A Monthly Newsletter for Members of the Kabissa African Civil Society Network
The Deadline for all submissions to Gong Gong is the 25th of the month. Click here for more details about how the newsletter is produced.
A: Tags are keywords which help describe the content of a blog post as well as help locate topic areas in the future. Websites contain huge amounts of information which can be hard to find if not organised under categories or keywords.
For example in this post on "Mapping xenophobic attacks in South Africa" I used the keywords: "xenophobia" "web 2.0", "South Africa" and "mapping". The keywords help tell you what the post is about. Also by clicking on a keyword you will be taken to all the other posts that have also used that same keyword.
Please see our Kabissa guides for more information on Blogging and on how to use the Kabissa site.
5. Opportunity Pot
AWARD Fellowship - Available to women agricultural scientists from:
Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia. For more information please see Gender & Diversity Program
Sokari: HINT is described as a "community development" organisation. Could you tell us what led to the formation of HINT and how easy / difficult was it to set up the organisation.
Tinshu: I was personally disturbed when I got to meet an ex-prisoner and know of his miseries and wished I could help. HINT was formed from my heart to see those in need helped, not only with "fish" but also taught how to "catch their own fish". So, HINT came forth from my heart of compassion towards the needy and underpriviledged and less fortunate and started with helping a prison re-unite with his family. So, though HINT was birth out of trying to meet a personal need, it now serves not only individuals but communities in need, where resources are available.
As you rightly mentioned, Helps International (HINT) is a community development NGO situated in Buea, Cameroon whose mission is to improve the social and economic well-being and health of the poor and under privileged in our society through education, skill development and job creation. We seek to accomplish this mission in the communities in which we work through four main areas which include access and training on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), enabling poor children to still have a good education, improving the health of the poor and helping to reduce the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, empowering poor adults through micro credits and training, and helping with community development projects such as clean drinking water and electricity.
Sokari: In your mission you state that you aim to help the needy through "education, skill development and job creation" through a range of activities. I am particularly interested in how you use ICTs to achieve your goals.
Tinshu: Probably because of my IT background, ICTs are a very strong component of our work. Our long term goal is to use ICTs to solve social problems in our society. So, we set our first IT Training Centre in Buea in 2004 after having been doing some work in the background. In Later the same year, our IT project emerged a winner in Rome's Global Junior Challenge - a big surprise and huge stepping stone for us. at the end of the Challenge, we were one of 5 projects to receive seed funding of 5000 Euros and that gave a big push to the project. We were able to acquire more computers, install internet, and later VoIP services at our centre in Bonduma, Buea.
As at this year, the project has trained over 800 underpriviliged youths several of whom have been able to find jobs because of the IT skills they acquired at HINT. This is how we help poor less priviledge youths gain employment and come out of poverty.
We were about the first in our country to provide VoIP services for as low as 25 FCFA per minute (about USD 0.056 per minute) for international call. This tremendously improved communication between community members and their relatives abroad.
Currently we are working towards implementing Inveneo's technology in one of our communities whereby communities even without electricity can still have access to IT Services such as Internet access, Training, VoIP...
Sokari: I note that ICTs projects are stand alone. Have you considered ways of integrating ICT with the other projects such as in Economic Development and HIV/AIDS?
Tinshu: I think the only way IT is helping these departments at the moment is that people can give to these projects online through our website at: but we will like to learn ways of how ICTs can actually be integrated into micro credits and HIV/AIDS for example.
When we do our micro credit and HIV/AIDS training programs we use a lot of IT support such as laptops, PowerPoint presentations, projectors...and this helps the people learn better, instead of the conventional blackboard.
Sokari: The mobile phone is used widely in Africa and I am sure Cameroon is no exception. Have you used mobile phones as a tool for community development, campaigns or for information provision.
Tinshu: We haven't but will like to learn ways of using mobiles in different projects in our community and projects. However, since almost everyone in the community we work has a cell phone, we often use it to remind/inform of upcoming meeting. Interestingly we have sent messages from Skype to cell phones and that is cheaper than cell phone to cell phone.
