Tag Archives: Africa

Creating connections at our 2023 Africa partner meetup

Post Syndicated from Isabel Ronaldson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/2023-global-clubs-partner-meetup-africa/

We partner with organisations around the world to bring coding activities to young people in their regions through Code Club and CoderDojo. Currently involving 54 organisations in 43 countries, this Global Clubs Partner network shares our passion for educating kids to create with technology.

Global Clubs Partners in Africa.

We work to connect our Global Clubs Partners to foster a sense of community and encourage collaboration. As part of this, we run in-person meetups to allow our partners to get to know each other better, and to help us understand how we can best support them, and what we can learn from them. Previously held in Penang, Malaysia, and Almere, the Netherlands, our latest meetup took place in Cape Town, South Africa.

Connecting through stories and experiences

Although we’ve seen some surprising points of commonality among all Global Clubs Partners, we also know that our partners find it helpful to connect with organisations based in their region. For the Cape Town meetup, we invited partner organisations from across Africa, hoping to bring together as many people as possible.

Global Clubs Partners in Africa.

Our aim was to give our partners the opportunity to share their work and identify and discuss common questions and issues. We also wanted to mitigate some of the challenges of working internationally, such as time constraints, time zones, and internet connectivity, so that everyone could focus on connecting with each other.

Global Clubs Partners in Africa.

The meetup agenda included time for each Global Clubs Partner organisation to present their work and future plans, as well as time for discussions on growing and sustaining club volunteer and mentor communities, strategy for 2024, and sharing resources. 

“If the only thing rural communities have is problems, why are people still living there? … Rural communities have gifts, have skills, they have history that is wasting away right now; nobody is capturing it. They have wisdom and assets.”

Damilola Fasoranti from Prikkle Academy, Nigeria, talking about not making assumptions about rural communities and how this shapes the work his organisation does

A group dinner after the meetup enabled more informal networking. The next day, everyone had the chance to get inspired at Coolest Projects South Africa, a regional Coolest Projects event for young tech creators organised by partner organisation Coder LevelUp.

Global Clubs Partners in Africa.

The meetup gave the Global Clubs Partners time to talk to each other about their work and experiences and understand one another better. It was also very beneficial for our team: we learned more about how we can best support partners to work in their communities, whether through new resources, information about funding applications, or best practice in overcoming challenges.

Building bridges

After attending a previous meetup, two of our partner organisations had decided to create an agreement for future partnership. We were delighted to learn about this collaboration, and to witness the signing of the agreement at this meetup.

Global Clubs Partners in Africa.

By continuing to bring our partner network together, we hope to foster more cross-organisation partnerships like this around the world that will strengthen the global movement for democratising computing education.

Could your organisation become a Global Clubs Partner?

You can find out how your organisation could join our Global Clubs Partner network on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly with your questions or ideas about a partnership.

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AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Post Syndicated from David Belson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/aae-1-smw5-cable-cuts/

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.

The impact

Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries
AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn peers with larger global providers like Telecom Italia (TI) Sparkle, which is one of the owners of SMW5.

In addition to impacting end-user connectivity in the impacted countries, the cable cuts also reportedly impacted cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud. In their incident report, Google Cloud noted “Google Cloud Networking experienced increased packet loss for egress traffic from Google to the Middle East, and elevated latency between our Europe and Asia Regions as a result, for 3 hours and 12 minutes, affecting several related products including Cloud NAT, Hybrid Connectivity and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a capacity shortage following two simultaneous fiber-cuts.” OVHcloud noted that “Backbone links between Marseille and Singapore are currently down” and that “Upon further investigation, our Network OPERATION teams advised that the fault was related to our partner fiber cuts.”

When concurrent disruptions like those highlighted above are observed across multiple countries in one or more geographic areas, the culprit is often a submarine cable that connects the impacted countries to the global Internet. The impact of such cable cuts will vary across countries, largely due to the levels of redundancy that they may have in place. That is, are these countries solely dependent on an impacted cable for global Internet connectivity, or do they have redundant connectivity across other submarine or terrestrial cables? Additionally, the location of the country relative to the cable cut will also impact how connectivity in a given country may be affected. Due to these factors, we didn’t see a similar impact across all of the countries connected to the AAE-1 and SMW5 cables.

What happened?

Specific details are sparse, but as noted above, the cable damage reportedly occurred in Egypt – both of the impacted cables land in Abu Talat and Zafarana, which also serve as landing points for a number of other submarine cables. According to a 2021 article in Middle East Eye, “There are 10 cable landing stations on Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea coastlines, and some 15 terrestrial crossing routes across the country.” Alan Mauldin, research director at telecommunications research firm TeleGeography, notes that routing cables between Europe and the Middle East to India is done via Egypt, because there is the least amount of land to cross. This places the country in a unique position as a choke point for international Internet connectivity, with damage to infrastructure locally impacting the ability of millions of people thousands of miles away to access websites and applications, as well as impacting connectivity for leading cloud platform providers.

As the graphs above show, traffic returned to normal levels within a matter of hours, with tweets from telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Oman also noting that Internet services had returned to their countries. Such rapid repairs to submarine cable infrastructure are unusual, as repair timeframes are often measured in days or weeks, as we saw with the cables damaged by the volcanic eruption in Tonga earlier this year. This is due to the need to locate the fault, send repair ships to the appropriate location, and then retrieve the cable and repair it. Given this, the damage to these cables likely occurred on land, after they came ashore.

Keeping content available

By deploying in data centers close to end users, Cloudflare helps to keep traffic local, which can mitigate the impact of catastrophic events like cable cuts, while improving performance, availability, and security. Being able to deliver content from our network generally requires first retrieving it from an origin, and with end users around the world, Cloudflare needs to be able to reach origins from multiple points around the world at the same time. However, a customer origin may be reachable from some networks but not from others, due to a cable cut or some other network disruption.

