In Nigeria, I doubt that cell phones outnumber net-cafes as a way to access the Internet, but I don’t have the data. Virtually *everyone* has direct or indirect access to SMS, but very few can afford the monthly service fees required for Internet access. Furthermore, high-speed access is only gradually spreading across the country. I think there is still a great need for Twitter or something like it.

Filling a Need for African-Based Reporting on Agriculture
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/filling-a-need-for-african-based-reporting-on-agriculture/

I’ve been trying to read as many African newspapers as I can while traveling. In Ethiopia I read the The Herald, in Kenya, the Daily Nation, in Tanzania, The Guardian, and here in Uganda, I’m reading the Uganda Record. One thing that I’ve noticed in all these papers are the large number of articles on agriculture, hunger, climate change, poverty, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and water and sanitation. It’s not surprising—all of these issues impact sub-Saharan Africa in a big way.

What is surprising, however, is the lack of African journalists writing these articles. Most are pulled from newswires, like Reuters and AP, or from the International Herald Tribune and UK-based papers. That means there’s not only very little on-the-ground reporting from the continent, but also that the people who know best about what’s really happening here aren’t the ones writing about the issues.

But there are efforts underway to increase reporting about Africa from Africans. The International Center for Journalists received a $2 million grant, three-year grant in 2008 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve coverage of agriculture and health. They’re placing journalists from the U.S. in four key African countries—Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, and Senegal— where they will lead projects with African journalists, helping them improve not only coverage, but the quality of the articles they’re writing. The project will also help train “citizen journalist” stringers who can relay information from the village level via cellphones.

And earlier this year, the Gates Foundation also awarded a two-year grant to the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to develop an intensive training program for African journalists to promote high-quality coverage of agricultural issues.

These projects could be at least partly inspired by grants the Soros Foundation and the Open Society Institute have been giving for training journalists in the former Soviet Republics and in Eastern Europe. The Independent Journalism Institute provides similar programs for journalists in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

These types of grants—and hopefully future funding from other donors—are an important way of not only generating news stories, but informing African people about what’s taking place on a daily basis in their own country.

–Been traveling across Africa and my personal travel blog is called BorderJumpers or http://www.borderjumpers.org. – Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack

Though I love Twitter’s capabilities, I love it because it works for me. Because it works for me, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for someone else. As a western nation, we like to think others want what we want. Most of the time, it isn’t true.

Matthew: you seem to suggest that Africa needs Twitter because it will make the West finally care about what’s going on there.

For decades, Africans have been expressing “their social and political conversation to the world,” and although there could be more, there has been significant media coverage of Africa’s many ups and downs.

Technology does have a role to play in political discussion and grassroots organization in Africa, but I’m not sure Twitter (or another service like Twitter) would really be a game changer.

Regarding the use of social media to organize protests in Iran, today I was listening to an NPR reporter talk about how the Iranian government was slowing down the Internet and cutting off text messages to clamp down on protesters. What did the protesters do? They chanted across Tehran rooftops to get the message out. Everyone in the city knew there was going to be a protest the next day. Social change and political organizing can happen without technology.

One of the most interesting things about our rapid pace technology (and sometimes one of the more sad things) is the turnover rate of the hottest “new” technologies. While I completely understand Twitter’s reasons behind discontinuing their SMS service in most of the world (what use is it running a company that is perpetually losing massive amounts of money?), I think that in doing so they’ve opened the doors for a whole new slew of new and improved Twitter-like microbloggers who may be better positioned or more determined to service those less-profitable areas of the world.