Tobias Eigen
Public Profile
- Bio
- Founder of Kabissa. Love Africa. Live in Berlin (when I'm not on Bainbridge Island).
- Details
Tobias Eigen, founder and executive director of Kabissa, is constantly seeking ways to support activists and development practitioners in the global south with the application of Information and Communication Technology. Currently a PhD candidate at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at the Freie Universität in Berlin, he divides his time between his research and the management of Kabissa, which he established in 1999.
Present fascinations include the role of social media in transforming the development aid business and the use of mobile technology for peace building and disaster response. Apart from his work with Kabissa and his studies, Tobias is an amateur photographer, enjoys tossing a frisbee on weekends with his daughter, and likes biking his two kids to school.
An early computer communications pioneer, Tobias set up his first Fidonet BBS at the age of 14 on an IBM Portable Personal Computer. After graduating from the International School of Kenya in 1990, he studied linguistics and African Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. There, inspired by his own experience with Fidonet, his love of Africa and the idealism he inherited from his parents, Tobias discovered and joined the ICT4D movement in 1992.
He founded Kabissa Communications to provide consulting and "store and forward email" services for international organizations and NGOs including Transparency International, Africare and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (now merged with Enterprise Works). He ran a private e-mail network for the USAID Famine Early Warning System, connecting field offices in a dozen countries across the African Sahel region with each other and their Virginia-based headquarters. In 1995, he joined his mentor Akin Fatoyinbo to help the West African Newsmedia and Development Centre in Cotonou, Benin to set up a BBS to serve the information needs of news agencies in West Africa before moving to Europe, where he continued his ICT4D work with organizations such as oneworld.net, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and UNESCO-UNEVOC. In 1997 he acquired his MA in Culture, Race and Difference at the University of Sussex Centre for Development and the Environment.
In 1999, while living in Oxford, England, Tobias was hired by the Organisation Mondiale Contre la Torture (OMCT) in Geneva to coordinate and monitor an Internet capacity-building project for ten Nigerian human rights groups based in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Abuja and Kaduna. His conversations there with activists from the participating human rights groups directly inspired Tobias to found Kabissa to help them - and other civil society organizations like them throughout Africa - put ICT to work for the benefit of their communities. Originally focussed on providing affordable domain hosting accounts that African organizations themselves can control, Kabissa went on to co-create Pambazuka News, along with Fahamu and SANGONet. From 2002-2007 Tobias co-ran Kabissa with Kimberly Lowery out of Washington DC and offered the Time To Get Online training program specifically tailored for African civil society. Thousands of African activists and development practitioners made their first steps online through Time To Get Online workshops and with the help of a 100 page manual (available as a free download in English, French and Arabic). Now Kabissa is a network connecting people and organizations for Africa via an online community website where organizations working in Africa can showcase themselves and join groups to connect and share with one another.
Tobias has also been engaged in a number of other initiatives, working most recently for iScale/GAN-Net in Seattle to manage the development and launch of a new participatory website at http://scalingimpact.net and to help organize workshops in Geneva and Bonn for the GAN-Net Communications Community of Practice.
Links
- Interviews and articles about Tobias Eigen
- Andrea Goetzke: Netzpolitik-Podcast: Web2forDev – Interview mit Tobias Eigen (German)
- Marshall Kirkpatrick on Netsquared blog: Working with African orgs on Web 2.0: an interview with Tobias Eigen of Kabissa
- Articles by Tobias Eigen in ICT Update
- At Ease With Email - book I contributed to in 1994
- Interviews and articles about Tobias Eigen
- Blog
- http://www.kabissa.org/blog/4313