Democratic Republic of Congo

National Endowment for Democracy is hosting an event tomorrow to honor Floribert Bahizire.

From the invitation (see below): "The people of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the worldwide human rights community suffered a terrible loss on June 1 when human rights defender Floribert Chebeya Bahizire was apparently assassinated after being summoned by the police. Floribert was undoubtedly Congo's most prominent, committed, courageous human rights activist."

The lifeless body of Floribert Chebeya Bahzire was found in the back seat of his car on June 2 in a neighborhood not far from his home in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The African Democracy Forum (ADF) is an African regional network of democracy, human rights, and governance organizations that seek to consolidate democracy in Africa by providing opportunities for democrats to openly express their views.  The ADF serves as a platform to build solidarity and exchange of resources among members, and supports membership empowerment.
 

August 6, 2009, Luvungi, Democratic Republic of Congo: Amid the chaos and lawlessness of Eastern Congo, a local organization has developed an innovative approach to settling disputes and promoting justice, one community at a time.

Uvira, DRC: Banana peels, sugar cane and manioc are widely found in the trash piles that collect outside of homes in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

They're also the ingredients being used by environmental advocates to create a light, inexpensive cooking fuel that could ease deforestation in the region.

I have been invited to return to Netsquared as champion for Ipeace, a featured project of the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. The innovative project is described as follows:

Ipeace, is a safety open source mobile telephony platform and Web 2.0 platform to allow journalist, human rights activist, scientist and people to expose war crimes and human rights violation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ipeace open-source mobile telephony platform will uses J2ME code that can run on a wide range of java-enable phones. 

It will include  different options (Video, Camera, SMS, MMS, GPS, GIS) to collect information, alerts and spread those information world wide.

I am excited to meet the people behind the project, Narcisse Mbunzama Lokwa and Dueme Patrick Safi, and to learn more about the Ipeace project. I am particular intrigued to find out how the creators intend to very quickly  implement such a challenging set of features on a limiting platform (mobile phones) and all of this in a way that is anonymous and secure. The need is great for such functionality, and not just in the Democratic Republic of Congo! 

Last time I was there was for N2Y2 together with Kim Lowery, presenting our own Kabissa 2.0: Strengthening the Social Web in Africa project which was featured that year. Reviewing Erik's blog post about it, I am reminded that I still think it's well worth doing even two years later!

It will be interesting also to spend more time with innovative friends at the event, including Mary Joyce of DigiActive and Ken Banks of FrontlineSMS. Indeed, it's great that 3 of the 10 finalist projects are based on FrontlineSMS. If you are coming, please let me know @kabissa!

Today is International Migrants Day. On this occasion, December 18 is running the third edition of the Radio 1812 event, a worldwide radio broadcast on migration issues. More than 130 radios from 45 countries are taking part. From Africa we have stations from Senegal, Mali, DR Congo, Ghana, Morroco and South Africa on board. You may have heard one of these programmes today when listening to your local station. I also encourage you to visit the special site: www.radio1812.net and listen to the programmes that are being uploaded thoughout the day.

You can read more on the Ushahidi blog here:

http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2008/11/07/ushahidi-deploys-to-the-congo-drc/

Ushahidi, which means ''testimony'' in Swahili, is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi's roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The new Ushahidi Engine is being created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them. It is being built so that it can grow with the changing environment of the web, and to work with other websites and online tools.