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72 Rwanda to Connect 3,000 Schools to Internet by 2024

102 This is the Ultimate, no BS ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for UX and UI Designers

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5 African Startups that are Trailblazing In the Continent’s Growing Tech Ecosystem

108 Black, Queer and Neurodivergent in Tech: How One Advocate is Creating Safe Space for Intersectionality

112 Startup Created a Digital Twin of the Office

114 A Google AI Chatbot May Soon Take Your Drive-Through Food Order at Wendy’s Lifestyle/Culture

116 Ibram X. Kendi says a Backlash has ‘Crushed’ the Nation’s Racial Reckoning.

120 Meet Charlie Mitchell, the First Black Michelin-starred Chef in New York City

123 Chef Mabaso Launches new YouTube Series Exploring African Art, Food and Life

124 82-Year-Old Triathlete and Longevity

Expert's Top Tip for Staying Mentally and Physically Sharp’

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Vice President Kamala Harris Invites You to Explore Trade Opportuni es with the Republic of Zambia

The USA and the Republic of Zambia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to promote and support interna onal trade opportuni es between the two na ons.

ABA DAWN has curated a report on the recent tour to Africa by Vice President Harris and a separate report detailing the substance of the five-year MOU.

Find the digital publica ons on the Africa Business Associa on website.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris

H.E. Hakainde Hichilema President of Zambia

Celebrating Two Black Memorial Days

About Africa Day

THE ANNUAL COMMEMORATION of the creation of the Organisation of African Unity, formerly known as African Freedom Day and African Liberation Day, is held on May 25 every year. It is a day for Africans and those who love Africa to show the world that the continent is a force to be reckoned with and that the moment has come for African youngsters to define the Africa they want, on their terms, following centuries of being referred to in a negative and degrading manner.

HISTORY OF GLOBAL AFRICA DAY

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on May 25, 1963, the leaders of 30 of Africa’s 32 sovereign republics signed a founding charter. The O.A.U. was established to assist numerous African countries in achieving transformation, freedom, and independence. The African Economic Community was founded by the O.A.U. in 1991, and the African Union was established by the O.A.U. in 2002. A total of 21 countries have joined the O.A.U. since its inception.

On May 23, 1994, South Africa joined as the 53rd member. African Liberation Day or African Freedom Day was observed in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Ghana on April 15, 1958, following the first Conference of Independent African States. In Ghana, African Unity Day replaced this holiday in 1963. Despite being renamed the African Union, the name and date of Africa Day have been preserved,

and Africa Day serves as an opportunity to honor Africa’s people and governments. Africa has a wide range of languages. Except for Ethiopia, every African country has one of the following official languages — English, Portuguese, French, or Arabic.

Apart from Ethiopia and Liberia, Europe colonized every country in Africa. After the colonized obtained independence, one of their official languages remained the colonizers. Liberia had previously adopted English as its official language after being founded by African-American settlers in 1847. Ethiopia was never colonized, despite being briefly occupied by Italy before WWII.

https://nationaltoday.com/global-africa-day/

Juneteenth USA

Juneteenth is acknowledged on page xx with an article on the work of Ibram X. Kendi and here we offer a description of one way to celebrate Juneteenth.

A Joyous Juneteenth Feast Uplifts Grow Dat in City Park

THE CULTIVATED LAND around Grow Dat Youth Farm will yield some 50,000 pounds of kale, squash, tomatoes and other vegetables in a year. They are also part of a program that produces a lot more than fresh food.

From this seven-acre stretch tucked away in City Park, Grow Dat is a program that

A table is se photo from G

uses farming and environmental stewardship as a vehicle for personal development for local youth.

The nonprofit has been pursuing this work for a dozen years now, and this spring it’s inviting the public to two unique culinary events, both to showcase its own work and to celebrate diverse areas of excellence within the local culinary community.

That starts with its Spring Dinner on May 23 with a farm tour, cocktail reception and an outdoor meal. It’s the revival of farm dinner Grow Dat held before the pandemic, and this return has a special theme, led by a collection of women who has each made her name in the New Orleans food realm.

Then on June 19 Grow Dat will be the setting for Afro Freedom / Afro Feast, an outdoor dinner aligned with the Juneteenth holiday and led by Serigne Mbaye, chef of the modern African restaurant Dakar NOLA (and a finalist for this year’s James Beard award for Emerging Chef, a national honor). See more details on both below.

Visiting Grow Dat can be a revelation for first timers, and an oasis at the intersection of nature, community and empowerment for those familiar with its work.

Each year, the group convenes high school students from schools around the city for its youth development program. They learn to grow food from seed to harvest, and that food is sold through Grow Dat’s CSA and at farmers market stands staffed by the students and also distributed to

low-income residents through the group’s Shared Harvest program.

Julie Gable, co-executive director of Grow Dat, said people often ask if the program is about teaching young people to be farmers.

“It’s more than teaching them about farming, we’re teaching them how to be leaders,” she said.. “It’s about how things work in the real world when you have a job, how you keep that job, how you communicate with people who have different experience from you, what it’s like to bring something back into your community.”

As they progress through the program, students take on leadership roles at the farm and through community outreach.

“They get to keep evolving through the program,” Gable said. “Youth who started out knowing nothing walking in are now leading programs here.”

The property occupies a piece of City Park within the Wisner Tract, which before Hurricane Katrina was a golf course. It’s now a spread of natural splendor, wildlife included, nestled in a curve in a lagoon lined by live oaks. The land itself is a teaching tool, and a unifying setting.

“Our youth is so diverse, we have young people who have never put their hands in dirt, and others who have traveled around the world – you’re putting all these young people together in one space,” Gable said.

“They learn that we need to put our hands in the ground and grow something and then we’re taking that food and giving it to people in our communities and people in need.”

Afro Freedom / Afro Feast, June 18, 3-7 p.m.

For the past few years, chef Mbaye of Dakar NOLA has organized a community dinner around Juneteenth, the holiday marking the day when formerly enslaved people got word of their emancipation. Last year, he held the event in Mississippi. This year Afro Freedom / Afro Fest is back in New Orleans at Grow Dat.

Effie Richardson, Mbaye’s partner in Dakar NOLA, said keeping the event on a farm is an important part.

“The idea is of food coming from the land, that’s what our ancestors were doing,” she said. “So

8

et for a past farm dinner at Grow Dat Youth Farm. (Contributed Grow Dat) see page

Guest Editorial - Memorial Days

Memorial Days from page 7

we’re going there to cook and celebrate, and we want to showcase Grow Dat because we support and embrace their work.”

The meal will explore African American culinary roots, prepared through a collaboration of many hands. That includes Mbaye and chef Charly Pierre of the Haitian restaurant Fritai in Treme, Prince Lobo of the Ethiopian restaurant Addis NOLA on Bayou Road, chef Ndeye “Queen” Ndir of Ndindy African Cuisine in Central City, Wiggins of Café Reconcile, Guerin of Lagniappe Baking, and chef and pitmaster Greg Rosary, Sr.

Cocktails will be handled by Turning Tables, the New Orleans-based nonprofit working to increase equity for people of color in the bar and spirits business.

The day begins with cocktail hour at 3 p.m. and dinner at 4 p.m., to conclude at 7 p.m. Tickets are $165. Get them via TOCK.

See you at Grow Dat Youth Farm, 150 Zachary Taylor Drive, New Orleans.

