K2 Weekly Roundup

Kabissa has set itself a huge challenge in deciding to create the new online community with the aim of bringing together over a thousand civil society organisations across the continent. Whereas previously members were "passive users", K2 requires a signifianct change in the way members think of and use the site as now they are being asked to actively participate in the development of Kabissa. In other words the members and users move from being in a passive user state to being active contributors through creating content and building relationhships with each other on a geographical or thematic basis.

[Image: iMedExchange]

Our job at Kabissa is to facilitate and support members. One way of doing that is to keep everyone up to date with what is happening on the site so we have decided to have a weekly roundup of K2 which includes brief profiles of new members, highlight from the weeks most interesting blog posts and news of any changes to the site and to Kabissa in general.

The good news for Kabissa is that we have 60 new members since January this year which brings our membership to over 1000. Our aim is to try and get at least 5% of these to become actively involved with K2 by the end of the year and build on that and hope there will be some knock on effect and members encourage each other to join in.

Some of the new members over the past few months are:

Youth Environmental Alliance which has a great acronym "YEA" is a Kenyan community project based in Nairobi and is similar to the many women's microcredit schemes but for young people.

YEA' S MAIN PROGRAMS Micro-Enterprise Development YEA identifies opportunities for income generation in the local community and ensures that youth participate in wealth creation through youth led enterprises. YEA conducts training to youths on Business Development Services for the selected industry.YEA links young entrepreneurs with financial institutions and markets. Mentorship is a key element to support youths through challenges in launching their own enterprises.

Aid and Care is a humanitarian organisation working with Sudanese refugees from living in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia and refugees from across Africa living in the US. They work on health, education and water based projects in Southern Sudan.

The challenge is enormous to those of us who uphold the sanctity of human life and the moral imperative to provide water to the thirsty. We plan to drill wells in local villages in Sudan. Fresh water is absolute requirement for a community's health. It is a stable developmental platform on which a community can build its future.

More and more environmental development projects are establishing themselves across the continent. The Green Access Service is based in Lagos and serves rural and urban areas by "harnessing eco-friendly materials to deploy socially productive technology. Like the African Gadget project which is often reviewed here, the GAS works on the principle of using indigenous and local materials to create innovative technologies which can be used by local people in the production of goods and services.

Another environment related project is Wildlife Direct - a blogging space for African conservationist highlighting endangered animals in Africa. WLD has 64 bloggers writing about animals - elephants, gorillas, flying foxes, wild dogs and parots to name a few, covering most Southern and Eastern Africa. Whats been great is that Dipesh Parbari of WLD has not only been our number one blogger to date but he is writing about a subject that is often forgotten in the midst of the many social justice, health, and development projects that tend to dominate CSO.

Naramatisho Livestock Cooperative is based in Tanzania and works with local farmers in the Chalinze, Bagamoyo, Coast Region to improve the quality and numbers of their local livestock as well as capacity building in the area of human rights and governance.

Events

The big event of this week was the official launch of K2 in which we had to send out over a thousand emails with instructions to members [Getting Started User Guide] on how to access the site and enter their organizations and staff member details.

As you will all note we still have a great deal of work to do on the site design. We would appreciate any ideas and feed back especially on reporting bugs which you can do by clicking here or on the "Beta" tab just by the Kabissa logo on the left of the page.

Blogs

The post of the week goes to my post on the solar mobile phone charger because I think this is one of the most useful and potentially money making innovations for Africa's mobile phone users especially those living in rural areas. Other suggestions and comments are welcome especially since I voted myself! In his post "Guns, Gorillas and Blogs", Dipesh's highlightd the dangers in protecting the mountain gorillas in the Congo an area which has been occupied by various militia. He points out that 370,000 have been displaced in the Eastern Congo since January 2007 and some 100 rangers caring for the mountain gorillas have been killed by rebel forces.

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