Sokari: Have you used any other technologies such as radio, video or CD's in your projects? If not are these something you would consider using as the organisation develops?
Tinshu: As I mentioned early, we use laptops, videos, digital projectors, CDs, DVDs. We would like to use these tools in a better way other than just training, if we know of them.
Sokari: I see you have been blogging on the HINT website for nearly one year. Why did you decide to start the blog and how do you see it fitting in with HINT's other projects.
Tinshu: Blogs are so important for content management and easy publication. Our website is built to function like a blog; for example the announcements, news items, volunteer opportunities and written and published directly from our website, without using a secondary blogging software. We are grateful to Joseph Talbot at Oxford University in the UK for designing and functionality of the website.
However, we also have a Wordpress blog located at http://www.hintonline.org/blogs that we use a lot more often than publishing on our website.
Sokari: What platform are you using for your website and your blog - why did you choose these particular platforms? Have you considered using any of the free open source platforms for your website and blog such as Drupal or Joomla (used by WOUGNET - Kabissa profile, website).
Tinshu: Our current website at http://www.hintonline.org was designed for us by Joseph Talbot of the IT department at Oxford University while he volunteered for us, as I already mentioned. We love the current site because it is simple and we can blog from it. Very basic knowledge/training is needed for employees to be able to post stuff to the site like announcement, news, volunteer opportunities, etc. However, we have begun to explore the possibilities of using a more sophisticated CMS and will make a decision in a not too distant future if it is time to switch. I am personally aware of the usefulness and power of Open Source Software and this came alive after I attended Africa Source 2 in Uganda in 2005. I am currently trying to do a website for an organisation using Joomla and that will give me the feel for the software and also influence whether we should switch or not.
Sokari: Have you been able to look at Kabissa's blogging guide and if so how useful do you think it could be in developing HINT's blog?
Tinshu: Honestly I have not been able to read through the material but I think it will be good to read through, especially if we decide to change the platform on which our site ccurrently runs.
Sokari: Thinking about the future of the HINT blog, do you think you will add any Web 2.0 features and possibly reach out to other organisations across the world?
Tinshu: Reaching out and finding out how we can help other organisations as well as how we can be helped is important in our work. We believe community work is not work until it is done in a network. Networking releases hidden potentials and resources. That is one of the major reasons why we are a member of Kabissa.
Sokari: HINT is one of the finalists for this year's Stockholm Challenge for it's Rural Electrification And Communication Technology (REACT) project. Can you tell us a little bit about the project and what being a finalist means to HINT and the communities you work with?
Tinshu: The Rural Electrification And Communication Technology (REACT) project is still in its setup stage. REACT will be an IT Centre in a rural community where there is no electricity. We will get electricity from Solar Energy to power the equipment.
The project will make use of Inveneo's new technology, specially designed for use in remote/rural communities and situations.
The Inveneo Communications System and suite of hardware and open source software products provides organizations operating in rural and remote areas with access to affordable computing, telephony, regional broadband local area networking and Internet access. The system is specifically designed to overcome the key challenges that organizations, and ICTs, face in these areas:
To meet these design requirements, the Inveneo Communications System incorporates a suite of affordable hardware an software components; ultra-low-power computing, VoIP, long-distance WiFi networking and open source software. These components that can be easily configured to create affordable turnkey ICT systems that can be used for a range of rural applications such as education, health care, agriculture, etc.
More on Inveneo's site at http://www.inveneo.org
Sokari: One of the ultimate aims of Kabissa's new site is provide the opportunity and space to bring together civil society organisations either across regional groups or thematic groups. Do you think this is something that would benefit HINT and how would you envisage using such a feature?
Tinshu: Kabissa's work is of tremendous importance for organisations in Africa because a greater number of people have not yet realised the power of the Internet and other new ICTs in our world of today. I wonder how organisations without Internet presence function.
The network of organisations being created by Kabissa is tremendous in that it enables us to see what others are doing and learn from them.
Sokari: Overall what are your initial impressions about Kabissa's online community? Do you have any suggestions for improving the site?
