How a Titanic Telescope Could Equal African Development

Africa is a contender, along with Australia and New Zealand, in a project to build a really huge telescope – the Square Kilometer Array. Although the decision on where to build it won’t be known until late March or early April at the earliest, the project is already in full swing. Made up of 3,000 radio-frequency receivers, it will cover a collective area of 1 square kilometer, hence its name (see artist’s rendering of SKA dishes below, courtesy SKA website). The receivers will range from large dishes to small fish-eye antennas, all aimed at a different radio frequency in the sky.

Only 20% of the antennas would be located in this square kilometer, 50% would be located within 5 kilometers and some would be located as far away as 3,000 kilometers – giving the scientists who will eventually work on the project access to the entire universe, and giving the project access to an entire continent, and maybe more. If it is built in Australia, the SKA could stretch all the way to New Zealand. If built in southern Africa, it could stretch to the Indian Ocean islands.


Astronomers and engineers from more than 70 institutes in 20 countries are designing it. It will be 50 times more sensitive, and will survey the sky 10,000 times faster, than any other telescope. And they are looking to study some pretty cool things:

• How do galaxies evolve and what is dark energy? (See artist’s rendering of dark energy below, courtesy SKA website.)
• Are we alone? It will be able to detect very weak extraterrestrial signals and will search for complex molecules, the building blocks of life, in space.
• How were the first black holes and stars formed?
• What generates the giant magnetic fields in space?
• Was Einstein right? It will investigate the nature of gravity and challenge the theory of general relativity; it will explore the unknown and, if history is any guide, it will make many more discoveries than we can imagine today.

The 20 participating countries share the nearly $2 billion cost, as well as its operating costs of $130 to $200 million per year. That is a lot of money, especially for countries in southern Africa where the development possibilities attached to such a huge project are endless: millions for power, communications and data processing alone. And let’s not forget all of the side businesses and other business spin-offs that would come from the work.

“The impact on Africa would be very far-reaching and a lot more than anywhere else in the world,” said Bernie Fanaroff, Project Director, South Africa, in a recent Time magazine article on “Africa’s Eye in the Sky”. “It would be good for getting business into Africa, and we would be creating people with skills and expertise to solve problems not just in astronomy, but energy, water, food security, disease and transport.”

As a matter of fact, some smaller dishes that will be used for the project are already in the pipeline or active in Africa, and it is local populations, not foreigners, who are reaping the benefits. These include general investments in the regions where they are being built, and full-fledged programs aimed at training local populations – scientists, engineers, physicists, especially women and blacks – creating world-class astronomy teams.

Thus this program isn’t only about reaching out into the cosmos, but about the far-reaching impacts it can have right here on planet Earth.

First published as an S3 communiqué on Scientifically Yours at www.spacebridges.com/S3-blog-English/.

'TIS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY

Bicycles for Africa

Got an old bicycle in your garage that you don't know what to do with? Send it to Bern, where it will be restored and shipped to Africa so people living in rural areas can cycle to work. That's what Paolo Richter does. His company, Gump-& Drahtesel hires unemployed individuals to recycle old bicycles for Africa, while helping them get back into the labor force in Switzerland.

Hundreds of jobless people work in Richter's bicycle and wood workshops, where they learn to be mechanics or sales people, and receive professional and personal training to reenter the job market. Over 7,000 repaired bikes are sent to Africa each year. Gump-& Drahtesel also makes lamps, jewellery and decorative items from spare bicycle parts, which are then sold in Bern to support the company's African project, while giving unemployed individuals work experience.

What a great idea: employing people who need work, training them in new skills while providing a product that offers greater mobility to people who need transportation to get to work.

Aiding the Delivery of Health Care in Africa

Riders for Health is "working to make sure all health workers in Africa have access to reliable transportation so they can reach the most isolated people with regular and predictable health care." In its own words, the social enterprise's vision is "of a world in which the poor do not suffer and die for lack of access to health care and other vital services simply because they are isolated by distance or terrain."

Founded in the UK in 1988 by Andrea and Barry Coleman, current estimates reckon that 11 million Africans have access to health care due to Riders' programs. The organization manages over 1,000 vehicles to deliver health care services in Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia. According to Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs 2011, "Riders for Health’s innovative transport systems incorporate driving skills training, daily maintenance procedures, fuelling supply-chain logistics for replacement parts, and interval preventative maintenance. By using a motorcycle, for example, health workers have increased their number of visits to remote communities by at least 300%."

Just one example: in Zimbabwe, health workers driving motocycles were able to deliver mosquito nets and drugs against malaria to secluded areas, decreasing the death rate from the disease there by 20%.

Since one of the main obstacles to health care provision in Africa is poor access and distribution of health products to rural areas, Riders for Health's initiative has proved fundamental to aiding people even in the most out-of-the-way places.

SCALEAfrica: Transforming Lives

This is the story of an architect who, having traveled to a school in Zambia and seen the often limited conditions in which the primary schools operate there, decided to devote some of her spare time to fund-raising and designing affordable and sustainable schools and housing in Africa. Erinn McGurn's side project has turned into her life mission. In 2006 she created SCALEAfrica to work on multiphased projects that include school renovation, improved sanitation, the design and construction of classrooms that use local labor and building materials, passive solar techniques and natural ventilation, as well as the provision of basic educational materials and furniture. To ensure community buy-in and respect for the local culture, Erinn works with governmental and tribal officials and the Ministry of Education. She has now left the architectural firm where she worked in New York on residential design to concentrate full time on SCALEAfrica, which is funded entirely by private donations. Erinn's stated aim is to devise a scalable, sustainable design model that can be replicated in various places.

