Kenya is the global hotspot for all things mobile money.  The two chief payment systems, Safaricom M-PESA and Zain Zap, not only share ten million subscribers, but moved ten percent of Kenyan gross domestic product last year.  According to Danson Muchemi, Philip Nyamwaya and Agosta Liko, the respective CEOs of JamboPay, iPay and PesaPal, those figures represent a massive market opportunity.

Danson highlights “very low banking services penetration” as the impetus behind JamboPay, the first online payment gateway in Kenya that processes credit & debit cards.  By topping up an “online purse” via credit/debit card or mobile money, JamboPay enables users to buy online goods from Kenyan merchants without exposing their information.  Unbanked users can access the service by topping up their accounts via mobile money.  Ultimately, JamboPay aims to mitigate the same market failure that gave rise to PayPal in the West: the need for secure and multi-channel access to e-commerce.

By now you may have seen or heard of 2012, the movie that is.

I only saw it recently, and only by the grace of KLM’s onboard entertainment system. It is standard fare from the apocalypse genre. The Earth has a cyclical destiny, which involves at crucial points in this cycle a confrontation with some life-wiping monstrosity. In the movie 2012, the choice of monstrosity is also pretty standard fare – a disease in the Earth’s crust, mangling the Earth’s magnetic field, displacing the continents, and necessitating the building of a new Noah-type ark – or rather a number of them.

I was not so much worried about the plausibility of this disaster movie as I was about its fatalist non-consequentialism. There isn’t much we can do about unpredictable Earth-chewing bugs now, is there? To all intents and purposes, whatever moral was in the tale of 2012 can't matter much to the lives of you and me.

I have had another kind of apocalypse in mind these past few weeks. It would make for a most underwhelming disaster movie though, and I have no intent of dramatizing the issue. But as quasi-seismic events in the health of the species go – and the fate of the species and the planet are much conjoined nowadays, are they not? – this one is worth at least a cursory thought.

Also published on the TechSoup Blog.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago about Fab Lab, a network of community-operated workshops springing up all over the world. I was excited about Fab-Fi, Fab Lab's name for the simple directional antennas they're using to build a mesh wireless network all over Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

Of course, to get the full effect of what's cool about Fab Lab, it's useful to take a step back. Fab Lab isn't about free wi-fi; it's about providing people with tools to produce whatever they want, tools that were inaccessible to consumers only a few years ago. Afghans are using the same set of tools to bring the Internet to Jalalabad that this young man in south Boston used to build an electric violin:

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a meeting at Georgetown University, which featured TLG Capital and members of Quality Chemical Industries Limited (QCIL). QCIL is the first World Health Organization-approved pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in sub-sarahan Africa. Their goals, which include expanding accessibility of antimalarial and antirevtrovirals by guaranteeing affordability and quality drugs.

Their state-of-the-art facility looks like it could be found in any technology park in a "developed" country. I had the privilege of watching a full-length video tour of the facility at the event. Though I do not have access to that film, here is a shorter clip which is styled as a welcome video for visitors.

You can see the high level of detail paid to maintaining a highly sterile and secure facility. Be sure to check out some other photos of the facility. The products they manufacture are Duovir-N, the antiretroviral for HIV/AIDS treatment and Lumartem, the combination drug which is used to treat malaria (also know as ACT).

This post contributed by Ashley Metz Cummings.

Across the globe, the computers used in underfunded schools share similar characteristics.  Outdated hardware grumbles to a start each morning to serve classrooms crowded with children.  Slow processors and limited storage space confine the possibilities for learning computer skills and using the Internet.  The students in these classrooms have never dreamt of owning their own PCs and cannot fathom the world on the other side of an Internet connection – they have enough on their minds at home.

Yet in many of these places, the speed of the Internet connection is ample for mainstream computing purposes and children are eager and excited to learn.  WiHood, a name originating in the phrase, The World is Your Neighbor, offers a virtual personal PC that overcomes the physical barriers to digital learning by making clever use of cloud computing and modified USB drives.

On this week's episode of the AshokaTECH Podcast, host Alex Budak interviews Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org.

Founded in 2005, Change.org seeks to be the central platform informing and empowering movements for social change around the most important issues of our time.  From homelessness to genocide, health care to human trafficking, global warming, and more, Change.org leverages technology and social media to connect people with one another and organizations to advance their common causes.  

Alex gets Ben's take on how technology is changing the game for non-profits, strategies for striking a balance between being a competitive organization while not being motivated solely by profits, and what his experience suggests to counter critiques of so-called online "slacktivism."

As always, be sure to follow Alex on Twitter, @TheBudak, for updates on the podcast and your chance to have your own questions answered in future interviews.

SocialEdge kicked off a new discussion yesterday, led by Ashoka's own Rosa Wang.  Continuing on the heels of Tech4Society earlier this month, here's where the discussion starts:

"Technology & Social Innovations

Developing technologies that solve the right problems can be enormously challenging, and then bringing them to the people who need them even more so. Social entrepreneurs from around the world met in Hyderabad earlier this month to share what they have learned about the challenges and successes of technological innovation to serve the poor. Let’s take this further in our discussion here."

Rosa shares a bit about the attendees, connections, learning and conversations what went on at Hyderabad, and opens the same questions to the rest of us:

In the realm of Global Health (and other sectors) the call for measuring changes in global health outcomes is increasingly strong. Considering the multi-millions of dollars that are spent on certain initiatives, these claims are not unfounded.

Although not a health outcome improvement per se, a recent BBC News article highlighted a major breakthrough in the field of vaccine delivery.

Oxford University scientists, in collaboration with Nova Bio-Pharma Technologies, have found a way to keep vaccines stable without refrigeration. Their research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The research findings were published in the February Issue of Science Translational Medicine and the free abstract is available here.

The Tech Awards, a signature program of The Tech Museum, honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to address humanity’s most urgent challenges.

This is a great opportunity for social innovators in tech and invention, for funding and for recognition.  Last year, Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Joseph Adelegan won the cash prize in his category for his "Cows to Kilowats" program, and Fellows Howard Weinstein and Bright Simons were named Laureates for their work creating the Solar Ear and mPedigree, respectively.

Image Source: Kopernik

Kopernik is a group of former UN workers and today, Feb 19th, they are launching Kopernik—www.thekopernik.org—an online store of technology designed for the developing world.

According to Ewa Wojkowska, Co-Founder of Kopernik:

"The technology addresses simple but critical needs—solar power, self-adjusting eyeglasses and quick water filtration, for example.  

As Haiti continues to clear the rubble, as a measure of stability comes to Sudan, as Sri Lanka holds a bitter peace, a new development opportunity presents itself in some of the world’s poorest and most troubled places."

Here is their press release announcing the launch: