Smart Africa and bright Kenyan spots
And so, October, of this unforgiving 2020, is ending. We could all use a little cheer. I found nearly 50 moments to smile in this month alone in the increasingly unloved media.
Hard to pick, but from the 50, but let’s start in Zambia. I didn’t know anything about the Foxdale Court Office Park, in the Zambian capital Lusaka, until a few days ago. It is considered Zambia’s most sustainable building because of its design, and 100kw solar power plant. The complex is launching a design market platform which also be a market for craft and curios. The story of the design market platform is what brought me to Foxdale Court Office Park.
Because of the uncertain times we live in, its launch early this month had a lone curio vendor - a brave Zambian man called Milton Chilufya. That’s how I found out the complex has two buildings. One is called Kenneth Kaunda, after the country’s wonderful golf-and-accordion-playing white-handkerchief-waving and sobbing founding father. And the second building? It is called Mama Betty Kaunda, his late wife. And good old Kaunda doesn’t own the complex.
When Covid-19 broke, there were alarms it would disrupt HIV/Aids treatments, and scuttle malaria controls like bed net distribution. Malaria kills nearly 360,000 people a year in Africa. Fears were that coronavirus mayhem would lead to a staggering 760,000 deaths. Seems, our gods were with us.
Globally, we learnt that over 90% of anti-malaria campaigns planned this year continents are on track. More than 200 million nets are on track to be distributed just over 30 countries, and more than 20 million children in 12 countries across the Sahel are expected to receive essential antimalarial drugs. In Africa three countries, including surprise, surprise, Kenya, have managed to immunise more than 300,000 children against malaria through a pilot malaria vaccine programme. Take that.
From Rwanda, there is this start-up called Driving Innovation and Technology (DIT). It introduced the Ikaze App. It is used to record visitors and employees entering buildings, to avoid pen and paper when the Rona is still around. Then it helps in contact tracing. If a positive case is reported in the building, it gives you a fairly good sense of your exposure.
It’s the same reason I find this app, developed by the Kenyan government with European Union for money for truck drivers to get their Covid-19 test results, to be clever.
Launched at the start of the month, it was reported just over a week ago that already 50,000 drivers have already downloaded it. A driver takes a test and goes away, and the results will come to his phone when he is on his merry way. It has reportedly shaved over a week of waiting, and eased those monstrous lines at East African border crossings.
And I need to squeeze in Tana River Governor Dhadho Godhana, before I forget. With the floods and rising waters that are causing havoc, Godhana has had it with the flood victims his county. They will continue when calamity hits in future, but they will first a thorough beating. Marvelously old school. My father and grandfather would have approved.
The flood of stories of what Africa’s heroic and long-suffering school teachers have done to teach students (without internet access for remote learning) during lockdowns, keep coming. One report said that in some cases in South Africa, teachers pasted pieces of paper on the wall and used them as “whiteboards”, then recorded themselves on their phones, and shared the videos with parents via WhatsApp groups. There must be a special place in heaven for people like that.
There have been thousands of stories from around Africa, of how the Covid-19 crisis innovation; some of it to help deal with the virus, others flourishing in the solitude and introspection of lockdown. Kenya’s Roy Allela, a 25-year-old engineer, belongs up there with the best of them. Allela desired to communicate with his 6-year-old deaf niece.
As the story is told, he developed a pair of smart gloves with flex sensors that help the hearing impaired communicate and vocalise messages to a mobile phone through Bluetooth. The gloves can be customised for any user, and are reported to have 93 per cent accuracy.
At a recent Financial Times (FT) Africa conference, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was remarkably frank about many things.
On Covid-19, he said; “In many African countries, healthcare is a neglected sector. This pandemic has exposed our dark underbelly”.
His government, he announced, was boosting the health by a hefty 46 per cent to 18.7 billion Ethiopian birr ($505 million) during the 2020/21 financial year, up from 12.64 billion birr in 2019/20.
We will survive.
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The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
