The eLearning Africa Conference Photo Competition asked for pictures with the theme Capture this! How ICTs are empowering people across Africa. The VSA submitted 5 pictures including descriptions.
The photo with my favourite description was shortlisted for the Jury Vote! Congratulations to Thozi Ngeju who was supervising the HIV project that is described in the photo and to Philisiwe Mbongwana, the CE volunteer who took the photo!
Upstarters being aware (link to competition)
“An innovative, true multimedia project that drew a lot of attention: The Village Scribe Association (international NGO) and eKhaya ICT (South African local IT business) developed a social networking software awareNet especially designed to be used largely offline, adapting to rural and peri-urban setting. Eastern Cape learners benefit from free lessons and a partnership with the Zazi Foundation for educational video content about health: teachAIDS videos, provided by the Stanford University School of Education. Inspired by the World AIDS Day 2010, learners collaboratively worked on a project about HIV/AIDS in wiki style. Certain parts of this projects were selected online by the Management of Grocott’s Mail, Grahamstown’s independent newspaper, to be included in the November 2010 Upstart supplement (The Paper for Youth by Youth). Here you can see the learners proudly reading their articles in the Upstart Paper. The photograph was taken by Rhodes University Community Engagement volunteers who work with the learners on several projects on awareNet. Together they started an awareNet photo project in which photos for the ‘eLearning Africa Photo Competition 2011’ were taken, uploaded, described, and chosen for submission.”
My favourite photograph was taken by Lutz Scharf. It was ranked 3rd place (out of 126 submitted photos) by the online-voters. Congratulations again!
When power is more of a problem than owning a cell (link to competition)
“The barber shop in Nkwalini, South Africa, allows cell phone owners to recharge their coll phones for a fee of three Rand. The photo illustrates the influence of ICTs on the lives of the community, depicting a socio-technical interface between traditional and modern culture: the barber shop is not merely a filling station for empty cell phone batteries, it is at the same time a social meeting place where gossip is exchanged and social connections are groomed. Traditional and modern communication pathways meet and cross here in an innovative manner that highlights just one of the many positive influences of ICTs.”