Planet Arduino

Afrimakers is a initiative born to inspire young African makers and plant the seed of local change through social entrepreneurship, digital fabrication and regional collaboration.

Its main promoter is HacKIDemia, a global organisation based in Berlin that enables future changemakers to access and create a hands-on science, technology, art, engineering and design education that will enable them to solve challenges by developing and testing creative solutions and physical artifacts.

They launched a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo to create maker workshops focused on local challenges in 7 hubs around Africa, to activate training paths and work with young people (potentially Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt ).

Stefania Druga, HacKIDemia founder, strongly believes that:

“Learning by doing and by playing comes natural to children as they have an innate curiosity. With HacKIDemia hands-on workshops we try to encourage and develop that curiosity and give them tools to transform their dreams into reality. The sooner they start the better.”

Each of the seven hubs will receive a maker kit which consists of several components, among which also Arduino Uno boards, and a local team will then be recruited and trained by HacKIDemia to organize and run hands-on workshops in local private and public schools.

They are running an indiegogo campaign and 2 hubs got already funded. CHech the video below and help them fund the rest!

We are really excited  to be included in the 2013 Nominet Trust 100 which celebrates inspiring examples of ventures from around the world that are using tech to accelerate social change.

The Nominet Trust 100 Steering Group, this year included; Lord Jim Knight (a consultant specialising in the use of technology in education and employment), Rory Cellan-Jones (Technology Journalist for the BBC), Madhav Chavan (a leading Indian educator, social activist and social entrepreneur) and Jeremy Heimans (Founder and CEO of Purpose).

The list has been launched with a feature by Charlie Leadbeater in the Financial Times weekend, here’s an extract from the article:

From finding lost children in China, to sharing experiences of illness, to using ‘unsmart’ phones to fight corruption – the Nominet Trust has spotlighted 100 groundbreaking applications of digital technology.

…

At Nominet Trust, one of the UK’s leading funders of social technology ventures, we wanted to find out how these digital technologies could help solve big social challenges. We believe such efforts, if implemented effectively, can make a tangible difference to people’s lives, especially in the developing world where there are severe shortages of doctors and teachers, hospitals and schools, and traditional models of providing essential services do not work.
To assess the state of social innovation, we launched the Nominet Trust 100, a project to find and recognise the most inspiring applications of digital technology for social good. From a long list of more than 400, identified by our own research and public nominations, a steering group of experts and opinion formers, led by Annika Small, the trust’s chief executive, has come up with the top 100 projects.
We have taken an optimistic yet pragmatic approach. In selecting our examples, we were looking for three things: inspiring new solutions to difficult problems; impact, at a scale affecting millions of people; and inspiration that could provide an idea or model that others might follow or emulate.

Check the complete list on Social Tech Website.