In September 2021, Cloudflare announced Orpheus, which provides reachability benefits for customers by finding unreachable paths on the Internet in real time, and guiding traffic away from those paths, ensuring that Cloudflare will always be able to reach an origin no matter what is happening on the Internet.

Conclusion

Because the Internet is an interconnected network of networks, an event such as a cable cut can have a ripple effect across the whole Internet, impacting connectivity for users thousands of miles away from where the incident occurred. Users may be unable to access content or applications, or the content/applications may suffer from reduced performance. Additionally, the providers of those applications may experience problems within their own network infrastructure due to such an event.

For network providers, the impact of such events can be mitigated through the use of multiple upstream providers/peers, and diverse physical paths for critical infrastructure like submarine cables. Cloudflare’s globally deployed network can help content and application providers ensure that their content and applications remain available and performant in the face of network disruptions.

Growing Raspberry Pi’s presence in Africa

Post Syndicated from Ken Okolo original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/growing-raspberry-pis-presence-in-africa/

Raspberry Pi is growing our presence in Africa, and we’re keen to talk to businesses and educational organisations in the region to learn and to build partnerships.

Developing partnerships

As part of our investments in the region, I am delighted to join Raspberry Pi as Strategic Partnerships Manager, and initially I will be focusing on Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Uganda. We will prioritise building a network of Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers and developing the right partnerships across industry and the education sector.

Uber's First Hackathon in Lagos
Uber’s First Hackathon in Lagos, Nigeria

Ensuring affordability with Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers

Over the last decade, Raspberry Pi has established a strong presence in the European and North American markets through partnership with our network of excellent Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers, providing access to affordable technology for the home, for business, and for education. Customers in many areas across Asia and the Pacific, too, have a choice of Approved Resellers offering Raspberry Pi products.

So far, our presence in Africa has been through our approved reseller PiShop in South Africa, which also has some commercial operations into other countries in southern Africa. Much of West, East, and North Africa has been underserved, and consumers in these regions have often obtained Raspberry Pi products via e-commerce websites in Europe, North America, and sometimes China. This has meant high costs of shipping products into Africa, which undermines our goal of ensuring affordability and availability across the continent. To address this, we have begun work to provide African customers with easy and reliable access to Raspberry Pi products at an affordable price point.

Supporting technological innovation

Africa has seen an explosion of technological advances in recent years, with investors funding innovative businesses built around technology. The continent is facing challenges ranging from accessibility to uninterrupted energy supplies, climate change, enabling agricultural potential, and building smart cities, and Africa’s mainly young population is meeting them head on.

Random Hacks of Kindness, a two-day hackathon. “RHoK Nairobi, Kenya” by Erik (HASH) Hersman / CC BY

While there is no shortage of innovative ideas, there is a real need for the right equipment and tools to support this ecosystem of makers, hobbyists, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Raspberry Pi is poised to close this gap.

Get in touch

Over the next couple of months, we will be planning a tour of our focus countries to visit the leadership of engineering associations and bodies, engaging with engineering student communities and maker spaces on the continent and building strategic alliances to deepen our inroads in the region. As Covid restrictions are eased, we will be visiting several countries on the continent to help us discover how we can best provide products and services that directly impact the region by ensuring access to low-cost, high-quality technology.

ken okolo crop
Ken Okolo

Could your African retail business meet our high standards for Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers, or could your educational organisation or your enterprise benefit from affordable desktop computers? Do your products require embedded computing power, or could your business grow with low-cost, low-power process monitoring or control? Get in touch with us by emailing: [email protected]. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

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Raspberry Pi reaches more schools in rural Togo

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-reaches-more-schools-in-rural-togo/

We’ve been following the work of Dominique Laloux since he first got in touch with us in May 2013 ahead of leaving to spend a year in Togo. 75% of teachers in the region where he would be working had never used a computer before 2012, so he saw an opportunity to introduce Raspberry Pi and get some training set up.

We were so pleased to receive another update this year about Dominique and his Togolese team’s work. This has grown to become INITIC, a non-profit organisation that works to install low cost, low power consumption, low maintenance computer rooms in rural schools in Togo. The idea for the acronym came from the organisation’s focus on the INItiation of young people to ICT (TIC in French).

Visit the INTIC website to learn more

The story so far

INITIC’s first computer room was installed in Tokpli, Togo, way back in 2012. It was a small room (see the photo on the left below) donated by an agricultural association and renovated by a team of villagers.

Fast forward to 2018, and INTIC had secured its own building (photo on the right above). It has a dedicated a Raspberry Pi Room, as well as a multipurpose room and another small technical room. Young people from local schools, as well as those in neighbouring villages, have access to the facilities.

The first dedicated Raspberry Pi Room in Togo was at the Collège (secondary school) in the town of Kuma Adamé. It was equipped with 21 first-generation Raspberry Pis, which stood up impressively against humid and dusty conditions.

In 2019, Kpodzi High School also got its own Raspberry Pi Room, equipped with 22 Raspberry Pi workstations. Once the projector, laser printer, and scanners are in place, the space will also be used for electronics, Arduino, and programming workshops.

What’s the latest?

Ready for the unveiling…

Now we find ourselves in 2020 and INTIC is still growing. Young people in the bountiful, but inaccessible, village of Danyi Dzogbégan now have access to 20 Raspberry Pi workstations (plus one for the teacher). They have been using them for learning since January this year.

We can’t wait to see what Dominique and his team have up their sleeve next. You can help INTIC reach more young people in rural Togo by donating computer equipment, by helping teachers get lesson materials together, or through a volunteer stay at one of their facilities. Find out more here.

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