Tinshu: It is a great place to learn from others and where one can easily make his voice heard and his work seen and I encourage every organisation without internet presence to benefit from Kabissa's free services.
Sokari: Thanks to Tinshu and all the staff at HINT. If you would like to see your organisation in the SPOTLIGHT, please email Sokari at community@kabissa.org
Contents
- Dear Mimi: Internet Advice Column
- Under the Baobab Tree: Announcements from Kabissa Members
- Kabissa Matters
- Technology News and Resources
- Opportunities Pot
- Member Spotlight: HINT
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1. Dear Mimi: Internet Advice Column
Q: Please could you explain how I should use the "tag" feature when writing a blog post on Kabissa's website?A: Tags are keywords which help describe the content of a blog post as well as help locate topic areas in the future. Websites contain huge amounts of information which can be hard to find if not organised under categories or keywords.
For example in this post on "Mapping xenophobic attacks in South Africa" I used the keywords: "xenophobia" "web 2.0", "South Africa" and "mapping". The keywords help tell you what the post is about. Also by clicking on a keyword you will be taken to all the other posts that have also used that same keyword.
On Kabissa, our TAGS can be viewed as a TAG CLOUD which you can see on the left hand side of the homepage. The more frequently a TAG is used, the larger it will appear in the TAG CLOUD. You will see that "Mobile Phones", "Blogging" are two of the largest TAGS which means we have used these more than say "moodle" or "rural". The tags can also be used to navigate content on the SITEMAP.
Tag Tips:
- Use one word TAGS and to try not to use too many as it gets confusing.
- Check the TAG CLOUD first to see if there is an existing TAG that will fit your post.
- Type tags slowly, and if an existing TAG already exists that matches your content it will be offered to you. Choose the offered tag instead of creating a new one!
- Be consistent. Check the spelling of your TAGs.
- Don't forget that on our site, as with all Drupal websites, TAGs must be separated by commas!
Please see our Kabissa guides for more information on Blogging and on how to use the Kabissa site.
2. Under the Baobab Tree: Announcements from Kabissa Members
- Liberia Computer Rehabilitating Society (LICRS) offers free computer education to war affected and underprivileged Liberian youth/children and information technology(IT) Support. Their site is also a resource for free online computer learning.
- Mathare North Youth Organisation (MANYO) in Kenya announce the "rebirth" of their organisation.
- African Youth Conference Against Hunger - to be held 17th - 23rd June in Freetown, Sierra Leone
3. Kabissa Matters
We are very proud to welcome 12 new members this month which takes us up to a grand total of 1210 members.- Time To Get Online wiki now available in French and Arabic
- Invitation to join Kabissa bloggers group!
Members are invited to participate in this group that are interested in joining an ongoing discussion with fellow bloggers in the Kabissa network. Click here to subscribe.
As a participant in the Kabissa Bloggers group you can:
-
- See yourself and Kabissa Bloggers all in one place in a picture directory
-
Post content to the group that is public (visible to anyone) or private (visible only to Kabissa Bloggers group subscribers)
-
Turn on email notifications to be instantly notified of posts to the Kabissa Bloggers group so that you can return and discuss blog posts through followup comments
4. Technology News and Resources
"Latest technology developments relevant to African civil society including tech programs, new web services, software, learning resources etc"- Mi-Pay is the latest mobile phone payments provider to use mobile phones for transferring remittances to Africa.
- Mobile phones for job search in Kenya.
- United for Africa. Using technology - online maps and SMS to document violence against immigrants in South Africa
- Ushahidi.com wins the NetSquared Challenge Competition.
- Kabissa You Tube - Videos from the Blog
5. Opportunity Pot
- Open Society Institute (OSI) Invites Innovative Thinkers to Confront Global Challenges.
-
DigiActive is seeking volunteer correspondents to write about digital activism in Africa. Please direct inqueries to Mary Joyce (Mary@digiactive.org).
What is DigiActive? DigiActive is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists around the world use mobile phones and the Internet to increase their impact. Our goal is a world of activists made more powerful and more effective through the use of digital technology.
