Mac-Jordan Degadjor's Blog

Yesterday during lunch at the Pizza Inn on the Ngong Road by the Uchumi Supermarket, the question about the number of Ghanaians on Facebook came up again after it was reported that, Ghana is the least country that uses the micro-blogging platform – Twitter.

On February 12th, I left Accra en-route to Nairobi to work on a project by Blogging Ghana – #BLOGH on Ethiopian Airways with a 3hr lay-over in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We touched down at Bole International Airport (formerly known as Haile Selassie I International Airport) at approximately 20:45 GMT+1 local time. Arrival: I was very impressed with the clean nature of the airport and how the security guards were available to assist with any questions ranging from transfers/transits to baggage [...]

Most people these days  think the social networking tool – Twitter is an American or European phenomenon, but you’ll be surprised how heavily it is been used on the African continent based on research findings by Portland Communications and Tweetminster from the last three (October, November & December) months of 2011. Twitter map: how Africa tweets Young people tweeting from mobile devices are driving the growth of Twitter in Africa. This pan-African analysis of Twitter traffic was complemented by a [...]

While researching towards this article, I couldn’t use any quote to support my opening than borrowing this from the BBC: “Democracy does not begin and end with the ballot box” I vividly remember how the socio-political and economic grievances in Tunisia forced the computer science graduate- turned-fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself ablaze on Dec 17, 2010 which sparked the Arab Spring. On Jan. 14, just 10 days after Bouazizi died President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali‘s 23-year rule [...]

Tomorrow; 6th Jan, 2012 – Rhapsody’s Restaurant & Pub located inside the plush Accra Mall will serve as the venue for the first Venture Capitalist for Africa – VC4Africa Meetup from 6:00pm till 9:00pm. What is a VC4Africa Meetup? Second to networking online, VC4Africa makes use of the Barcamp model (an international network of user generated conferences – open, participatory workshop/events, whose content is provided by participants) to organize our very own series of VC4Africa Meetups. We like this open [...]

Re-blog from How We Made It In Africa From “the hopeless continent” to “Africa rising” – how The Economist made a U-turn on Africa. In May 2000, respected magazine The Economist on its cover called Africa “the hopeless continent”. One of the articles painted a picture of a continent ravaged by war, famine and disease. “Floods in Mozambique; threats of famine in Ethiopia (again); mass murder in Uganda; the implosion of Sierra Leone; and a string of wars across the [...]

Congratulations to the winners of the App 4 Climate Challenge (West Africa). From the Apps4Africa Blog: 1st prize $15,000 – HospitalManager by Victor Ogo Ekwueme (Nigeria) HospitalManager is a web-based application that helps hospitals and health organizations prepare for disasters such as floods and storms. More frequent heat spells, rains, and floods are leading to heath emergencies, both due to the event itself, and later to water related disease. HospitalManager will help hospitals in Nigeria, and potentially throughout Africa, identify [...]

Congratulations to Bright B. Simmons (TED Fellow) named one of the top mobile health innovators of 2011 by the mHealth Alliance and Rockefeller Foundation. Bright Simmons is the founder of mPedigree, a mobile phone and cloud-computing platform designed to combat counterfeit drugs by providing instant, free access via text-messaging to a drug quality verification system in Africa and South Asia. His work is channeled through his mPedigree Network and the IMANI research institute, ranked as one of the world’s 20 [...]

Erik Hersman asks us to shed outdated notions of Africa as a unified place plagued by starvation and war. Between mobile phone innovations like M-PESA, social networking like MXit and entrepreneurial spaces like Maker Faire Africa, Hersman sees innovation and entrepreneurship exploding within some of Africa’s—and the world’s—fastest growing economies.

Cross-posting from VC4Africa Blog This past weekend, Startup Weekend Accra took place at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in East-Legon, an area in Ghana’s capital Accra. The event was sold out and attracted more than 100 attendees. On the last day (of the three day event) the winner was announced: Dropifi – an online messaging platform that turns contacts of large and small scale businesses into loyal customers. Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketeers and startup enthusiasts [...]

In this era of mobile technology booming in Africa and Dual SIM phones becoming the preferred choice in most African countries; mobile phone manufacturing giant; Nokia also stepped into the market with their latest Nokia C2-00 (GSM+GSM). The Nokia C2-00 seems like a mid-range phone from the nineties at first, but this modest handset actually makes a lot of sense, and use. Being a dual-SIM, dual-standby phone is the obvious highlight: you can have two active phone lines in the [...]

Nokia has stated it has a broad portfolio of mobile devices specifically targeted at the African market for its African market. Blanca Juti Nokia’s Vice President Product Marketing Mobile Phones made this known during the just concluded Nokia World conference held in London. According to her, Nokia acknowledges that even though most people in the continent have the aspiration and the need to communicate, not everyone can afford a supper high phone that is why the company has designed a [...]