Coco was one of the more interesting folks to come to Maker Faire Africa which is saying a lot given the crowd. She's originally from Liberia and has bounced back and forth between there and the US, specifically, Houston, which she found to be the most compatible with her home of Liberia. Most everyone knows that Liberia has had a rough go of it for the last few years and is currently rebuilding under Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. When asked as to why she went back to Liberia she simply replied, "There's no place like home."

Once word got out about Coco, Twitter buzzed up around her because one of the main things that she does (she actually has a number of creative endeavors) is to make African Barbie dolls. For anyone familiar with these dolls, you know that they are mostly white in both skin tone and dress. Coco picks up cheap dolls, and paints them to have darker skin tones as well as dress them in proper African womens' dresses. @kenyanpundit asked as to why the dolls had blue eyes. After the fair, I asked Coco this and she said that she didn't have time with this batch to repaint them as she doe normally repaint the eyes. So, there you go.

Cool stuff overall and if you ever get the chance to meet Coco, chat her up, she's very cool. And Scarlett Lion has a much longer article about her if you wanted to read more about this fabulous woman.

Paul Sika like Nana Kofi Acquah was one of the other more traditional artists at Maker Faire Africa in that he is also a photographer, although from Côte d'Ivoire. Of course, as is often the case things didn't start out this way. He was studying software engineering in England when he found that he had a much stronger love of cinema after seeing a trailer for The Matrix on Tottenham Court Road in London. Realizing that finishing his degree was his best move, he started photography as a side hobby and so began his path towards "one frame" movie making.

In 2007, he moved back to Côte d'Ivoire and initially worked as a graphic designer for a company. He left to go work more in photography and advertising which then eventually led to his large exhibit in Abidjan last November which he showed a portion of at Maker Faire Africa.

When asked what his influence was, he said that in the beginning, he didn't have one. He took shots of most everything and had no real focus in doing so. Then he started letting his environment be more of a factor in his photos. For instance, his "Charbon Fire" photo series (one of which is pictured right) was inspired by a bag of coal he saw in the street. The "At The Heart of Me" photo series was inspired by a calendar. He says that due to not having a formal art education he escaped a good deal of the formatting that would have taken place if that had been the case. It's interesting in talking to Paul as you get the feeling that his scientific background plays a huge part in how he approaches his art.

Paul has been featured on KanYe West's website, Arise Magazine, the BBC, and has upcoming features in the next issues of Canoe Magazine and B.Spirit. For the future, he is looking to do licensing of his designs and form a fashion line. He also has a book of his photos coming out this year. But, I was curious as to his thoughts on how 21st century licensing is changing a great many things. With digital, anything we create is endlessly able to be reproduced. How can you make money in an environment like that? Paul brought up the fact that if you were painting cathedrals in the 16th century as an artist, then at some point your work went out of style and you had to change. In other words, it's up to the artist to add some form of value or uniqueness to what they create in order to make a living through it.

You can view more about Paul and his work which has the tagline, "this is a valuable art piece" here.

For those who didn't know, Maker Faire Africa was not only a fair of those who make things, but it also had a number of open-forum sessions tied in to it to talk about various African-related tech items. On Sunday I was part of this one that blended together building SMS applications with building for low bandwidth. The two items aren't mutually exclusive of one another, but obviously, it's a touch hard to talk about them both at the same time and the conversation went from one to the other.

For me personally, hearing what the Ghanaian developers had to say about low bandwidth (as well as low latency) web developing was interesting. Everyone in the room admitted to the fact that the websites they build for clients are all hosted in the US. Why? Cost. Pure and simple. The deals you get on hosting in the US are better than pretty much anywhere else in the world. This makes sense as the US still wrongfully clings on the ICAAN (the governing body that regulates domain names) group when it should be a world body.

The big problem with this is that then all of the root servers (for that . that is actually after any domain name which no one ever types--maneno.org. will work just as well as maneno.org) are in the US and so you're stuck with the fact that even if you were to build a website for Ghana to be hosted in Ghana, you've still got to ping these root servers which are located in the US. There is no way around this for anyone in the world and it slows down every site not viewed by a US user.

