My visit to Abalimi Bezekhaya

Books to read, films to see, blogs to connect to and projects to visit

The Fourth Revolution is a revolutionary new book by Jeremie Averous (2011 ISBN 978-967-10358-0-1) see www.jeremieaverous.com.

He reminds us that the underlying catalist for revolutions is always related to a dramatic change in human interpersonal communication and information management capabilities. (Averous 2011, 35)

We have lived through the Hunter-Gatherer Age, the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and now we are in the Collaborative Age. His concept is that we have also lived through revolutions of cognitive capabilities.  The previous ones were speech, (around 100 000 years ago which led into the nomadic Hunter-Gatherer age) writing (around 10 000 years ago, which led into the Agricultural Age) and broadcasting (around 1500AD with the invention of mobile font printing which led into the Industrial Age). Today, ICT's have given us capabilities that we never had before - long distance communication that allows long distance collaboration.  This he calls the Fourth Revolution.

The other Fourth Revolution that I see as the one that will take place in Africa, is the Green Energy Revolution.

The Fourth Revolution: Energy also known as Die 4. Revolution - Energy Autonomy is a German documentary film  by Carl-A. Fechner released in 2010. It is a vision of a global society living in a world where energy is produced 100% with renewable energies.  This will result in a complete reconstruction of the economy. In this film they see the three previous revolutions as the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions and the fourth one as the energy revolution.  I believe the fourth one is the Green Energy as well as the cognitive, ICT Revolution. The production of the film lasted four years and was financed by volunteers. The film was made in 10 different countries to show existing pioneer projects in different cultures. The film was released in Germany in March 2010 and in the USA in March 2011. Hermann Oelsner, CEO of the Darling windfarm has recently obtained the rights to screen the film in public places in South Africa. The documentary features celebrities, top managers, African Mothers, bankers and activists around the world.  Hermann Scheer, chairman of the World Renewable Energy Forum and winner of the Alternative Nobel  Prize said, "A new system of energy autonomy is just about to break through.  It will make energy independent.  The world is facing the greatest structural changes in the economy since the beginning of the industrial age." 

As I watched this documentary showing valleys covered in wind energy turbines and solar panels and as I listen to the heart-warming stories of African scientists and engineers returning home to change their worlds, I knew that something huge is happening in the evolution of mankind and it is happening first in Africa - again. Adaptation is the key world when we talk about evolution, revolution and survival.  In Africa, where many people are without the huge infrastructures of an Eskom, solar energy makes most sense.  Europe with all its luxuries and dependencies will struggle for some time to come to adapt to clean energy, but Africa is ready and waiting.  In many rural settlements where people never had the experience of electricity, solar panels now adorn school and hospital roofs.  The first electricity ever, is from high technology solar panels.  Why would they ever go back to coal-fired electricity?

The first fully electric car developed and built in Africa by Cape Town based company, Optimal Energy, is an excellent example of what the continent could do for itself. I believe out of necessity, Africa will become the pioneering continent for green technology. Do yourselves a favour and try to see the film, The Fourth Revolution - the positive answer to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

In 1999, a book called High Tech High Touch - technology and our search for meaning by John Naisbitt (Random House ISBN 0-7679-0541-5) appeared on the shelves. The book inspired me to always try and find a balance between technology and nature, especially with my young children who are growing up in the age of computers and cell phones.  In Africa with its rich indigenous wisdom and knowledge of the earth, the perfect balance could be found between the ICT platform and the earth.  My pilot research project titled, Back to Earth via Mobile phones: The role of mobile phones to support adaptation to climate change in Africa (Meiring October 2011) I explore this idea.

Abalimi Bezekhaya, the home farmers,  www.abalimi.org.za is another wonderful initiative in Cape Town. I first became aware of Abalimi Bezekhaya and its micro-farmers, in a Mail and Guardian article of 9 September 2011.  Kwanele Sosibo’s report was produced in partnership with The Southern Africa Trust.  In the article, she interviews founder Rob Small, who considers Cape Town’s more than 3000 micro-farmers climate change mitigation experts even if they had never heard of climate change.  He said: 

“Cape Town is South Africa's climate change training ground as the weather here has always been extreme. We have 40°C drought with hot gale-force winds in summer, floods in winter and gale-force southeaster winds in-between. On top of this, our micro-farmers successfully grow abundant top-quality organic crops year round in soil that is beach sand. Everything begins and ends with what we eat. When you buy food, you buy the entire chain of events.  Buying local and organic helps to mitigate the impact of climate change " (mg.co.za/article/2011-09-09-women-at-the-mercy-of-climate-change)

