Stories from and

African Startups Win FinTech for Agriculture 2015 Competition

  7 July 2015

Two African startups have emerged winners of a regional competition organised by Village Capital: Village Capital today announced the first winners of its innovative program, East Africa: FinTech for Agriculture 2015. The program supports entrepreneurs in making financial services more affordable and accessible for smallholder farmers and other underbanked individuals...

Angani: First Operational Cloud Service in East Africa

  12 May 2015

Last month, Angani launched first operational cloud service in East Africa: Angani, the first fully automated cloud infrastructure company in the region, today officially launched their cloud and hosting services. Angani also announced their partnership with local data center operators that will make it safe and cost effective to provision...

Colombia's Festival on the Value of Data in Development

  24 April 2015

The Cartagena Data Festival has just wrapped up in Cartagena, Colombia. The festival is an international event committed to discussing data deployment for human development and related topics, like open data, data journalism, big data, and other analysis tools. The festival, which ran from April 20 to April 22 and took place in...

Tracking Infrastructure Damage in the War in Yemen

Hundreds of people have been reportedly killed in fighting in Yemen since Saudi Arabia launched a military campaign against the country on March 26. Backed by its Gulf Arab allies, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco,and Sudan, Saudi Arabia started an airstrike operation, dubbed Decisive Storm, against Houthi fighters who took control of...

Mapping Vietnam's Socio-Economic Indicators

  28 March 2015

The World Bank has launched mapVIETNAM, an interactive map that shows various socio-economic indicators in Vietnam such as poverty rates, employment, and electricity connectivity. The photo above shows the number of households living on $2 dollars a day. Using the map, we can see that poverty rates are high in...

Documenting the Systematic Decline of Women's Rights in Macedonia

  25 March 2015

Although southeast European countries are progressive in many other ways, the decline of women's reproductive rights in some Western Balkan countries has been a worrying trend. In Macedonia, several small protests have been held in recent years to demonstrate people's opposition to government involvement in determining public sentiment on issues...

Call for Urgent Climate Change Action After Cyclone Pam Devastates Vanuatu

  17 March 2015

Following the devastation of Pacific islands nation Vanuatu by Category 5 Cyclone Pam, John Englart (aka @Takvera) looks at links with climate change: Vanuatu has suffered its worst disaster on record with the impact of Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Pam, with the President of Vanuatu blaming climate change for extreme...

Fast-Growing City of El Alto Turns Thirty

  6 March 2015

Relatively young by Bolivian city standards, the city of El Alto celebrates its 30th anniversary on March 6th, 2015. What initially started as a small suburb of the city of La Paz, the seat of government located 4,070 meters above sea level, it became its own municipality in 1985. It...