Ghana has pretty solid internet bandwidth overall (again, more on that in the future) so for developers here, the issue is less about making a site that is lean and more about making a site that reduces latency. If they are hosting a site in the US, then every single piece of that site needs to be grabbed form the US and that's a lot of cable to traverse for the simple process of displaying a web page. This has an ill effect when it comes to AJAX development as while AJAX would be an ideal system to use a lot of in a low bandwidth site (AJAX requests are not a whole web page and are thus, much smaller) the latency makes it nearly untenable, although there are were a few developers in the crowd working to try and make it happen.

I posed the question as to why not host in England or France? All of the internet cables for West Africa terminate in either of these countries and so, while you still have the root servers in the US problem, you at least cut down on the latency issues for loading the site. There were some in the audience that admitted sites were indeed faster when hosted closer, but again, the problem was cost. With the exchange rates, those hosting deals in pounds sterling or euros are exorbitant.

What I took away from this is that all of us developers are aware of the shortcomings on the internet. All we can do is to work around them as best we can until that day when costs go down or ICAAN is moved out of the US. Afterall, if Google, whose home page in the US loads in a tenth of second, can't get it to load faster than three seconds in Ghana, there probably isn't much to be done about the issue at the moment.

The Maker Faire Africa was focusing a great deal on more physical things, but there were others in the crowd that fell in to the more traditional definition of an artist that makes. One such person was Nana Kofi Acquah, a Ghanaian photographer.

I actually met Nana before the fair started at the monthly Ghanaian bloggers meetup as he is also an avid blogger as well as a photographer. The photography however, started about six years ago. Originally a Nikon man, he now shoots with Canon, although he's one of those people I like who state that they really don't care which tool they use as long as the job gets done.

In general, Nana's photos are about African scenes. The exhibit he was currently showing a sample of at the fair was Water Flies, which circulates around a theme of water and thus is much more outdoors. It's a great spread of photos and it portends well as to why Nana will be going on assignment to take photos in Angola shortly.

I wish him the best of luck in this and if anyone is looking for some vibrant, lively images of Africa, check out his work.

This was another IDDS project. It was shown to me by Stefanie Robinson who is currently working on her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at my Alma Mater, UC Berkeley.

So, basically the issue at hand is the fact that in the far reaches of Ghanaian village life, people grow a great many groundnuts (peanuts) for sale and subsistence. When harvested, the women will sit and pick through the roots to pluck the nuts out. It's an extremely labor intensive method which takes them about a month a glean the nuts from a 0.4 hectare plot of land.

I liked how the group approached trying to make this less of a process in that they basically tried a number of methods to thresh out the nuts. The most basic of which was a curl of plastic that you could scrape along the plant to pull out the nuts. Another was a metal comb with jagged teeth to pick out the nuts which could be made with a hacksaw. The most successful with people in the villages though was what looked like a folding table with a large mesh grid on the top. People can press the nut plant along the grid and scrape out the nuts quite quickly. They estimate that it is at least five times faster for an individual and 10 times faster for a group using this table grater method.

The grater is also quite cheap. The prototype costs about $6 USD and would be even cheaper if mass produced. It's also produced from materials that are all available locally. In a word, it's quite perfect for the environment.

They did try some things that weren't nearly as good. Like so many groups in the IDDS, they tried to work in bicycles, but found that they weren't so ideal for the task at hand. They first realized that the spokes of a bicycle gear would work great when turned sideways, but the problem then was was that the chain fell off the gears. Working to create a more complex device increased the cost and wasn't completely tenable.

I was curious as to why Stefanie thought that these solutions didn't currently exist. They are after all extremely simple systems that are cheap to build. Her thoughts were that it was just due to a lack of exposure to the possibilities on their end. As for those in a place like Accra who do have the exposure, there is a lack of communication with those in these villages to make things like this happen. Naturally then, for something like this to be successful, they are going to have problems. Essentially, it comes down to the issue that they need marketing to these communities so that folks could make these themselves. Whatever the case, I hope it works as it seems to be a very practical solution to a common task.

For those who haven't heard of it Afrobotics is a cool group that intends to "inspire African university students to be science, engineering, and technology leaders, by enabling them in innovative team-based competitions that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire entrepreneurial risk-taking, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership" I'm going to write a larger article in due course, but here are a few shots them getting their robots ready for presentation at Maker Faire Africa.

This had to be the most unusual display I saw for the day at Maker Faire Africa. Paul Karikari has developed this method of blending together aluminum shavings, water, and some kind of powder to produce a very powerful heating agent. When stored in a container, it emanates a great deal of heat. He and his assistant showed several examples of what could be practical implementations such as a fridge that they had converted in to a heating box, a speaker which they converted in to a space heater, and lastly a pot that they converted in to an "emergency iron".