By Ian McNulty

https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/eatdrink/grow-dat-in-city-park-holds-farm-dinnerjuneteenth-feast/article_6c04983c-ef72-11ed-94bedb2a3bda3811.html

Chef Serigne Mbaye poses in front of a wall of masks, ea their own story, at Dakar NOLA in New Orleans, Friday, N 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune Orleans Advocate)

Students from New Orleans area high schools come tog Youth Farm, a nonprofit youth development program ba Park. (Contributed photo from Grow Dat)

Students conduct a mock farmers market at Dat Youth Farm in City Park to prepare for their shift selling product. (Photo by Ann Maloney, NOLA.com | The TimesPicayune) Photo from Ann Maloney

ach with Nov. 11, | The New

gether to learn at Grow Dat se in New Orleans City

Grow Dat Youth Farm is a nonprofit based in New Orleans City Park that uses agriculture and environmental stewardship as a vehicle for youth leadership development.(Photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)

Toi Henry, Gustavs Tobiss and Kristen Shelby were crew members at Grow Dat Youth Farm and later returned as assistant crew leaders. (Photo by Ann Maloney, NOLA.com | The Times-PIcayune) Ann Maloney

Guest Editorial - Memorial Days

6 Small Towns With Big Black History Stories

By Sheryl Nanace-Nash

THE BLACK HISTORY STORIES of Atlanta, Montgomery, Memphis, and Chicago are legendary. But there are interesting sagas from smaller towns across America. Similarly, there are mid-sized cities whose Black history may not be well known. Here, we shine the spotlight on those lesser-known stories.

1. Pensacola, Florida

You could mistake Pensacola Beach for the shimmering waters of the Caribbean, but there’s more to the Pensacola story and plenty of African American history. The Chappie James Museum and Flight Academy is on the National Register of Historical places and honors “Chappie,” the first African American fourstar general and a part of the Tuskegee Airmen. The flight facility offers year-round aviation experiences, and you’ll learn about Chappie and the Tuskegee Airmen. In town, there’s also a memorial of him in a plaza dedicated to him.

In the heart of Pensacola is a cabin that belonged to Julee Panton, a free woman of color who is said to have tried to purchase the freedom of enslaved Black people in the early 1800s.

Continue your history lesson in the Belmont-DeVilliers neighborhood, an official stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail, dubbed the Harlem of the South. Locals and the likes of B.B. King, Sam Cooke, Tina Turner, and James Brown performed in the neighborhood’s theaters and clubs.

Today you’ll get a belly full of southern cuisine at 5 Sisters Blues Café with its gumbo du jour, fried green tomatoes, Aunt Cora’s blue crab cakes, fried okra, blackeyed peas, mac and cheese, and more good stuff than should be legal. I left stuffed and a big smile on my face. There’s live music during the Sunday jazz brunch and you’ll love the old concert posters and photos. Blue Dot Barbecue is another favorite. In the 1920s, BelmontDeVilliers was also the home to Viola Edwards Hospital, the first Black-owned hospital in Pensacola.

Temporarily closed due to hurricane damage last fall, look for the reopening of Fort Pickens, one of the few Union-occupied forts in the South during the American Civil War. It was accepted into the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2020. The site, operated by the Gulf Islands National Seashore, was a beacon in 1861 and 1862 for freedom seekers. The fort was also defended by members of the 25th U.S. Colored Troops in 1864.

2. Cape May, New Jersey

I love Cape May, have been there a couple of times, and had no clue about its Black history. To me, it was this beautiful beach town with those storybook Victorians and great restaurants. I know what I’ll be doing on my next visit. Cape May is a stop on the state’s Black Heritage Trail. Cape May was a major Underground Railroad hub. In the early 1850s, there were an estimated 100 free African Americans who owned land in the area and became instrumental in the freedom movement. Several buildings at the intersection of Lafayette and Franklin Streets were once the center of abolitionist activism. This past summer, the Harriet Tubman Museum opened. The museum pays homage to the heroine’s contributions to history. Down the street, private tours can be arranged at the Stephen Smith House, the summer home of the successful Black businessman and founder of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. There is an Underground Railroad Trolley Tour and the African American Heritage Walking Tour, which is available with a guide or can be self-guided. Highlights include a visit to the Owen Coachman House and a walk in the cemetery where the earliest freed Black settlers were buried.

3. Macon, Georgia

If you’re touring Atlanta, it’s worth the 1-hour drive to Macon. There are more than 20 African American historic and cultural sites. Take for example the 63-footlong mural in the Tubman Museum, created by Macon’s own Wilfred Stroud, that showcases folks from the early days in Africa to the present.

The Washington Memorial Library offers an extensive African-American heritage collection that some say is one of the best in the southeastern U.S. The collection, which began in 1959, contains rare genealogical, archival, and biographical information.

Sports legends like Henry “Hank” Aaron, Wyomia Tyus, Cleveland Brown, Gwen Torrence, Dominique Wilkins, Evander Holyfield, and Jackie Robinson are among the icons featured at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame with its 3,000 artifacts and 205-seat ballpark theater, research library, and interactive exhibits.

While in town, check out a performance at the Douglass Theatre. It was built in 1921 by Black entrepreneur Charles Douglass. The restored theater had greats like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Cab Calloway grace its stages. Native son Otis Redding was discovered there.

There is a statute honoring him and a bridge named after him. Explore the historic Cotton Avenue and Pleasant Hill Districts. Cotton Avenue is linked to Jefferson Long, the first Black man elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1879 and the Reverend Pearly Brown, a blind street singer who learned to play guitar at the Georgia Academy for the Blind Colored. Brown would go on to become the first Black man to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. The Pleasant Hill District is where Little Richard grew up and is one of the first Black neighborhoods listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

4. Daytona Beach, Florida

Daytona Beach is known for its international speedway. But there’s plenty more to this beach town. In 1866, a large colony of formerly enslaved people was established by Esther Hill and John Milton Hawks in an area just south of Daytona Beach that you would know now as Ponce Inlet and Port Orange. Hawks and his wife were doctors and abolitionists who spent the Civil War caring for Black Union Soldiers who — along with their families — settled in the area after the war. Of the nearly 30 people who voted to incorporate Daytona Beach in 1876, two were Black men. You’ll learn all kinds of good stuff along the Share the Heritage Trail, which highlights the local African American story.

Two key sites you don’t want to miss are the home and gravesite of civil rights leader and educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune with memorabilia and artifacts from this legend’s career. The National Historic Landmark is situated on the grounds of Bethune-Cookman University and offers guided tours. The daughter of former slaves, Dr. Bethune became an advisor to five U.S. presidents. She lived much of her life in Daytona Beach, where in 1904, she founded the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for the Training of Negro Girls — with a little more than $1.50, faith in God, and five little girls for students. The new statue of Dr. McLeod Bethune, which was on display in Daytona Beach November–December 2021, will be unveiled in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building this May in Washington, D.C.

Secondly, make your way to Jackie Robinson Ballpark, where the baseball legend broke the color barrier in professional sports when he played in his first spring training game in 1946. A bronze statue of Robinson is on permanent display at the ballpark’s entrance. Schedule a tour and explore the numerous historical markers and an outdoor museum that tell the facility’s story.

