A Village telco is a community based telephone network. It is based on a suite of open source applications that enable entrepreneurs to set up and operate a telephone service in a specific area or supporting the needs of a specific community [1].

The first village telco has been established by Dabba at Orange Farm, a township near Johannesburg, South Africa. Users can make free local calls to other Dabba subscribers, as well as use pay-as-you-go vouchers to make calls to ‘phones on other networks [2].

Technically, a village telco consists of:

• a mesh network made up of Wi-Fi mini-routers combined with an analogue telephone adaptor (aka ‘Mesh Potato’)
• SIP phones
• a pay-as-you-go billing and management system
• a SIP/VOIP server
• least cost routing equipment

These components together comprise an easy-to-use, standards-based, wireless, local, do-it-yourself, telephone company toolkit. The goal of bringing these together is to make local telephony in developing countries to be so cheap as to be virtually free. This has become possible thanks to advances in open source telephony software and the dramatic decrease in the cost of wireless broadband technology.

Meena Kadri
Maker Faire Africa is dubbed a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and invention. What is the nature of the celebration?

Emeka Okafor
Many DIY-types — designers, inventors, hackers and tinkerers — in Africa work in isolation, so part of the celebration is about bringing them together to enhance, cross-pollinate and provide insights into the wider impact of their innovations on society. Taking the focus away from extractive ventures, we instead focus on those that are doing, making and producing. Globally there is a re-examination of manufacturing, production and design that is moving past the classical industrial sense and pointing to more distributed forms of production. Moving beyond mere celebration, there is also an interest in the interchange between these emerging global dynamics and local inspiration in Africa. This speaks to a far-reaching conversation in which the questions are posed: “How do we regain our creativity? How do we redefine what we mean by a society that is advanced?”

More here

Match a Maker is a great way of  helping each other, you can offer someone advice on design or technologies for example and perhaps gain advice or help on funding or mentorship. There are so many ways to ‘match’

At the live event in Ghana,  lots of matches were made, for example: a man working on biocarburant found a mentor to further develop his business model, an inventor needing AutoCad skills was linked with the FabLab in Ghana, a shea butter maker was linked with a fabricator for a new machine to do same, a local children’s community organisation was linked to FM radio sender makers and  a Ugandan man was linked to a mentor for developing his bicycle driven medical care service.

Now we want to continue this momentum online. So see if you can help ‘match’ people to take inventing and making to the next step.
We are also working on a fully fledged platform to support the same types of matching but then globally. We envisage liking this to a ‘Whuffie‘ type approach to reward people who match others. You can help us design and build this full platform, if you have suggestion are are willing to volunteer time to get this platform up,  running and connected please mail us

Patrica Temma Bio and friend - Emer's match @makerfairafrica

Dominic Wanjihia's "Evapocooler," used to keep Somali herders' milk cool, profiled at Afrigadget.com

Thanks to the generosity of an MFA supporter, Kenyan inventor Dominic Wanjihia will be attending Maker Faire Africa. Dominic, who first came to the anonymous donor’s attention through an article published on AfriGadget in 2008, describes himself as, “an inventor of appropriate technology, environmentally friendly gadgets applicable to … the empowerment of rural people.” Among his inventions are:

1. The Malaria Integrated Vector Management (IVM) Disc
2. An evaporative cooler
3. A solar food dryer
4. A food smoker for meat and fish
5. A shallow well – deep well water pump
6. An eco-friendly pest exterminator, mainly for moles and termites

We’re looking forward to meeting Dominic in August and expect that he will benefit greatly from the opportunity to interact with other appropriate technology inventors like Amy Smith of the International Development Design Summit.