And I do suspect that it would have been interesting to listen in on some of the conversations “depicted” on the cover - what do Chris Rock and Warren Buffett say to each other at a joint photo shoot anyway?

The message of the cover is that Africa is important and sexy because important and sexy people care about it and are willing to lend their “talent” and celebrity appeal to the “cause”. This tends to piss off my friends who are begging the world to think of Africa less as a cause and more as a continent, particularly as a continent open for business. How hard would it have been for Vanity Fair to pair some of these well-meaning celebrities with actual Africans working to build businesses, repair hospitals and save forests? Put Corniele Ewango on the cover and let Brad Pitt look up to him, an actual superhero, someone who has risked his life numerous times to preserve the forests of the eastern DRC. Put Madonna on the cover with William Kamkwamba, the remarkable Malawian youth who built a windmill to power his family’s house. (Wait, scratch that - she’d probably adopt him.)

Photo by White African. Don’t sue me, Hash.

Or throw this photo on the cover - here’s Bono talking to some of the young entrepreneurs that George Ayittey terms “the Cheetah Generation”. In the straw hat and badass shirt is Eric Osiakwan, one of the very fastest of the cheetahs, a young innovator who’s worked extremely hard to ensure that the submarine cables that connect the African internet to the North will actually bring down the cost of connectivity on the continent. Vanity Fair isn’t going to make Condoleeza Rice any more famous, but it would probably help Eric get more attention for his work.

But that’s not the point of the issue, as the table of contents makes clear. Genocide in Darfur, AIDS in Rwanda, Jeff Sachs’s attempt to raise $200 billion to transform villages, Madonna in Malawi. The only story in the online table of contents remotely connected to entrepreneurship is a slideshow about the airlines that serve as transport infrastructure for the DRC. It’s possible - and quite likely - that some of these stories are excellent and worth reading. But the overall picture is the one that so many Africans find themselves fighting - Africa as basket case.

Most Americans don’t get it. Howard French, unsurprisingly, does. One of the best journalists of a generation, French knows both Africa and China well enough to see things most people miss. On a flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing, he observes that the vast majority of his passengers are Chinese businessmen, looking for ways to make money on the continent. Flights from America, infrequent as they are, have a different set of passengers:

As I remembered them, the passengers one finds aboard the few existing flights linking the United States to Africa make for an interesting comparison with my Chinese fellow travelers. Yes, there is a smattering of business people and of tourists. But the Americans who travel to Africa tend to be aid workers of one kind or another: officials of the U.S. government and of the international financial institutions, like the World Bank, and the army of well-paid consultants and contractors that they deploy. They are also relief workers and missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, and academics doing research.

There is much to be gleaned from the contrast here. Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.

As one of those former well-paid contractors, and current researching academic, I can confirm French’s observation. The US businesspeople aren’t getting on the planes yet. Conferences like TED may change the minds of some of the people at Google and AMD, but we’re way behind China, which leads to some of the continent’s more visionary leaders - as well as some of the most repressive - looking eastwards to the future.

If Vanity Fair is on its way to rescue Africa, can you blame Africans for running towards China as fast as they can?

It’s possible to portray Africa in a different light. Ask Emeka Okafor, who put the remarkable speaker list for TED Global together. Flip through the photos on Flickr from the event, including this one, which may be the first example of me being turned into a LOLGeek… Maybe Bono will ask Emeka or some of the other cheetahs for some help the next time someone asks him to represent an entire continent in magazine form.

Update: Several commenters and bloggers have made the point that the contents of the magazine are significantly broader than portrayed on the website, including some of the speakers from the TED Africa conference. Juliana from Afromusing - who’s collected four of the twenty covers - makes this point especially well… With her recommendation, I plan on buying one - though only one - copy of the magazine to see whether I agree with her assessment… :-)

It’s three days after the TED conference, and I’ve had two days to enjoy a rainy, but very beautiful, Cape Town and do some digesting of thoughts and ideas. (lots of pictures, for those interested…) I had breakfast this morning with Russell Southwood and our conversation reminded me just how exciting the conference had been, and how unexpected. I’m used to the concentration of amazing minds we see at conferences like TED and Pop!Tech. But it’s rare to feel the sort of enthusiasm, hope and excitement at events anywhere in the world.

After the first panel sessions of the conference, I came up to Emeka Okafor to say hello. He asked, “How do you think it’s going so far?” and before I could even answer, we’d collapsed into a hug, both laughing like hyenas. The idea that Chris Anderson would give Emeka such free reign to make the argument that Africa is open for business, that so many resources had been deployed to make the event possible, that he’d assembled such an incredible group of speakers and audience into the same space seems like a major miracle to me.

The question, for many attendees, is where we go from here. Some of my friends who were fellows at the conference wanted to see us come away from the event with a declaration or manifesto. Some wanted to make sure we replicated the conference again soon. I want to make sure we keep the conversations going. As liberating as it was to air some of these questions in a forum like this one, the challenge is to start answering these questions.

The core debate of the conference was about the effect of aid on African economies. It’s a debate that’s familiar to people who follow African politics, newspapers and blogs closely, but it clearly came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees that so many Africans would make passionate arguments against foreign aid.

While Andrew Mwenda framed the debate, arguing that aid distorts Uganda’s budget and enables corruption, I found that Herman Chinnery-Hesse had the most persuasive attack on the aid business, using examples from his work in Ghana and the ways in which aid ends up being a subsidy for foreign firms to work in Africa at the expense of local firms. Herman’s argument was particularly interesting to me because I’ve run an NGO in Ghana, one that supported his business, providing an experienced programmer to work with his staff and provide training so that he could compete more effectively in the local market. I wouldn’t argue that our collaboration with Herman was particularly successful - and we deserve absolutely none of the credit for his remarkable success - but I am passionately interested in the question of whether the ways we tried to help Herman could constitute “good” aid, or whether there’s such a thing in the eyes of Mwenda, Shikwati or the other thinkers making a strong trade, not aid case.

It’s a shame that Madame Okonjo-Iweala didn’t get to speak until the last day - she did a much better job of defending western aid than Bono and Jacqueline Novogratz did. The conclusion to her story about a doctor saving her sister’s life - “When someone is saving a life, you don’t care that it’s aid - you want the person to be alive.” - rings true to me, and, I think, to the vast majority of the audience. The interesting question is what the long-term effects of that aid are. Until folks like Bono and Jeffrey Sachs are willing to engage with questions from thinkers like Shikwati rather than dismissing these questions as oversimplifications, there’s going to be a camp that resents, resists and critiques aid. If George Ayittey’s contention “the begging bowl leaks” is true - and it is - projects like Jeff Sachs’s Millenium Villages are going to lose an enormous amount of money, line the pockets of numerous politicians and potentially, have dramatic unintended consequences. (It’s worth reading Victoria Schlesinger’s critique of the Sachs effort in the May issue of Harper’s - unfortunately, the article isn’t available to non-subscribers…)

Bono dismissed “the Mwenda plan”, wondering if the journalist had any ideas that went beyond dismissing foreign money and good intentions. I think there’s a way to pull a plan together from some of the suggestions offered over the course of four days:

- Build infrastructure that enables African businesses. This includes roads, railroads, ports, airports, and critically, power generating facilities.

- Encourage trade between African states and between African states and the rest of the world, in part by dismantling tariff barriers and unfair subsidies.

- If you aid governments directly, do so in a way that they use the money to support entrepreneurship, not to enrich “the hippo generation”. Look for ways to support the energetic, young “cheetah” generation.

- Public health, including maternal health and “ordinary” healthcare has to be a major priority going forward, not just AIDS and malaria care.

- Education is critical. A large percentage of the speakers at the conference were brilliant young Africans who’d had the opportunity to study abroad - it’s critical that great opportunities to learn develop on the continent.

- Value your diasporans, not just as investors, but as ambassadors and generators of new ideas.