5. Onslow County, North Carolina

This stretch of North Carolina is beloved for its white sandy beaches. It’s north of Wilmington and east of Raleigh, and includes Richlands, Jacksonville, Camp Lejeune, North Topsail Beach, Sneads Ferry and Swansboro. The history is rich. Start putting the pieces together with the Onslow County African American Heritage Trail. You’ll visit African American gravesites, historic churches and schools. You’ll find Ocean City, at one time, the only oceanfront property that Blacks were able to purchase (lots sold for $500). Today, Ocean City is known for its jazz festival. You’ll hear about Hammocks Beach State Park, which was donated to the Black Teachers Association in 1950 by Dr. William Sharpe. It was a segregated beach until 1961. Another stop on the trail is the Onslow County Museum. Check out its exhibit, The African American Experience in Onslow County. An audio-history project is also underway to create voice recordings of the memories of local African Americans.

6. Allensworth, California

Allensworth is the only town in California that was founded, funded, built, and governed exclusively by African Americans.

Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth escaped slavery in Kentucky, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and migrated west after the Emancipation. Settling in Los Angeles, he built a summer home in Tulare County and joined with other Black leaders to purchase land in the area. Inspired by the need for economic independence and refuge from racial discrimination in the region, Allensworth directed the establishment of an all-Black agricultural town that had 300 residents in its peak years.

People who lived there were craftsmen, artisans, businessmen, farmers, ranchers, retired members of the military, and members of the U.S. Buffalo Soldiers, who protected the town. Allensworth thrived until the mid1920s when the town declined, and many people left. It survived into the 1960s. Today, Colonel Allensworth Historic State Park (CAHSP) is a tribute to Allensworth’s legacy. Established in 1976, the Park preserves 240 acres of the town center and includes several restored buildings and an outdoor staging area. The visitors center arranges tours of the park and events throughout the year to celebrate Allensworth’s history.

https://www.travelawaits.com/2726271/small-townswith-big-black-history-stories/

Image credit: tubmanmuseum.com

Ricky Katsuya

Publisher's Message

Dear Reader,

We are excited to share with you the story on page 23 of Health in Her HUE, a digital platform that aims to connect Black women and women of color to culturally sensitive providers. This platform was launched by public health innovator Ashlee Wisdom and strategic executor Eddwina Bright, who are passionate about fighting against the health disparities faced by women who look like them across the nation.

In this article, you learn how Health in Her HUE connects women to racially inclusive and culturally sensitive healthcare providers, evidence-based content, and community support. You will also discover how the platform uses a rigorous onboarding process for providers, ensuring that they are in alignment with the company’s broader mission. And you will hear from the founders themselves, who share their vision of being the first touch point for Black women and women of color when it comes to their health.

We hope that this article will inspire you to check out Health in Her HUE and join their community of women who are empowered to make informed choices about their health. You can learn more about Health in Her HUE by clicking here.

Thank you for reading and supporting our publication.

Sincerely,

Ricky Katsuya

Africa Business Association "DAWN"

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Ricky Katsuya

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Harry Belafonte, Singer, Actor and Tireless Activist, Dies Aged 96

By Abu Mubarik

Harry Belafonte, singer, actor and tireless activist, dies aged 96

WELL AS PERFORMING GLOBAL HITS

such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony award for acting and appearing in numerous feature films, Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

The cause of death was congestive heart failure, his spokesman told the New York Times. Figures including the rapper Ice Cube and Mia Farrow paid tribute to Belafonte. The US news anchor Christiane Amanpour tweeted that he “inspired generations around the whole world in the struggle for non-violent resistance justice and change. We need his example now more than ever.”

Bernice King, daughter of Dr Martin Luther King, shared a picture of Belafonte at her father’s funeral and said that he “showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings.” The BenineseFrench musician Angélique Kidjo called Belafonte “the brightest star in every sense of that word. Your passion, love, knowledge and respect for Africa was unlimited.”

Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his

early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.

After the war ended, he worked as a janitor’s assistant, but aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre (along with fellow aspiring actor Sidney Poitier). He took acting classes – where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Walter Matthau – paid for by singing folk, pop and jazz numbers at New York club gigs, where he was backed by groups whose members included Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.

He released his debut album in 1954, a collection of traditional folk songs. His second album, Belafonte, was the first No 1 in the new US Billboard album chart in March 1956, but its success was outdone by his third album the

Harry Bele

following year, Calypso, featuring songs from his Jamaican heritage. It brought the feelgood calypso style to many Americans for the first time, and became the first album to sell more than a million copies in the US.

The lead track was Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), a signature song for Belafonte – it spent 18 weeks in the UK singles chart, including three weeks at No 2. His version of Mary’s Boy Child was a UK chart-topper later that year, while Island in the Sun reached No 3. He released 30 studio albums, plus collaborative albums with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne and Miriam Makeba. The latter release won him one of his two Grammy awards; he was later awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Academy’s president’s merit award.

Bob Dylan’s first recording – playing harmonica – was on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special The previous year, Belafonte had been hired by

Frank Sinatra to perform at John F Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.

Belafonte maintained an acting career alongside music, winning a Tony award in 1954 for his appearance in the musical revue show, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, and appearing in several films, most notably as one of the leads in Island in the Sun, along with James Mason, Joan Fontaine and Joan Collins, with whom he had an affair. He was twice paired with Dorothy Dandridge, in Carmen Jones and Bright Road, but he turned down a third film, an adaptation of Porgy and Bess, which he found “racially demeaning”.

He later said the decision “helped fuel the rebel spirit” that was brewing in him, a spirit he parlayed into a lifetime of activism, using his newfound wealth to fund various initiatives. He was mentored by Martin Luther King Jr and Paul Robeson, and bailed King out of a Birmingham, Alabama, jail in 1963 as well as co-organising the march on Washington that culminated in King’s “I have a dream” speech. He also funded the Freedom Riders and SNCC, activists fighting unlawful segregation in the American south, and worked on voter registration drives.

He later focused on a series of African initiatives. He organised the all-star charity record We Are the World, raising more than $63m for famine relief, and his 1988 album, Paradise in Gazankulu, protested against apartheid in South Africa. He was appointed a Unicef goodwill ambassador

see page 16

efonte (c) with Sammy Davis Jr. (l) and Sidney Poitier (r)

Sidney Poitier (i) & Harry Belefonte (r), in film "Buck & the Preacher"

Harry Belefonte from page 15

in 1987, and later campaigned to eradicate Aids from Africa

After recovering from prostate cancer in 1996, he advocated for awareness of the disease.

He was a fierce proponent of leftwing politics, criticising hawkish US foreign policy, campaigning

rather than in the fields, criticisms that Powell and Rice rejected.

He was a frequent critic of Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, over issues including Guantanamo Bay detentions and the fight against rightwing extremism. He criticised Jay-Z and Beyoncé in 2012 for having “turned their back on social responsibility … Give me Bruce Springsteen, and now you’re talking. I really think he is Black.” Jay-Z responded: “You’re this civil rights activist and you just bigged up the white guy against me in the white media … that was just the wrong way to go about it.”

He continued to take occasional acting roles. In 2018, he appeared in the Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman. In 2014, 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen announced he was working with Belafonte on a film about Paul Robeson, though it wasn’t developed.