Abalimi operates in the socio-economically neglected townships of Khayelitsha, Nyanga and the surrounding areas on the Cape Flats near Cape Town.  Abalimi means the planters” en Xhosa and Bezekhaya “of the home”.  I arrived at one of the community gardens in Gugulethu on Tuesday 11 October 2011.  The women running the community garden were all over 60 years of age.  They seem to love being in the gardens instead of sitting at home thinking of their aches and pains.  Here they are nurturing seedlings, weeding, composting and they have each other to talk to.  I am surprised at the sandy soil.  They tell me that you just use old newspapers, cardboard, grass, a little bit of compost and then plant their seedlings.  The Harvest for Hope programme now helps these community farmers to sell their produce to larger markets.  We visit the packing shed in Phillipi where box after box of fresh organic produce is packed and delivered at different venues around Cape Town.  They have 200 orders a week and many customers on a waiting list. They dream of having 600 boxes by 2012, but for that more farmers will have to be trained up.  Visit this wonderful initiative by contacting them at info@abalimi.org.za

Mobile phones are becoming the planet’s first common and equalizing communications platform with far-reaching consequences for all global issues. My research study will focus on one of them – climate change.

Developing countries are often at the bottom of the food chain where the latest technology or revolutionary new ideas are concerned - we are too busy surviving.  There is a long wait for technology and new ideas to trickle down to where the developing world can afford them and often by that time it is old hat in the first world.  New technologies are sometimes lost in translation – unsuitable, too Eurocentric to absorb and insensitive to rich, traditional wisdom and knowledge. 

But perhaps these things are about to change.  In Kenya, in April 2010, Amos Gichamba launched his own cell phone application that made the lives of struggling rural dairy farmers a lot easier.  Gichamba created a text message-based system where farmers could send questions to a computer.  The queries are then matched up with a database of information about local dairy markets.  Answers are spit back in 140 characters or less.  (http://edition.cnn.com/2010 /TECH/04/12/africa.apps/index.html (Accessed: 19 October 2012.)

Do yourselves a favour and look at his blog: http://www.amosgichamba.wordpress.com On 30 July 2010, Gichamba wrote in his blog, “In the near future, Africa is going to set up the pace of using mobile technology to transform social, political and economic growth of a country.  Most of these applications are being done by ambitious young people who are passionate about changing Africa using mobile technology. “  But he is not a lone voice.  Jessica Colaco, 28 –year-old mobile developer, who is also a researcher at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya  and who started a “boot camp” for young people who want to become app developers, said in a CNN interview last year, that Africa is taking the lead in developing apps that can be used in rural places and can improve livelihoods.  Colaco’s first mobile app was a smartphone map of Nairobi, which came out in 2007, even before Google had published detailed maps of the area.  Since she lived there, she knew that I was needed and how it needed to be done.  She says, “What we need is more evangelism.  People need to know what Africa is doing – and how they can adopt from us.”  http://edition.cnn.com/2010 /TECH/04/12/africa.apps/index.html

Also hailing from Kenya, is Ory Okolloh who started the mobile-informed web site Ushahidi (meaning “testimony”) when elections in Kenya turned violent in 2007.  She posted reports about the violence on her blog and asked people to comment with their own stories.  She created a site where people could share their stories by text message immediately after a crisis and pared the reports with a map, making the data more useful for crisis responders.  The code that supports the site is now available for free and has been used in the 2009 earthquake in Haiti and a snow storm in Washington DC in 2010. It was also used to map the fall-out from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the xenophobic violence in South Africa.

From Uganda, Jon Gosier is the founder of a company called, AppAfrica, which caters for people who are illiterate or who are not comfortable with text messaging.  They have tested a call-center model which allows farmers to call a free hotline to get information about crop disease.

In May 2011, Africa Nazarene University initiated a Mobile Computing Diploma and Certificate programmes and courses that are aimed at building entrepreneurs, researchers, trainers and software developers who are ready to venture in mobile technology. The course is delivered on flexible times and the cost is relatively low.

These cases of adaptation for Africa by Africa have not yet been documented and explored in formal research studies and current researchers have to rely on websites and internet articles to access these stories.  Yet, it seems that while researchers in the First World are coming up with flashy new games for ipods, people in Africa are solving one of the world’s most daunting problems – adapting to climate change, using one of the first equalizing communications platforms.

One of my heroes...

The Green Energy Revolution in Africa

The Industrial Revolution started in Europe and almost cost us the earth.  I believe the Green Energy Revolution will start in Africa and will bring new life. Today, almost a month ago, on 25 September, one of the great Earth Mothers of our time, died.  Dr Wangari Muta Mary Jo Maathi (1 April 1940 - 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan environmentalist and political activist. She founded the Green Belt Movement which is an environmental and non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation and women's rights.  She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.  Wangari Maathi will be remembered for many things, but also for these words: "In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground.  A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.  That time is now."