- Image matters, not just to outside partners but to Africans who are mischaracterized as struggling and weak. Rebranding the continent - or individual countries - has to be part of the continent-wide change.

Assembled together, these suggestions don’t look all that radical - I’d argue that many of them have entered mainstream development thinking. (What was more radical, in my opinion, was the demand to end aid as we know it. I think it’s worth unpacking that demand. There are those, like Shikwati and Mwenda who genuinely believe that aid is distorting economic policy to the point where it does more harm than good. There are others, like Okonjo-Iweala, who argue that aid will be neccesary in the short term but accept that growth will come from markets, not donors. But there’s a second layer to that demand, which I think was echoed by a large number of the speakers: when Africa receives aid, particularly crisis aid, it helps brand the continent as a place that needs help, not an investment opportunity. The harm of that branding, both in terms of international image and in terms of psychological harm to individuals, as Ory Okolloh argued, is a major reason why we might consider changing the nature of aid.)

The problem is, all these ideas are much easier to articulate than to implement. While everyone agreed that infrastructure is important, there weren’t a lot of success stories to point to aside from mobile phones. But building mobile phone networks requires comparatively modest investment compared to building roads and little community cooperation compared to building sewers. Plus, with mobiles, your customers finance your largest costs - the cost of the headsets. There’s a tremendous opportunity to build infrastructure in ways that require comparatively modest investment and leverage user financing - finding ways to have customers help finance electric generation (whether that’s through village scale wind, solar or hydropower, or through energy collectives that help finance power plants) seems like a great direction.

But the sorts of infrastructure that leads to regional integration - a state of the art rail/port integration that allows containerized export of agricultural products from a whole region, for instance - requires massive investment, and there’s no good evidence that the private sector is willing to make investments of this size in an African context. And this infrastructure may not lead to the sort of growth we’d expect unless the Doha Round can be salvaged and campaigns to address US and EU agricultural subsidies can gain some traction.

It’s easy to point to the need for improved education, but it’s harder to get there. I’d love to see dozens of efforts as ambitious as One Laptop Per Child, literally trying to change education in every school on the continent, experimenting with different interventions to see what works. The health projects presented at TED were astounding, but right now they’re the work of incredibly passionate individuals who’ve sacrificed their lives and fortunes to take on challenges in their nations - there’s a level of personal sustainability that needs to be thought through in these efforts as well.

I got an IM from a friend in the States today who told me she’d found the ideas expressed at TED - which she followed through the blogs - inspiring, filling her with hope. I hope that reaction is widespread. I got a different reaction from some Americans who’d attended the conference. One mentioned that he felt like he knew a great deal more about Africa, and he now knows precisely how unqualified he is to offer suggestions and solutions. While that’s not the reaction anyone would hope for, I was pleased, inasmuch as it showed he was listening.

This stuff is hard. Really hard. People work their entire careers trying to help poor people become wealthy - inside or outside their home countries - and many wrestle with the question of whether they’re doing more harm than good. I’m grateful that TED helped put these questions in front of a much wider audience than usually considers them. I have high hopes that Chris and crew will choose to feature some of the amazing people we heard from at TED Global on the TED stage in Monterey, putting them in front of an even broader audience.

But more than that, I hope that everyone inspired by the past couple of days will find a productive way of continuing to wrestle with these questions. Those of us who wrestle with them frequently aren’t getting as far as we need to, and we need the help of everyone who wants to think deeply about them.

Conferences like TED Global are only a couple of days long, but I find I can get surprisingly used to them - wake up, absorb a mass of new and provocative ideas, have a few dozen conversations, stagger back to the hotel, rinse and repeat. And then, all of a sudden, they’re over. It was almost humorous how quickly TED ended - Minister Okonjo-Iweala left the stage at 1pm, and half an hour later, many of the participants were on buses heading to basecamp to climb Kilimnanjaro or towards tent safaris somewhere in the beautiful Tanzanian bush.