Belafonte was married three times, first to Marguerite Byrd, from 1948 to 1957, with whom he had two daughters, activist Adrienne and actor Shari. He had two further children with his second wife, Julie Robinson: actor Gina and music producer David He and Robinson

against nuclear armament, and meeting with both Castro and Chavez. At the meeting with Chavez, in 2006, he described US president George W Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world”. He also characterised Bush’s Black secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as being like slaves who worked in their master’s house

divorced after 47 years, and in 2008 he married Pamela Frank, who survives him.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/25/ harry-belafonte-singer-dies-actor-singer-activist Image credit: blogspot.com, ultimatemovierankings.com, thecoli.com, nbcnews.com

Harry Belefonte (c) with Coretta Scott King. (l) and Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. (r)

Harry Belefonte (r) hosts the Tonight Show

Steve McQueen on his hero Harry Belafonte: ‘He had everything – but his service was to his people’

By Alex Needham

HARRY BELAFONTE WAS A HERO of mine. He meant everything to me. I met him around the release of 12 Years a Slave, and he became a mentor. I received a best director award at the New York Film Critics Circle awards and Harry gave an amazing speech: he talked about seeing Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan at the cinema as a child and how the depiction of people of African descent made him feel being ashamed to be Black.

Look what he did – his first album sold more than 1m records. He was Martin Luther King’s closest confidant and he supported his family. He was the main organiser to get Hollywood people involved in the civil rights movement, bringing people like Sidney Poitier. He was close to Bobby Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt. And he was an artist, and he was an actor; he studied with Brando, Brando was one of his best friends. He really was a renaissance man if there ever was one, and extraordinarily good looking. He had everything, but his service was always to his people. He told me that the civil

rights days were scary – what he sacrificed and what he did for the good of people was incredible.

The last time I heard from Harry was via a text saying he’d just watched Small Axe: ‘Brilliant, bravo, we send our love’

Harry didn’t compromise. When he wasn’t getting the roles that he thought that he deserved, he just went and did his music. And I think that vision came from his mentor Paul Robeson, who said: “ Why don’t you sing your song?”

Harry understood that he was a Black man of the diaspora – his background was in Jamaica, his upbringing was in America, and he travelled the world as a Black man in the entertainment industry. He was an American but an internationalist – a man of the world. He was in Africa, he was in Cuba, he was in eastern Europe. Harry’s reach was global –he was world famous. His drive was incredible. He didn’t stop until he dropped.

We had plans to make a film about Robeson and we worked on it for a little while, but some things don’t always come together. The last time I heard from Harry was when I got a text from him and his wife Pam saying that they’d just watched Small Axe: “Brilliant, bravo, we send our love and thoughts through these crazy times, Pam and Harry.”

A child of the West Indies growing up in America and reaching the heights of international stardom. That was Harry. I loved him very, very much.

https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2023/apr/25/steve-mcqueenhero-harry-belafonte-tarzan-12years-a-slave Image credit: Pinterest

Harry Belefonte (l) with Steve McQueen (r)

Former MAC Global Communications Manager, Aja Bradley-Kemp, Starts Natural Hair Movement in Australia

By Stacy Jackson

IT’S TRULY A BEAUTIFUL THING when women can feel seen and heard and connect over their similarities.

Living in Australia and working as a marketer for global beauty brands, this entrepreneur noticed a lack of resources for Black natural hair care. Aja Bradley-Kemp, the creator of the Love My Curls Festival, curated the first beauty event celebrating women in Australia and New Zealand with curly and textured hair. Her entrepreneurial journey launched with the creation of her own agency, Conversate Collective, following her leave as one of MAC’s premier global communications managers.

As a marketer and experiential event designer, she has used her experience to grow consumer, lifestyle, and tech brands in the United States and international markets, including Expedia, MAC Cosmetics, Sunglass Hut, and Reebok.

Bradley-Kemp shared with BLACK ENTERPRISE how working in the beauty industry for over 20 years has led to creating an empowering environment of diversity and inclusion among the Black Australian hair community, as well as in the U.S.

Natural hair care: A mission to unify the Black Australian hair community

Bradley-Kemp identifies herself as a “natural connector” who loves bringing people together. After a journey of trial and error using relaxers, texturizers, experimenting with protective styles, and experiencing breakage in the 2000s, she was determined to find alternative ways to wear her natural curls.

“There’s no holy grail or product cocktail that works for everyone. We all have different needs and lifestyles,” the natural hair guru said. “The more you understand how a product works, what ingredients are in the formula and how it should

be applied, the more confident you will be in taking care of your hair.”

Working for global beauty brands including MAC Cosmetics expanded her horizons beyond the U.S., to the Canadian and Australian markets. Providing solutions to the lack of resources for Black hair care and educating women on how to use different natural hair products became a huge part of Bradley-Kemp’s mission for Black naturalistas.

Love My Curls Festival

Living in Australia for almost a decade uncovered the scarcity of products for Black hair. “During that time [I] could never just run to a store and pick up products for a wash and go or twist out. I either had to have friends and family send them to me or stock up when I visited the U.S.,” Bradley-kemp shared.

Moving back to the U.S. in 2015 opened her eyes to the natural hair movement that was in full swing. “I was just in awe of the amount of products, education, and conversation that was readily available for women here,” she said. “I wanted to provide that access and community to my girlfriends in Australia that were having the same challenges caring for their hair that I was.”

“Our goal with Love My Curls is to cut down on the amount of time, money, trial and error it takes to figuring out what the right products are for you,” she said. “At the festival, in addition to providing access to the brand representatives, we had a full day of live demonstrations, product spotlight sessions and panel discussions to ensure there was plenty of hands-on education being provided.”

The event created an empowering environment

of diversity and inclusion amongst both the Black Australian and New Zealand hair communities. “When I set out to create the festival, my target audience, who I thought this would be most beneficial for, was Black women living in the region. But when I spoke with Tomasina Boone, a fellow expat and owner of Curls and Natural Hair Salon in Sydney, she explained how her customers are women of multiple ethnicities and they are all using products intended for black women because of their efficacy.”

Brands and customers were able to connect in ways that they hadn’t previously. For some of the brands, it was their first time visiting the Australia market. Customers were able to get questions answered directly from brand representatives and professional stylists, while stocking up on products that were not readily available in local stores.

Love My Curls became a forum for conversations surrounding the commonalities of the hair journey and experiences as women.

“I was touched to hear stories from young children and grown women about how grateful they were to have a community who could relate to their experiences of growing up in a society where straight hair was the prevailing beauty standard and their natural curls were viewed as unruly and unkept,” Bradley-Kemp said about the event. “While we share some similarities with our Australian sisters, the conversations and challenges for women with natural hair are different in Australia than the U.S. But, at a basic level, Love My Curls is about celebrating our hair and bringing women

together who all have the same goal – to get poppin’ curls, a healthy crown, and feel confident in the process!”

Conversate Collective

Bradley-Kemp founded her brand consulting agency, Conversate Collective, a Black womanowned agency that helps brands develop lasting relationships with their audience, through the power of shared experiences, specifically with women of color.

“As an agency that specializes in creating experiences for women of color, I now get to work with brands and hairstylists to help them nurture their communities, create inclusive spaces, and get their products in the hands of the people that need them,” she said.

Bradley-Kemp has experience working on hundreds of product releases and had the privilege of launching campaigns with iconic spokespeople like Lil Kim, Mary J. Blige, Eve, and Missy Elliott to raise money for the MAC AIDS Fund and support people affected by HIV/AIDS. Branching out into entrepreneurship led her to work with natural hair brands such as Cantu, Mielle Organics, Shea Mositure, and Mixed Chicks.

