Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

Yari Yari Ntoaso is an international conference on literature by women of African ancestry. You can follow in on Twitter using #YariYari hashtag or on Kinna Reads blog.

Dapa Arnaud gives a list of the 10 most active african presidents [fr] on social media. At the top of the list is  president Paul Kagame in Rwanda:

In place since 2003, the president of Rwanda is the most active on the internet.  According to the Ecofin agency, Paul Kagame interacts with many users on Twitter through his account @PaulKagame. His personal website named “The Journey Continues, Dukomeze Imihigo” is also one of the most visited websites in the country. His presence is also quite strong on other social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, Flickr or YouTube.

Vote for African Women's Development Fund blog which has been nominated in the first ever Blogging Ghana awards: “I’m really pleased that AWDF’s blog has been nominated in the category of ‘best organisational blog’. Many thanks to all of the AWDF staff that have contributed to this blog. I plan to revamp this blog soon with even more exciting content.”

The film opens on the Ghanaian coast at the remnants of a slave post, the camera then pans over the Atlantic, finally settling on the green hills of rural Jamaica (Marley’s birthplace Nine Mile) from where it picks up Bob Marley’s story, thus cementing a link between the continent and its new world diaspora.

Sean Jacobs reviews Kevin MacDonald’s critically film, “Marley”.

Alternative medicine practitioners in Ghana have decided to invest in new technologies, Kofi Domfeh reports:”M.Y. Ventures, a natural healthcare center, has introduced a swap card technology that helps protect the privacy and data confidentiality of patients.”

With both big technology players and local partners in Ghana, we’ll be hacking together our “crap map” using existing open source tools and software paired with meaningful offline facilitation around behavior change in sanitation.

Molly Norris of Ideo.org explains the objective of the Crap Map project: “to stimulate collective action to improve community-wide behavior and pressure the public sector and others to make investments in improved sanitation solutions.” On World Toilet Day, it's worth noting that in West Africa, only 37 percent of inhabitants can access a clean toilet, posing important issues of public health and human dignity. The WHO/UNICEF joint monitoring program (JMP) estimates that Eritrea and Niger have the highest ratio of population forced to defecate in the open.