In my last post I mentioned how Georgina enjoyed the Lion King soundtrack, and indeed so did the rest of our staff. Because of this, Claudia and I had the idea that it would be fun to get the movie and show it to our staff. We planned it out for Wednesday and told our [...]
I often encourage Georgina, our housekeeper, to put on some music while she is working. At first her selections were not too surprising like the Power of One, a movie soundtrack full of beautiful African singing. Then there were weeks when it was nothing but the Lion King. Lately though, I have been surprised. First [...]
Les-Longwe Miserables
Yesterday Geeta blogged a really insightful post about the sad
circumstances of a robbery that happened to some friends of
ours:
“…security guards have often been the ones to steal from
their employers. It begs the question why the very people hired to
enforce the law, so easily break it? Well, to start, I think it has
something to do [...]
Malawi is a small place. The blogging world of Malawi is even smaller, and it makes it all the more fun when the real world intersects the online one.
A few weeks ago a blog popped up on on my Lilongwe search written by Tyler and Anna Sparks, a couple that I had been running with [...]
Recently Claudia and I visited some OIBM clients in a nearby village.
Every client we met greeted us with a proud smile - proud of the
business that OIBM had helped them to setup. The first person we met was
a man who made buckets and watering cans out of sheet metal.
He explained to us how his loan [...]
Ethan Zuckerman is visiting PopTech and posting some really fascinating stuff on his blog. Ethan is a blogger, with a penchant for social networking (often via the blogosphere), and a love for Africa. Here are a few things that I thought appropriate for Hacktivate:
An interesting look into the technology and thinking behind the 100 dollar [...]
Interesting first hand account of a World Food Programme official searching out signs of the famine in Malawi.
My colleague also points out that the steady lines of people walking along the roadsides are an increasingly common sight in this part of Malawi. Most have walked tens of miles to get food from the market because [...]
CFO.com has a good article about microcredit/microfinance with a lot of quotes and stories from Opportunity International.
Advocates of microcredit, also called microfinancing, contend that it’s a modern-day example of the old Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for [...]
I can hardly believe it myself, but yesterday a BBC World Service reporter emailed me after reading Hacktivate and asked if he could interview me about the food crisis in Malawi. I was pretty freaked out, but assented, particularly after realizing that it was for a pilot program - what that means I still am [...]
Yesterday morning I visited the school where the children of our housekeeper attend. By Malawian standards the school was quite wealthy. Indeed this school is situated in a neighborhood filled with ambassadors, wealthy tobacco families, and other expatriates. What makes it wealthy? There was a school building for starters. All of the windows may have [...]