AWARD Fellowship - Available to women agricultural scientists from:
Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia. For more information please see Gender & Diversity Program
- The Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) is a South African NGO operating as a Centre for Developmental Practice. 5 Short courses - See Here for more information
6. Member Spotlight:
This month Sokari Ekine interviews Tinshu Genesis, founder and President of HINT in Cameroon (Kabissa profile, website)Sokari: HINT is described as a "community development" organisation. Could you tell us what led to the formation of HINT and how easy / difficult was it to set up the organisation.
Tinshu: I was personally disturbed when I got to meet an ex-prisoner and know of his miseries and wished I could help. HINT was formed from my heart to see those in need helped, not only with "fish" but also taught how to "catch their own fish". So, HINT came forth from my heart of compassion towards the needy and underpriviledged and less fortunate and started with helping a prison re-unite with his family. So, though HINT was birth out of trying to meet a personal need, it now serves not only individuals but communities in need, where resources are available.
As you rightly mentioned, Helps International (HINT) is a community development NGO situated in Buea, Cameroon whose mission is to improve the social and economic well-being and health of the poor and under privileged in our society through education, skill development and job creation. We seek to accomplish this mission in the communities in which we work through four main areas which include access and training on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), enabling poor children to still have a good education, improving the health of the poor and helping to reduce the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, empowering poor adults through micro credits and training, and helping with community development projects such as clean drinking water and electricity.
Sokari: In your mission you state that you aim to help the needy through "education, skill development and job creation" through a range of activities. I am particularly interested in how you use ICTs to achieve your goals.
Tinshu: Probably because of my IT background, ICTs are a very strong component of our work. Our long term goal is to use ICTs to solve social problems in our society. So, we set our first IT Training Centre in Buea in 2004 after having been doing some work in the background. In Later the same year, our IT project emerged a winner in Rome's Global Junior Challenge - a big surprise and huge stepping stone for us. at the end of the Challenge, we were one of 5 projects to receive seed funding of 5000 Euros and that gave a big push to the project. We were able to acquire more computers, install internet, and later VoIP services at our centre in Bonduma, Buea.
As at this year, the project has trained over 800 underpriviliged youths several of whom have been able to find jobs because of the IT skills they acquired at HINT. This is how we help poor less priviledge youths gain employment and come out of poverty.
We were about the first in our country to provide VoIP services for as low as 25 FCFA per minute (about USD 0.056 per minute) for international call. This tremendously improved communication between community members and their relatives abroad.
Currently we are working towards implementing Inveneo's technology in one of our communities whereby communities even without electricity can still have access to IT Services such as Internet access, Training, VoIP...
Sokari: I note that ICTs projects are stand alone. Have you considered ways of integrating ICT with the other projects such as in Economic Development and HIV/AIDS?
Tinshu: I think the only way IT is helping these departments at the moment is that people can give to these projects online through our website at: but we will like to learn ways of how ICTs can actually be integrated into micro credits and HIV/AIDS for example.
When we do our micro credit and HIV/AIDS training programs we use a lot of IT support such as laptops, PowerPoint presentations, projectors...and this helps the people learn better, instead of the conventional blackboard.
Sokari: The mobile phone is used widely in Africa and I am sure Cameroon is no exception. Have you used mobile phones as a tool for community development, campaigns or for information provision.
Tinshu: We haven't but will like to learn ways of using mobiles in different projects in our community and projects. However, since almost everyone in the community we work has a cell phone, we often use it to remind/inform of upcoming meeting. Interestingly we have sent messages from Skype to cell phones and that is cheaper than cell phone to cell phone.
Sokari: Have you used any other technologies such as radio, video or CD's in your projects? If not are these something you would consider using as the organisation develops?
Tinshu: As I mentioned early, we use laptops, videos, digital projectors, CDs, DVDs. We would like to use these tools in a better way other than just training, if we know of them.
Sokari: I see you have been blogging on the HINT website for nearly one year. Why did you decide to start the blog and how do you see it fitting in with HINT's other projects.