“We live in a world that is divided and divisive,” she said, adding that her goal is to continue providing a unifying experience.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/former-macglobal-communications-manager-aja-bradleykemp-starts-natural-hair-movement-in-australia/

Image credit: Aja Bradley-Kemp

Aja Bradley-Kemp

Aboriginal Artists Designed Breville’s Stunning New A

By Zachary Petit

THER E’S A NECESSARY TENSION that hangs over any corporate product involving the original inhabitants of a country—a fact that’s as true in Australia as it is the United States. So when you see “Breville” and “Aboriginal Culinary Journey,” you’re right to be dubious. Alison Page, a Wadi Wadi and Walbanga member of the Yuin nation and founder of the National Aboriginal Design Agency in Australia, wanted to change the paradigm. So as curator of Breville’s new limited-edition product line of kitchen appliances designed by four prominent Aboriginal artists, she did.

“It was really important for us to treat this project as a tonic to this sickness that had kind of permeated Aboriginal design for a really long time,” she says. “Aboriginal culture had been ripped off, appropriated, stolen . . . before we were even recognized as citizens of the country.”

Breville’s Aboriginal Culinary Journey line dates back nearly 20 years, to when Page met Richard Hoare at a wedding. Hoare had just joined the high-end Australian kitchenware company as head designer, and he and Page riffed on an idea rooted in storytelling and indigenous art. It didn’t

end up panning out right away, but Page says a seed was planted—and now it has germinated, resulting in a range that brings vibrant energy and life to the staid environs of our endlessly stainless steel kitchens.

The easiest part of the whole initiative was choosing the artists, Page says. “The best contemporary artists in the world come from the Western Desert.” Three of the artists—Yalti Napangati, Yukultji Napangati and Tjapaltjarri— are members of the original “Pintupi Nine,” who did not interact with the modern world until 1984. Simpson, meanwhile, is a Sydney-based artist and Yuwaalaraay woman.

The collection encompasses Yalti Napangati’s Piruwa kettle and Kampurarrpa juicer, Lucy Simpson’s Dhuuyaay oven and Dhunbarrbil toaster, Yukultji (Nolia) Napangati’s Marrapinti coffee machine, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s Tingari coffee machine.

On the whole, artmaking is directly woven into the lives of Aboriginal Australians. “We do have a

Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri

[Photo: Breville]

Tingari Men and the Ancestral Snake at Willainkarra, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri [Photo: Breville]

Women’s Ceremonies at Marrapinti, Yukultji (Nolia) Napangati. [Photo: Breville] Yu

ppliances

living culture,” Page says, “so when other materials came into our existence, we started painting on everything.”

In the absence of written language in Aboriginal Australia, Page says objects tell their own stories— e.g., a boomerang used for hunting will feature an artistic narrative of a hunt. The same applies to cooking tools, which Aboriginal people painted, burned, and etched. Breville’s new range attempts to honor that history. While the Breville team came prepared with a surplus of blank appliances for the artists to interact with, Page says it was a “onetake wonder” as they meditatively got to work, painting directly onto the pieces. Each product contains a story—for instance, Yalti Napangati’s kettle, which depicts women preparing Piruwa tea around a watering hole, represented by the waterlevel window on the appliance.

The artists painted the pieces on site, but reproducing them faithfully proved to be more challenging for Breville. Page says she and Hoare spent around a year working through the technical

aspects of how to imbue each appliance with the true tactile nature of the originals.

After a significant amount of trial and error, the team developed a 3D scanning process that accurately captures the texture and depth of the brushstrokes; the art is then reconstructed by hand in layers of applications, with Breville dubbing the end result indistinguishable from the original. The company has gone on to patent the technique.

The final production of 10,000 pieces, which are all individually numbered, releases in the U.S. today.

When it came to compensating the artists, Page wanted to raise the bar, so she partnered with an Aboriginal intellectual property lawyer, establishing a royalty for each item produced, with the artists retaining copyright. Moreover, “what has really blown my mind about Breville is that they’re going

see page 22

ukultji (Nolia) Napangati [Photo: Breville]

▲Piruwa – Women preparing Piruwa tea at Kiwirrkurra, Yalti Napangati [Photo: Breville]

 Dhuuyaay – Fire Stick Farming, Lucy Simpson. [Photo: Breville]

Aboriginal Artists from page 21

to donate 100% of the profits,” Page says.

Per Breville, half of the funds will be used to support the National Indigenous Culinary Institute and the Moriarty Foundation, and the other half will fund Indigenous scholarships and initiatives at the University of Technology Sydney.

“I think the motivation for Breville to do the project in the first place was about saying, ‘This is what makes Australia unique,'” Page says. “‘This is about our land.’”

Page says storytelling is key to sustainability— imbuing an object with meaning and history can help eliminate the disposability of the modern world. And to her, that’s an essential part of the project at large.

“We can use

the act of design as an act of power, and say, no, we’re not going to do this anymore. We’re not going to design all these ubiquitous objects that just get thrown away. We’re going to build story and meaning and preciousness and sustainability into everything we make from now on.”

It may seem like a lofty goal, but hey—stranger things have happened. (Like, say, a major brand seeking to do right by a group of brilliant Aboriginal artists.)

https://www.fastcompany.com/90880390/ aboriginal-artists-designed-brevilles-stunningnew-appliances

Lucy Simpson [Photo: Breville]

Dhunbarrbil – Place of Many Seeds Ready for Grinding, Lucy Simpson. [Photo: Breville]

[Photo: Breville]

Kampurarrpa – Dreaming at Ngami. [Photo: Breville]

IS ESSENTIAL

COMMUNITY

for the overall wellbeing of Black women, and Health in Her HUE is on a mission to help each one find her tribe.

Health in Her HUE

The platform was launched by public health innovator Ashlee Wisdom alongside strategic executor Eddwina Bright. Together, they’re using their expertise to fight against the health disparities faced by women who look like them across the nation.

These Founders are Behind a Digital Platform That Aims to Connect Black Women to Culturally Sensitive Providers

By Shanique Yates

“The reason why Health in Her HUE is particularly important for Black women is because Black women have some of the worst health outcomes and not because of anything that we’re doing wrong, but because of the structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism,” Wisdom told AfroTech. “And so because we have some of the worst health outcomes, it’s important for there to be equitable health care solutions that are tailored to the specific needs of Black women.”

Serving Women In The Digital Space

Health In Her HUE aims to help both Black women and women of color stay informed when making choices about their health, but, just as important, the digital space is there to help them feel empowered.

“We’re a digital health platform that connects Black women and women of color to racially inclusive and culturally sensitive healthcare providers,” Bright said. “We connect them with evidence-based content, essentially their lived experiences, and then we also connect them to community support.”

She continued:

“When we think about our products and what we offer, we describe it in three ‘Cs.’ The first ‘C’ is ‘connection’ and that’s our provider directory. We have about 1,200 providers across 60 specialties, currently listed on the platform. The second ‘C’ is ‘content.’ We have a content and research library that is separated into 10 different health and wellness topics. And then we have the ‘community’ ‘C.’ We offer a community forum, again, separated across those health and wellness topics where women can talk to each other or talk to healthcare providers. Another component of our community is our care squad program.”

