State Dept Teams With Entrepreneurs to Unleash African Tech Talent

People working there will tell you that we're entering a new era of African talent, and it's being largely facilitated by the explosion in affordable mobile technology and computing power. Yesterday the State Department announced "Apps 4 Africa," a collaboration with Kenya's iHub incubator, Appfrica, and SODNET to get East African web developers designing applications to help their communities and countries.

Of all the social entrepreneur subcommunities, it's hard to find one as consistently creative, dynamic, and successfully collaborative as the group focused on unleashing African technology talent. While many of the organizations and individuals in the community have been involved much longer, as a whole it burst into many people's view a few years ago with the launch of Ushahidi.

Ushahidi began as a call by Keynan blogger Ory Okolloh to the East African tech community to help figure out a way to better track and create a collective memory of the violence that spread in the wake of the 2008 disputed elections. Since then, it has create an open platform that has been used to track violence, elections, and disaster response. Recently, many of the folks behind the platform have helped launch the iHub, an incubator and coworking space for Kenyan tech talent in downtown Nairobi.

Not long after that, Appfrica launched. Appfrica includes a media property that is one of the best sources for African tech news and commentary and Appfrica Labs, which is part web development client firm and part incubator for new home built applications. They've done an array of awesome things, including their ongoing work with Ushahidi to create a machine intelligence tool for separating valuable, usable information out of the general social media stream in the wake of a disaster.

The State Department, again displaying the collaborative jones we've written about being impressed with before, is helping coordinate and add weight and heft to the competition. The team at State behind this project include some of the folks who worked with Ushahidi and other civil technology organizations to establish tools for relief in Haiti after the January earthquake.

The App 4 Africa contest will bring together the African tech community with local civil society. Local organizations will suggest challenge areas ranging from better development information to governance reporting issues to whatever they can dream up, which will seed the field of applications that developers will be asked to build.

Citizens can submit ideas through a variety of social media means, and the contest is open to any developers from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. International folks can participate as mentors if they have valuable skills to contribute.

The contest runs through August 31st. Check out the Apps 4 Africa website to learn more.

Photo credit: Barcamp Nairobi at iHub by whiteafrican