I took a few hours to wander Arusha, realizing that I’ve never seen a city that does such a good job of preserving greenspace in its center - walking the half-kilometer from my hotel to the central post office involves a bridge over a whitewater streem in a lush, green valley, and at least two urban farms. I had an absurdly good Japanese meal in a building that sells auto parts in one half, yakitori and fried udon noodles in the other side. I slept a bit and found myself in a TED reunion at the Arusha airport as a couple dozen of us took Air Tanzania’s hop-skip-and a jump service to South Africa (Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam and Jo’burg, over the course of six hours, covering an amazing range of mountain, coastal and savannah landscapes in the process.)

And now I’m enroute to Cape Town, wondering what we’ve learned, what might come out of this gathering. I started writing my impressions and realized that I’m not ready yet to give the sort of analysis this meeting deserves. So instead, I’ll give you a link to the few photos I took, a link to a richer collection on Flickr, and my sincere thanks to everyone who made TED possible, both the organizers and sponsors, and the speakers and attendees who brought it to life.

Former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the sort of visionary African leader everyone on stage and in the crowd would wish for Africa. She’s challenged with summing up four days of discussions on “Africa, the next chapter”.

She tells us we’re seeing changes in Africa that we never thought would happen. We’ve seen annual growth of 5%, in some cases 6-7%, up from 2%. External debt has been massively reduced. Countries are building up foreign exchange reserves, shoring up their currencies. Private investment flows are increasing, remittances to Nigeria are skyrocketing, and there’s a net inflow of capital.

But Africa needs jobs. 62% of Africa’s population is under 24. We have to figure out how to make these people productive. Nigeria is now building an opinion research organization, a way of listening to citizen voices, which she notes is a rare thing on the continent. The top issue in every survey? Jobs.

Just a few years ago, she tells us, we couldn’t even talk about “the next chapter” for Africa. There was negative economic growth. There’s been an amazing transformation, and this is something that’s allowed us to have our debate about aid versus the private sector. “It has been a simplistic debate.” It needs to be about “a partnership that involves governments, donors, private sector, and ordinary Africans.” It’s not trade or aid - “what is the combination of all these factors is going to yield results?”

African entrepeneur Mo Ibrahim dreams of the moment when Africa is giving aid. “But we’re already doing it - the UK and the US could not have been built without African aid. The resources - including human resources - have made those countries what they are today.” So when those countries are willing to give something back, we need to take it, but we need to use it effectively.

Okonjo-Iweala tells a story about growing up during the Nigeria-Biafra war. Her father was a brigadeer on the Biafran side, and her family was doing very badly, eating a single meal a day. When she was 15, her mother was ill, and her three-year old sister was deathly ill from malaria. She put her sister on her back and walked 10 kilometers to a clinic, where she’d heard there was a good doctor. When she arrived, there were a thousand people outside, trying to break down the door. She went to the side and climbed in through the window. The doctor told her she’d barely saved her sister - she gave the girl a shot of chloroquine, put her onto rehydration and within hours, she was back to health. “The ten kilometers home with her on my back, that was the shortest walk of my life.” The point of the story: “When someone is saving a life, you don’t care that it’s aid - you want the person to be alive.”

Okonjo-Iweala tells us she doesn’t believe aid, even aid to save lives, in the sole answer. We have to use it well. Why has southern Spain developed? On the back of aid which was provided to build road and infrastructure. Ireland is one of the fastest growing economies in the world - they used aid to build infrastructure to build an information society. “They didn’t say no to aid - but if they can build infrastructure in Spain, why do they refuse to build the same infrastructure in our countries?”

She asks, “Are we calling the NGOs together and telling them what we want, asking them to coordinate? No. We haven’t taken charge and sat these people down to hear about our priorities.” [Having sat in endless donor coordination meetings, I'd ask whether this is really true.] “Aid can be a faciliator, a catalyst. If we fail to use it as a catalyst, we have failed our people.”

The Chinese are so popular in Africa, she tells us, because they don’t shy away from infrastructure. She talked with the Chinese ambassador, who told her that to develop, “You need infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline.” Okonjo-Iweala wants this infrastructure and discipline to create jobs, especially for women, who will use this support to support their families and their societies.

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