Tech4Africa: The ‘World Cup’ of Geekdom (part 1)

Tech4Africa, the most anticipated event on the South African tech calendar, officially kicked off this morning. The brainchild of Gareth Knight, the event aims to bring the global giants and South African minds together to discuss the possibilities of human enabled technology and communications.

With international speakers like Clay Shirky, Leila Chirayath Janah and Dustin Diaz, supported by local minds like Alistair Fairweather, my very own ginger boss Rob Stokes and Barbara Mallinson (and too many more to mention, see here for the full list), the conference promised to be, well, rad… and if the first day is anything to go by, it will exceed my rather large expectations.

The proceedings were kicked off by Internet Solutions CEO; Derek Wilcocks. He spoke about cloud computing and the impact that the internet is having on our society today, describing the internet as The Fifth Estate. According to Wilcocks, the internet is a ‘power block in society, a force that can determine our society and communications’. He spoke of global corporations who are using the internet and social media to open communication channels, perform market research, develop brand advocates and increase customer service efficiency, but cautioned us that as powerful as the internet is, employees with the most cohesive face to face networks are up to 23% more productive than their digitally networked counterparts. For more, read my post on the Tech4Africa Blog.

There were two distinct highlights of day one for me. The first was definitely the Q&A session with Andy Budd and ‘The Knights of the Social Media Round Table’; Dustin Diaz from Twitter, Joe Stump (formerly from Digg), John Resig from Mozilla and Jonathan Snook from Yahoo! (yes, this is a geek’s wet dream). These guys are funny and have a great rapport, making some heavy tech-laden content engaging even to non-techies like me. I actually had a moment where I had to stop myself from rushing the stage, laying prostrate at Dustin’s feet and thanking him for changing my life with Twitter, my favourite thing in the world. (sssh, don’t tell my ginger, my niece or Quirk)

The other session that touched me was Leila Chirayath Janah‘s Keynote on creating work in Africa. Leila is a woman that every one of us should aspire to be like. She gave up a life in America to come to Africa to teach.

Out of this she founded Samasource, which allows people living in poverty to cross the digital divide. Leila surprised the audience with some astounding stats on education and literacy levels in Africa, which are higher than we all think. The real problem is lack of work, unemployment drives young people to join terrorist organisations in droves because it is the only way to earn money to feed their families.

Local trade and crafts does not make an impact on the poor either. Products made by poor people are often only bought by locals or a few tourists, making an average maximum of $1 a day for the sellers.

Conversely, most corporations do not make products that are affordable for the majority of the 3rd world citizens. In Leila’s words, ‘we must engage the bottom of the pyramid if we are to eradicate poverty‘.

Samasource’s mission is to connect poor people to work via the internet, it builds tools to allow their customers to work with them without outsourcing to a large company. It’s amazing, inspiring and I actually had a lump in my throat at the end. Read more on my post on the Tech4Africa blog.

I am simply loving this conference so far, the networking alone has made it worth it. I have met amazing people ‘IRL’ that got me through the abyss of last week through all their tweets, Facebook messages etc. This is why I’m a geek, this inspiring, mind-blowing ‘connectedness’, both online and offline.

Here’s to another rocking day tomorrow!