SCALEAfrica is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that, in its own words, is "dedicated to the improvement of rural schools in sub-Saharan Africa through the use of sustainable building techniques and active community participation. The model of sustainable design is intended to allow communities to build in ways that can be supported and maintained by their existing resources, with a focus on improving public health and education. SCALEAfrica aims to meld principles of sustainability with practical and cost effective local solutions." Do consider a donation or other support so SCALEAfrica can keep up its tremendous work!

Good News in Africa

Positive news does come out of Africa. For example, the largest African film festival, Africa in Motion, featuring 70 films from 28 countries, is currently taking place in Scotland, the 5th such festival to date. This year's theme is celebrations.

Other examples: South Africa and India are joining forces on HIV vaccine research; Uganda receives a grant of $207 million for clean energy; Angola increases tourism significantly; Nigeria boosts its status as the top oil producer in Africa, Rwanda initiates a plan for economic recovery.... For details on these stories and other good news from Africa, go to http://www.africagoodnews.com/ and http://www.sagoodnews.co.za/

Remarkable Results from Simple Solutions

Providing free school uniforms in Kenya actually decreased girls' dropout rates by 15%, teen marriage by 12% and childbearing by 10%. The rationale for providing the uniforms was to decrease the cost of education, empower children and increase motivation. By raising the girls' ability to conceptualize themselves and increasing their self-esteem, while lowering costs, those who received free uniforms were significantly more likely to stay in school, thus reducing the likelihood of getting married and having babies. These results were published in World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4024 following a randomized evaluation of 70,000 students in 328 primary schools in rural Kenya.

Introducing cable television in rural India has been shown to improve the status of women there. In particular, a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (MIT Press) in 2009 found "significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference [over daughters]. [The authors] also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing). The effects are large, equivalent in some cases to about five years of education ...". The report suggests that exposing women and men to new and more diverse sets of information via the cable TV has produced these positive results.

Progress Undented by Financial Crises

With the US-led crisis just behind us and another unfolding in Europe, one could be forgiven for becoming pessimistic about our prospects. But at the World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Summit in Doha last week participants were asked to cast their gaze back over the last 60 years and ask, “How are we doing?” The answer: fantastically well. Sixty years ago, after all, Europe and much of Asia were still struggling to emerge from the ashes of the second world war. China has in the past 20 years achieved what the leaders of the Long March never could have imagined. And in just the past decade, Africa has emerged from decades of turmoil, famine and epidemics to become a promising new centre of growth. Incomes are more evenly distributed than ever. Fewer people proportionately live in poverty, hunger or the darkness of illiteracy than ever before. They have more choices than ever before. And now we stand on the threshold of a revolution in health brought about by bioengineering and nanotechnology. Times may be tough, but we have undoubtedly come a long, long way.

"We Need to Start Telling the Good News from Africa"

At the World Economic Forum on Africa 2010 that is underway in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, several participants - including both Africans and outsiders - have called for a rethinking of perceptions about the continent. Too much focus is placed on what is going wrong - disease, poverty, corruption, poor infrastructure, among other problems - with too little emphasis on positive developments, they said. The world should hear about how many African economies have weathered the global economic crisis and are set to contribute to global growth over the next decade, how countries have managed to resolve longstanding military and political conflicts, and how business, government and civil society are working together to address public health threats.

"We need to change the stories that we tell about Africa," said human rights activist and social entrepreneur Hafsat Abiola-Costello, 36, the founder of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), an organization that promotes civil society and democracy in her native Nigeria, and the CEO of China-Africa Bridge, a group aimed at boosting mutual cooperation between China and Africa. (She is the daughter of Chief Moshood Abiola, the Nigerian businessman and president-elect who never took office and died in prison in 1998.) "We need to start telling new stories about the opportunities in Africa, the good news from Africa. Enough about the problems. We all know them. If we start telling the stories about the opportunities, who wouldn't want to take advantage and come to seize an opportunity?"

Hafsat is right. Despite all its progress in recent years, Africa still has an image problem. Perhaps the World Cup in South Africa this summer will help change people's perceptions of the continent. Watch Hafsat and other so-called Young Global Leaders (YGLs) of the Forum who are attending the meeting discuss the enormous potential of Africa in a press conference. And why not post your good news about Africa and tell us about the many opportunities that it has to offer?

Watch live streaming video from worldeconomicforum01 at livestream.com

Using the Power of Soccer in the Fight Against HIV and AIDS

"Founded by former professional soccer players in 2002, Grassroot Soccer (GRS) trains African soccer stars, coaches, teachers, and peer educators in the world’s most HIV-affected countries to deliver an interactive HIV prevention and life skills curriculum to youth."

International Women's Day - March 8, 2010

Featuring Camfed International: Dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women

Camfed International has successfully challenged the conventional wisdom that cultural resistance is at the heart of girls' exclusion from education in rural Africa, proving instead that chronic poverty is the main barrier. Since 1993, Camfed has pioneered a grassroots approach to advancing opportunities for girls and young women to guarantee a model that is locally inspired and owned. Camfed has proven that girls' education is the most effective means by which girls and their communities can break the devastating cycle of poverty that currently plagues sub-Saharan Africa. (From "Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs 2010", Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, p. 37)