Tinshu: Blogs are so important for content management and easy publication. Our website is built to function like a blog; for example the announcements, news items, volunteer opportunities and written and published directly from our website, without using a secondary blogging software. We are grateful to Joseph Talbot at Oxford University in the UK for designing and functionality of the website.
However, we also have a Wordpress blog located at http://www.hintonline.org/blogs that we use a lot more often than publishing on our website.
Sokari: What platform are you using for your website and your blog - why did you choose these particular platforms? Have you considered using any of the free open source platforms for your website and blog such as Drupal or Joomla (used by WOUGNET - Kabissa profile, website).
Tinshu: Our current website at http://www.hintonline.org was designed for us by Joseph Talbot of the IT department at Oxford University while he volunteered for us, as I already mentioned. We love the current site because it is simple and we can blog from it. Very basic knowledge/training is needed for employees to be able to post stuff to the site like announcement, news, volunteer opportunities, etc. However, we have begun to explore the possibilities of using a more sophisticated CMS and will make a decision in a not too distant future if it is time to switch. I am personally aware of the usefulness and power of Open Source Software and this came alive after I attended Africa Source 2 in Uganda in 2005. I am currently trying to do a website for an organisation using Joomla and that will give me the feel for the software and also influence whether we should switch or not.
Sokari: Have you been able to look at Kabissa's blogging guide and if so how useful do you think it could be in developing HINT's blog?
Tinshu: Honestly I have not been able to read through the material but I think it will be good to read through, especially if we decide to change the platform on which our site ccurrently runs.
Sokari: Thinking about the future of the HINT blog, do you think you will add any Web 2.0 features and possibly reach out to other organisations across the world?
Tinshu: Reaching out and finding out how we can help other organisations as well as how we can be helped is important in our work. We believe community work is not work until it is done in a network. Networking releases hidden potentials and resources. That is one of the major reasons why we are a member of Kabissa.
Sokari: HINT is one of the finalists for this year's Stockholm Challenge for it's Rural Electrification And Communication Technology (REACT) project. Can you tell us a little bit about the project and what being a finalist means to HINT and the communities you work with?
Tinshu: The Rural Electrification And Communication Technology (REACT) project is still in its setup stage. REACT will be an IT Centre in a rural community where there is no electricity. We will get electricity from Solar Energy to power the equipment.
The project will make use of Inveneo's new technology, specially designed for use in remote/rural communities and situations.
The Inveneo Communications System and suite of hardware and open source software products provides organizations operating in rural and remote areas with access to affordable computing, telephony, regional broadband local area networking and Internet access. The system is specifically designed to overcome the key challenges that organizations, and ICTs, face in these areas:
- lack of dependable electricity, if any
- lack of available and/or affordable communication alternatives
- punishing physical environments - extreme heat, dust and humidity
- lack of ICT experience at the administrative and end-user level
- extremely tight budgets for ongoing operations and maintenance
To meet these design requirements, the Inveneo Communications System incorporates a suite of affordable hardware an software components; ultra-low-power computing, VoIP, long-distance WiFi networking and open source software. These components that can be easily configured to create affordable turnkey ICT systems that can be used for a range of rural applications such as education, health care, agriculture, etc.
More on Inveneo's site at http://www.inveneo.org
Sokari: One of the ultimate aims of Kabissa's new site is provide the opportunity and space to bring together civil society organisations either across regional groups or thematic groups. Do you think this is something that would benefit HINT and how would you envisage using such a feature?
Tinshu: Kabissa's work is of tremendous importance for organisations in Africa because a greater number of people have not yet realised the power of the Internet and other new ICTs in our world of today. I wonder how organisations without Internet presence function.
The network of organisations being created by Kabissa is tremendous in that it enables us to see what others are doing and learn from them.
Sokari: Overall what are your initial impressions about Kabissa's online community? Do you have any suggestions for improving the site?
Tinshu: It is a great place to learn from others and where one can easily make his voice heard and his work seen and I encourage every organisation without internet presence to benefit from Kabissa's free services.
Sokari: Thanks to Tinshu and all the staff at HINT. If you would like to see your organisation in the SPOTLIGHT, please email Sokari at community@kabissa.org