Category: blogafrica

Basel to Blantyre and back

My daily routine has engulfed me already. But I want to add some notes on my recent visit to Blantyre. And point you to some photos. And travel tips. Let’s start with the travel tips: A very favourable recent development for Blantyre-bound travellers is the fact that Ethiopian Airlines now flies to Malawi’s commercial centre […]

Read more

Tagaroo and other links

Pêle-mêle off the top my head: In my daily reads, I stumbled across a WordPress plugin called Tagaroo. It reminded me of Zemanta. I haven’t tried it out. But I guess the interesting part is that it is being sponsored/developed by media giant Thomson Reuters as part of the Calais project. As usual I’ve been […]

Read more

Zemanta

I am learning a lot from the African blogs I am reading… App+frica recently wrote about useful web applications for bloggers in developing countries. In his list he mentions Zemanta: Zemanta, which just scored a new round of funding from Union Square Ventures, is a huge time saving tool. It’s a browser-side plug-in that scans […]

Read more

The African Cookbook Project

just read about the African Cookbook Project. You can submit your favourite African recipe at: questions (at) betumi.com. Off the top of my head and based on the recipes I’ve published here at Chiperoni.ch, I would say banana bread. I’m sending an email to Blantyre to ask my mom…

Read more

Windmill builder

Lunch over IP on young Malawi windmill inventor: William Kamkwamba, a 15-year-old Malawian (…) built a windmill in his rural village based on a picture he saw in a book. He used old bicycle parts, wooden poles, plastic pipes, and an old car battery for energy storage. The windmill now powers four lights and two […]

Read more

in the summertime

I tried to capture today’s awesomely red fireball of a sunset in Basel. My cameraphone snapshot doesn’t quite do it justice. But heh, that’s one moment in time captured and stored and uploaded and tagged and online. Stumbled across this blog entry: We googled you! And it definitely raises an important discussion point… what will […]

Read more

Malawi bloggers

When I started blogging back in Jan 2003, one of my high flying and lofty ideas was to help cross the digital divide and point to content about Malawi. A goal I haven’t really managed to keep. But from time to time I’ve pointed to various Malawi sites. It’s great to see that the number […]

Read more

Free Software for Malawi

Alex Antener presents a talk on his Malawi projects: Freie Software – Eine Chance für Afrika, (in German) Very interesting, and lots of screens with GNU Linux. [update] The official recording of the talk is available online.

Read more

Malawi bloggers on Madonna

My Google alert for news on Malawi has never had so many US and European articles as in the past months. All because of Madonna. Topics such as the last General Elections or bad harvests – which have a much bigger impact – were only covered by the usual outlets (BBC World, CNN). I remember […]

Read more

well-intentioned, but…

stumbled across this well-intentioned attempt to increase the salary of Malawi’s health personnel in Joanne’s blog: Sometime last year DFID (the British development agency) decided to give money specifically to increase the salaries of nurses and clinicians, the thought being that this would help with retention of health workers. Unfortunately, the government decided that the […]

Read more

Babycatcher

A nurse midwife writes about her work experience in Lilongwe – sad and heart-wrenching with glimpses of hope. I found a Quicktime movie about her work, but I can’t view it on my Windoze machine, even though I have the required Quicktime player. [update] The video now works but it’s on a slowish server.

Read more