[kictanet] Africa's Absence From The Table

[S.Murigi Muraya]

We are not yet as exposed as we need to be to compete a global level. 
Wish more Kenyans could access the Microsoft and Google Tech High 
Quality (HQ) educational videos - (a 1 hour HQ Video is about 1GB). Now, 
it will cost a Kenyan (on the mobile networks we use) to stream or 
download a 1 hr HQ Video the same as it costs Korean, Japanese or 
Western students download or stream 60 (GB) to 80 (GB) HQ educational 
(or entertainment) videos per month. The US, Europe and Asia do not use 
expensive mobile networks for their large downloads (60GB-100GB monthly) 
but ADSL or Fibre.

If Orange soon provides bandwidth of up to 1Mbs @ 4K-6K allowing monthly 
downloads of up to 30GB to begin with - they will win the SOHO / SME 
(data) market. If Safaricom builds their own Fibre Optic Network before 
Orange styles up .... Keep and Watch your Safaricom shares!


Rad! wrote:
> I was a judge at the Imagine Cup and I must confess that i was 
> extremely disappointed. The eventual winner was a contestant from 
> Ethiopia that developed a heart monitoring system that interfaced with 
> hardware that connected to a patient's chest via electrodes to measure 
> the heart rate and predict when a heart attack was imminent. It would 
> plot the hearbeat on the wearer's phone. It would then send the 
> location of the wearer via his phone through GPRS to the nearest 
> hospital that would use the GPS coordinates to map out a route for the 
> ambulance to the patient.
>
> Contestants from Kenya i am ashamed to say were presenting Library 
> systems and their ilk.
>
> I was very taken aback at this disconnect.
>
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Walubengo J <jwalu at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:jwalu at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     i agree. its not awareness...i remember pushing another similar
>     challenge from Microsoft, "Imagine Cup 2009" at Multimedia
>     University. It got a serious mute response...i think our students
>     from primary school are drilled to focus on and pass
>     exams....anything that has little or no impact on their exam tends
>     to be neglected.
>
>     We seem to have failed to cultivate a culture of intellectual
>     "activism" in our education system. When I was growing up we used
>     to have something called "science-congress" where all high-schools
>     would compete from district, provincial and finally national level
>     to show-case their innovations. Not quite sure if this still
>     happens...
>
>     walu.
>
>
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