The Health in Her HUE platform uses a vigorous onboarding process for providers, including a health interview. Rather than taking a data approach like many other companies, professionals looking to join Health in Her HUE have to self-opt in because it is vital that they are in alignment with the company’s broader mission.

“Our overall vision is to be the first touch point for Black women and women of color when it comes to their health,” Wisdom concluded. “And so what that actually means is that if a woman has a question related to her health, her first instinct isn’t going to WebMD or Google, but it’s Health in Her HUE’s content and resource library where she can find videos and articles on that particular condition.”

To learn more about Health in Her HUE, click here.

https://afrotech.com/health-in-her-hues-

Business Michelle Obama Launches Food and Beverage Company PLEZi Nutrition to 'Transform the Entire Food Industry'

By Ngozi Nwanji

BACK IN 2010, Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move!,” a national campaign to reduce childhood obesity and help children have healthier lifestyles.

During her time in the Oval Office, an impact that the former First Lady’s efforts created was changing school lunches to have more nutrition. Now, she’s taking on the food and beverage industry.

According to the company’s website, its mission is to disrupt the marketing of food and beverages to kids.

“So I’ve learned that on this issue, if you want to change the game, you can’t just work from the outside,” Obama, who is the co-founder and strategic partner, shared on the website. “You’ve got to get inside. You’ve got to find ways to change the food and beverage industry itself. So that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

She continued, “I’m proud to introduce you to a new company called PLEZi Nutrition. We’re hoping not just to provide healthy and delicious drinks and snacks for kids, but to jumpstart a race to the top that will transform the entire food industry.”

PLEZi Nutrition’s first product is PLEZi, a drink for

children ages six through 12. It comes in the flavors Tropical Punch, Orange Smash, Sour Apple, and Blueberry Blast. The debut product serves as an alternative to juice with high sweetness as it has less sugar and includes fiber and potassium. However, it’s still “delicious,” which will help parents in getting their kids to hop on board.

PLEZi Nutrition details that 10% of profits will go toward the movement of promoting kids’ health.

Obama hopes for the launch to be the start of more people joining in on raising a healthier generation of kids.

PLEZi Nutrition is available for purchase at Target, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Walmart online.

https://afrotech.com/michelle-obama-food-andbeverage-company-plezi, tastingtable.com

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is a Co-founder and Strategic Partner of PLEZi Nutrition, working behind-the-scenes to guide the company's mission to be a driver of change and a model of how food and beverage brands can support the health of our next generation.

port

Hear directly from Ms. Obama on why she's excited about the launch of PLEZi Nutrition!

U.S.-Africa Business Summit to be held

July 11-14 in Gaborone, Botswana

Corporate Council on Africa - Brandcom Partner

together African heads of state, senior U.S. and African government officials, and top CEO’s and senior business executives from the U.S. and Africa spanning major business sectors that are critical to the continent’s development. These include infrastructure, ICT / digital, health, energy, mining, agriculture, consumer goods, finance, tourism and creative industries.

During a visit to Gaborone, Botswana, Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) President and CEO Florizelle “Florie” Liser was honored to meet with H.E. Mokgweetsi Masisi, President of the Republic of Botswana, who reiterated his Government’s commitment to successfully co-hosting the 15th U.S.-Africa Business Summit (USABS) in Botswana later this year. President Masisi noted that key Cabinet officials who were in attendance at the meeting were ready to mobilize their ministries and work collaboratively with CCA and the private sector to organize a highly successful Summit. Following several days of government and private sector meetings as well as site visits, Ms. Liser was pleased to announce with Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, Hon. Mmusi Kgafela that the Summit will be held July 11-14, 2023 in Gaborone. The announcement was made Friday, February 3, 2023 at the Minister’s office along with the signing of an agreement between CCA and the Government of Botswana.

The U.S.-Africa Business Summit is the Corporate Council on Africa’s premier annual event, bringing

The 15th USABS theme “Enhancing Africa’s Value in Global Value Chains” highlights an issue that was heavily discussed during the U.S. – Africa Business Forum, hosted by President Joseph R. Biden on the second day of the U.S.Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, DC in December 2022. During the Forum, President Biden announced more than $55 billion in new U.S. government programs to support trade, investment and development in Africa along with more than $15 billion in new trade and investment deals made by private sector companies that were in attendance. CCA was proud to have coorganized the U.S.-Africa Business Forum which highlighted opportunities for greater collaboration between the U.S. and African private sector. This year’s CCA Summit will build on and advance those discussions, further deepening U.S.-Africa economic engagement and business ties.

With a desire to keep the positive momentum going from the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and Business Forum, Ms. Florie Liser stated that ” the U.S.-Africa Business Summit is an important platform and opportunity to again bring together U.S. and African government and private sector leaders to grow U.S.-Africa trade, business, and mutually beneficial gains for the people and businesses of both the United States and Africa.”

https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2023/u-s-africabusiness-summit-to-be-held-july-11-14-ingaborone-botswana/

(l-r) H.E. Mokgweetsi Masisi, President of the Republic of Botswana with CCA President/CEO Florizelle “Florie” Liser

Nine Principles You Should Use to Incr

By Dr. Amanda Nimon-Peters

principles four to six are perception-related, and principles seven to nine are behaviorrelated

INFLUENCE AND PERSUASION skills are highly desirable for all businesspeople, and especially for entrepreneurs, whose livelihoods depend on the outcome of certain momentous decisions. And the good news here is that influencing skills can be learned -and improved- with the right methodology.

If you have ever considered improving your powers of persuasion, you may have come across Robert Cialdini's The Psychology of Persuasion, or Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. While these books are great, they were also both written in the in the 20th century- I don't have to tell you that the world of work has changed enormously in the past few years, let alone since 1984.

Today's business professionals have been missing a model for influence at work specifically designed for the 21st century. As a business school professor, I sought to fix that problem. 18 months ago, I examined the last four decades of behavioral science research on the factors that influence people's decisions and actions. As a former entrepreneur and corporate executive in the Middle East, it was my goal to include research from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as studies from Europe and the US.

The result is my book, Working With Influence: Nine Principles Of Persuasion To Accelerate Your Career. It is based on more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles revealing nine universal principles for increasing your influence at work. These nine principles are organized into three sets of three to ensure they are easy to learn and remember: principles one to three are people-related,

PRINCIPLE ONE: STATUS In all cultures, people who have higher status are given preferential treatment. The key to gaining influence via principle one is to understand that status rankings are often done subconsciously, so think carefully about how you present yourself. The key is to avoid mentioning factors that reduce your status, like a lack of experience in one specific area, and instead make others aware of any experience, qualifications, or past successes you have, such as previous work experience at a big-name company. Be careful that the words you use are not simply the first ones that come out of your mouth.

PRINCIPLE TWO: SOCIAL IMITATION Our choices are heavily influenced by those of people around us or like us. Numerous studies have shown that when people receive information about what others have done in the same situation, they modify their own preferences in the same direction. The effect is stronger the more the target audience identifies with the referent group. To influence a decision in favor of the direction you propose, present the option you want people to choose as the standard or normative choice for the decision-maker's social grouping.