It's all new to me. I had no idea that aluminum would work to produce this kind of effect. From what I'm told, it's probably all due to a reaction of the components which then boils off the water and heats. Because once bought, the super secret mixture will work for months if not years as long as you add new water to it.

Again, I don't get it, but I was a horrible student in chemistry. They are however basing a great deal of the model on using aluminum. This particular item is quite cheap in Ghana as they mine it here. I really admire how they are using a common element to power their heater, but that makes the heater really best suited for a place like Ghana. Places where heating is required in larger amounts have aluminum costing a great deal more.

Still, there could be some potential with their design. It is definitely cheap and it did indeed produce heat. If used in a place like the US, there would be never ending questions as to what is in it, but I suppose that bridge would be crossed once it appeared on the horizon.

I talked with David Celestin who has been a student at Accra Polytechnic institute. A group of the guys from there came by Maker Faire Africa to show off the things that they've been tinkering with in their free time from studies. One of the big attractions was a radio with a broadcast range of about 25km. Not bad.

Following are a few shots of some of their projects. Cool stuff!

The main reason for Maker Faire Africa to be now was in order to coincide with the IDDS presentation of works. One of the groups that were from this were Playground Power who worked to create a merry-go-round that powers a generator. This prototype is much more of a proof of concept device than a functional model. At $535 USD for the initial prototype and a desire by the group to bring it down to $360, it's definitely a large investment for any people in the potential market: those without a reliable source of electricity.

It appears that most all of their cost is derived from $100 for the car alternator and then the rest in fabrication. They do use a number of "found" parts such as an old tire rim though.

Once cranked up, they can actually pull 80W of power out of the the device, but that takes a good number of people powering it. I have no idea as to the sustainability of the device, but it is interesting and we are seeing more of these ideas coming about which take rather everyday items and give them a dual purpose.

Those of us in Europe and the US have a real fascination with fancy soap. Companies like Lush have been taking the world by storm with their "all-natural" cleansing products. Being "natural" is what is in.

Well, turns out that this fact isn't lost on Yasmeen H. Nsiah who realized a niche that needed to be filled in Ghana and possibly elsewhere in Africa. When I met her here at Maker Faire Africa, my initial questions were mostly about the local market because as silly as it may sound, when I started to think about it, I had no idea what Ghanaians bathing trends were. According to Yasmeen, most people buy rather cheap, heavily processed soaps that are usually Chinese-made. While they work for the most part, they aren't the best for the skin or body overall. They are however quite cheap, running about $0.12-0.20 USD a bar.

Yasmeen (as well as others) has seen a need. People need better soap. Ghana has no end of natural, perfect ingredients such as shea oil and coconut oil to make soaps that, outside of Ghana, can cost upwards of $50 a kilogram. By being able to make use of them where they are actually produced takes advantage of the much lower cost of the raw materials which then translates in to creating a soap that while much more expensive at about $2.50 USD per bar, is a much higher level of product that is actually beneficial to the user.

Given how much more expensive Yasmeen's soap are, one has to ask, is there a market for this? She says yes. People in Ghana appreciate the higher quality of the soaps. There is however an uphill battle in perception that will require a marketing campaign which includes helping people to make their own soap in order to understand the difference in product. She has even set up a shop in Accra where people can purchase supplies for soap making. It's not something that people can do overnight though as each bar she creates takes three weeks to cure in the natural process that is devoid chemical additives or modifiers.

She has even bigger plans than Ghana-wide soap domination. She wants to work with women in villages where all these ingredients grow locally to have them produce the soap which she can then resell for them in larger markets such as Accra. This is so incredible cool because initiatives like this are more often than not started by foreigners who come in with the idea that they're going to help people out by basically working in a bubble and having no idea what the local supply and demand is. But, with a Ghanaian actually doing this and striving to work within the local markets is just fantastic, not to mention the fact she isn't do this with backing from some Ford or MacArthur grant. She is doing it on her own.

Oh yeah, as to how are the soaps? I bought three bars and I recommend anyone else at Maker Faire Africa to stop by for a look. The cocoa butter and coconut oil one is especially great and I'm having to stop myself from taking a bite out of it.

Just a little Twitter update on the soaps. Apparently my source for most soaps was off as Yasmeen corrected in this tweet