Africa

On Tuesday April 25, Dr Nancy J. Hafkin and 32 others were inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. Dr Hafkin was awarded the title of Global Connector for helping to spread internet use in Africa over the course of a twenty-three year career as “a pioneer and innovator in the area of networking, development information, and electronic communications.”

The Internet can strengthen human rights through the enhancement of the realization of freedom of expression, allowing people to receive information and seek to impart it as required in article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

How Africa tweets: visualised Twitter is often thought of as a European and American phenomenon. But how does Africa use the social networking tool? Tweetminster and Portland have analysed more than 11.5m geo-located Tweets from the last three months of 2011.

Technology doesn’t change the world, how we use it does Last night, at an award ceremony in London organised and hosted by Index on Censorship , Kubatana won the award for Innovation in media technology for our Freedom Fone project. Our information officer Upenyu Makoni-Muchemwa was there to receive the award. Freedom Fo

SANGONeT turns 25 in 2012. To celebrate this achievement, SANGONeT’s CEO, David Barnard, will run 750km across three deserts on three continents as part of the annual SANGONeT “No Pain No Gain” campaign. Now in its third year, the 2012 campaign will be bigger and more challenging than ever before.

In recent months we have seen the notion of “Internet as a Human right” become quite controversial. On the one hand we see folk like Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol maintain that “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself”.

Information Communication Technology policy covers the Telecommunications, the Radio-TV and the Internet and are critical at that moment with two issues: access and civil liberties. Africa is the continent with the least access to the ICTs even if every had already access to Internet; it is a need to redefine sectoral policies, regulations and boundaries institutions.

Last year events in North Africa and the Middle East showed how ICT and media may have an impact on the future of people and countries. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt was successful mainly thanks to social media.