PRINCIPLE THREE: AFFILIATION Our decisions about people are influenced by whether or not we feel a person is like us or part of our in-group. Research data shows that decision-makers can feel affiliation towards someone who graduated from the same school, who has friends or colleagues in common, or even someone who has the same first name. Creating a sense of affiliation between yourself and other people can help to tip decisions in your favor during an interview or a client meeting, or when you are seeking help and resources.

rease Your Powers of Influence and Persuasion

PRINCIPLE FOUR: VALUE FRAMING In our dayto-day communication, we often fail to express the value of our work in terms that are inherently valuable. For example, we say "this is a great solution" instead of "this solution can reduce the hours your employees spend on data processing by more than 50%". Both statements can be true, but only the second statement is expressed in units that are inherently meaningful to a customer Value framing works because the tendency to judge value in relative, rather than absolute, terms is universal in humans.

PRINCIPLE FIVE: EFFORT Humans globally behave as if they are programmed to expend the absolute minimum seconds or calories of effort to achieve a given outcome, unless they have a very good reason to work harder. This is a facet of influencing we rarely consider. If you control the effort involved, you control the likelihood it will be done. Don't want people to do something? Ensure that it is a lot of work, and you won't have to say "no." Want people to do something? Make it as easy as possible, and people will often comply, just because you ask nicely.

PRINCIPLE SIX: REASONING Studies show that when people at work attempt to influence others, the most common tactic is rational persuasion, i.e. providing logical reasons. Those same studies also show this is not very effective. Human decisions are far less influenced by logical reasons than by the prospect of reward. To use principle six, generate an influential reason by tapping into emotion. What would make someone feel, rather than think, that your idea is a good choice?

PRINCIPLE SEVEN: INERTIA In many situations, human behavior occurs in a predictable sequence, as if actions were being driven by an invisible force such as inertia. Perhaps you have a specific sequence when you enter your front door- keys on the rack, drink from the fridge, feet on the coffee

table, TV on! As Bruce Lee suggested, it is often easier to go with the flow of water than to fight against it. Given what is most likely to happen, what is your best move?

PRINCIPLE EIGHT: END-GOAL FOCUS Imagine you are on a motorboat attempting to reach a faraway shore with a dwindling source of fuel. The more that you waiver from side to side, the less likely you are to reach your goal. The fuel analogy is highly relevant, because people have limited energy with which to make decisions. Focus your energy and efforts against achieving one outcome– not against trying to win all arguments at the meeting. A 16th century proverb says: "If you try to run after two hares, you will catch neither."

PRINCIPLE NINE: EXECUTION Planning and executing that plan are not the same thing. The key to applying to principle nine is to practice the aspects of execution and delivery most strongly linked to persuasion- an upright posture, familiar words, and a voice that matches the emotion of the message. Practicing micro adjustments in your execution must be done in advance, because it is too hard to focus on what you are saying, and how you are saying it, at the same time.

When it comes to influence at work, you don't have to be the best influencer there ever was. Your goal should be to develop your skill so that your success improves relative to what it has been. Aim for steady improvement!

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-ae/growthstrategies/nine-principles-you-should-use-toincrease-your-powers-of/444357

Image credit: SlideShare

7 Common Qualities of Credible People

By Gwen Moran

CREDIBILITY IS AN INCREASINGLY valuable attribute today. Perhaps to no one’s surprise, the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer found a rise in polarization, with the U.S. falling in the top quarter of countries deemed “severely polarized.” But business bucks that trend. Edelman’s research found that business is now not only the most trusted institution but also the only one trusted globally. In addition, the research found that respondents overwhelmingly expect CEOs to use their resources to “hold divisive forces accountable,” according to the report’s press release. But in order for information to be seen as trustworthy, you also have to believe the person delivering it. “If you don’t believe the messenger, you won’t believe the message,” says Barry Z. Posner, leadership professor at Santa Clara University. He calls it “the first law of leadership.” Posner and his colleague James M. Kouzes, fellow of Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders, are coauthors of Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It. “[It’s] even more true today, it could be said, because we believe the messenger, we’re going to believe the message— even if it’s not true,” he adds. That makes building credibility an imperative imbued with responsibility. What makes someone credible? Who are these folks who seem to engender our trust, sometimes before they even say a word? As it turns out, they have a few things in common:

THEY’RE COMPETENT

A key component of credibility is competence, says Douglas Fisher, professor and chair of the department of educational leadership at San Diego State University and coauthor of Leader Credibility: The Essential Traits of Those Who Engage, Inspire, and Transform. While that may seem obvious—you should know what you’re doing

or talking about to be credible—what is less so is how the people around you determine whether or not you’re competent.

“What’s really interesting is, in the workplace, the people who report to you judge your competence based on your communication skills more than your bosses, who judge your competence based on your performance skills,” he says. So your competence— and, as a result, your credibility—may be evaluated differently based on your relationship.

THEY KEEP THEIR WORD

Credible leaders communicate well and often, but there’s another element to what they say and how they say it. Posner calls it, “DWYSYWD”—in other words, do what you say you will do Credible people don’t make promises they can’t or don’t intend to keep. They use words carefully and then ensure that they’re doing what they articulated. “We call it ‘discovering yourself’—knowing what’s important to you so that you can articulate it. And then once you articulate it, listening to yourself so that you make sure that you’re not saying one thing and doing another,” Posner says.

THEY VALUE ACCOUNTABILITY

Accountability is another important component of credibility “It’s not only holding yourself accountable, but to be credible, you have to hold other people accountable,” Posner says. That means noticing when they’re doing things

Aliko Dangote, Chair, Dangote Group

wrong, but also noticing when they’re doing things right. If someone performs in an outstanding way, that should be called out, too, because it sends a message to the team that accountability isn’t always negative.

THEY CONNECT WITH OTHERS

Credible leaders understand who they are and how to communicate to their audience, says executive coach Carol Kauffman, coauthor of RealTime Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High. She adds that they also go “beyond the Golden Rule.”

“The Golden Rule is ‘treat others as you would want to be treated.’ But to be truly credible, you want to treat others the way they would want to be treated,” she says. So, if you’re an extroverted leader, you adapt to the needs of introverts on your team. If you’re dealing with people who are worried, you respond in a reassuring manner. Being relatable

fosters a sense of connection that aids credibility, Fisher adds.

THEY CARE

Credibility is also bolstered when someone truly cares about an issue or situation. Posner points to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as an example: “He built credibility with a nation by not leaving.”

Showing that you’re invested by having another’s best interests at heart can also build credibility, Fisher says. “The people around us are always watching, and it’s human nature, for example, to look for additional evidence that the person is not trustworthy,” he says. “So we say, ‘Oh, I have this experience with a person not having my best interests at heart or not being reliable,’ which creates cracks in our credibility.”

THEY’RE OPEN TO NEW IDEAS

Credibility requires having the ability to listen and question our own assumptions, Kauffman says. “(Credible people) are willing to say, ‘Hey, I may not be right. What’s your point of view on that?’” Doing so without defensiveness helps them stay open to new information and ideas that inform their opinions and beliefs.

THEY KNOW WHAT TO DO WHEN THEY BLOW IT

Mistakes happen. Deadlines get missed. In short, we blow it sometimes. Credible people own up to their mistakes and figure out what to do to make them right. To keep your credibility, own up to it, apologize, and make it right as soon as possible, Fisher says. Be sure you “close the loop” to let others affected know what you did to make it right. “Then, give yourself a little grace,” he says. And figure out what you can do to improve the circumstances that led to the error or misstep.

Building credibility is an important part of gaining trust—and trust grows more valuable as it becomes increasingly scarce.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90866477/ common-qualities-credible-people

Image credit: recruitmenttrust.com, Inside Edition, the-sun.com

Barack Obama, former President, USA

Nelson Mandela, former President, Republic of South Africa

The Power of Representation: Why Including Black People in Your Digital Illustrations Matters

By John D Saunders

Representation is an important aspect of digital illustrations. It not only serves as a tool for artistic expression but also plays a significant role in creating a sense of inclusivity and diversity.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE LACK of representation of Black people in digital illustrations is a significant issue that has been going on for a long time. This article aims to highlight the importance of including Black people in your digital illustrations and the impact it can have on representation and inclusivity.

Why representation matters

Representation is important because it impacts our psychological and emotional well-being. Seeing oneself represented in media and advertising can create a sense of belonging, while the absence of representation can lead to feelings of exclusion and marginalization. The lack of representation of Black people in digital illustrations contributes to stereotypes and prejudice, leading to a narrow and distorted view of Black people.

However, there are examples of successful representation in media and advertising. The success of Black Panther, for example, showed the impact of positive representation on the audience. The film’s emphasis on African culture and Black excellence provided a sense of pride and belonging to Black viewers.

The lack of Black representation in digital illustrations

Despite the growing awareness of the need for representation and inclusivity, Black people are still underrepresented in digital illustrations. According to a study by Allure, out of 156 fashion and beauty brands analyzed, only 15% of their

Instagram posts featured Black people. This lack of representation is not only harmful to Black people but also limits the perspective and creativity of artists and designers.

The lack of Black representation in digital illustrations has an adverse impact on society as a whole. When Black people are not represented, it reinforces the false narrative that Black people are unimportant or insignificant. This can lead to further discrimination and prejudice, which can affect the mental health and wellbeing of Black people.

Benefits of including Black people in your digital illustrations

There are several benefits to including Black people in your digital illustrations. First and foremost, it increases representation and inclusivity, which is essential in promoting diversity and equality. Additionally, including Black people in your digital illustrations can connect you with a wider audience, including the Black community. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to challenge stereotypes and promote diversity by showing the world that Black people are multidimensional and complex.

Conclusion

Incorporating Black people in your digital illustrations is crucial for representation and inclusivity. The lack of representation of Black people in digital illustrations perpetuates harmful stereotypes and reinforces the false narrative that Black people are unimportant or insignificant. By including Black people in your digital illustrations,

you can help promote diversity, equality, and inclusivity.

Remember, when including Black people in your digital illustrations, it is essential to avoid harmful stereotypes, conduct research, consult with Black people, incorporate diverse perspectives, and consider hiring Black artists. Together, we can create a more inclusive and representative world through digital illustrations.

It is our mission to create beautiful, black illustrations for use in digital projects around the world. Browse hundreds of illustration packs and SUBSCRIBE to get access to the entire library.

https://www.blackillustrations.com/blog/thepower-of-representation

Image credit: Black Illustrations

BECOMING THE National Small Business

Person of the Year is like winning the big game, at least for Abdirahman Kahin.

Kahin earned the Small Business Administration's pinnacle award in May for his work as the founder of Afro Deli & Grill, an African fusion restaurant. The award is largely symbolic, as the winner walks away with bragging rights. For the SBA, he's a shining example of how the agency's pandemicera lending turned a struggling business into a winner

"It's news that I've always wished to hear," Kahin tells Inc. "It's huge. It's like winning the Super Bowl: You can feel the emotion of when you win the Super Bowl, so it's the equivalent of that magnitude."

Kahin arrived in the United States from Somalia in 1996. Part of what drew him to the food industry, he says, is how food can be a bridge among different people.

And that's just what his restaurant seeks to do: bring cultures together and introduce them to African cuisine. Afro Deli serves a menu of cuisine options ranging from sambusas (meat-filled pastries from Somalia) to chapati noodles and sweet plantains. Afro Deli opened 13 years ago in the Twin Cities and now has four locations across Minnesota.

While he admits he isn't a cook, Kahin saw an opportunity after seeing so many Africans in America. "I managed another restaurant and began planning out my vision of an African fusion concept that could be as popular as Chipotle," he says. "I realized the fusion concept was a great way to bring cultures together and introduce African cuisine to the mainstream."

Kahin also believes in social entrepreneurship and making good food accessible. That's why Afro Deli partnered with groups like Meals on Wheels to help address food insecurity within its community.

Abdirahman Kahin with Representative Betty McCollum (D-Minn.). Photo: Courtesy Minnesota SBA

How This Deli Owner Earned SBA's Top Award by Making African Food Mainstream

By Caleb Naysmith

The restaurant even secured a contract to deliver meals to vulnerable community members in the earlier days of the pandemic. Since March 2020, the restaurant has donated more than 1.2 million meals.

As many other entrepreneurs can attest, finding the right financing proved to be a challenge for Afro Deli. Kahin believes that doubts around the restaurant's viability, plus a lack of understanding around African cuisine, fed into Afro Deli's capital constraints. "Even after the success of our first location, traditional lenders would not finance our expansion into a busier downtown location because they thought we wouldn't be successful outside of an immigrant-majority neighborhood," Kahin shares.

Kahin credits the SBA with helping to solve his restaurant's capital troubles, especially during the pandemic. Afro Deli was not immune to the problems the pandemic brought: Kahin was forced to lay off most of his employees and temporarily closed two of his locations.

But the company was able to stay afloat through

seven PPP loans, totaling $554,073, which helped the company stay open until business normalized. The money kept 39 employees on board, plus more than 20 contract drivers for the home delivery food service program. Kahin also used the money to pay rent, utilities, and food costs.

And Kahin didn't forget about EIDL loans. Afro Deli received $335,300 in 2020 and an additional loan in March 2022, for $464,400. A majority of these funds, Kahin says, will help the business expand as it prepares to open another location next year.

"We're excited because it will be the first location we will own and is perfectly located in the heart of Minneapolis," Kahin says.

The restaurant has recovered since the pandemic's low points and is currently projecting $5.8 million in revenue across its four restaurants.

Moving forward, Kahin will keep seeking more capital as he plans to expand into other states. Two new restaurants are coming in 2025. And he hopes to keep leveraging resources from the SBA, such as training programs.

"Our success has allowed us to be able to access SBA loans and other financial resources that have helped us open more locations and expand our offerings," Kahin says. "Now, we're really excited about the opportunity to go national and become the first fast casual African concept."

https://www.inc.com/magazine/202304/dianaransom/the-sba-after-ppp.html

Image credit: Afro Deli & Grill

The Rise of AI Entrepreneurs: How This Technology is Creating New Opportunitie

By Jodie Cook

ONE THING IS FOR CERTAIN: the next wave of billionaires will be AI billionaires. It’s already happening. Entrepreneurs who have been looking out for an opportunity are taking the widespread awareness of artificial intelligence as their sign that this is it. Their time to shine. Forget how you ran a business before because new skills are required for this playing field. Before you had to bang on doors, hustle and grind. Now you have to think smart, adapt fast and uncover every stone until you find product market fit.

This technology is creating new opportunities for those with their eyes open wide enough to spot

them. Here’s what’s out there for ambitious AI entrepreneurs and how to make use of it.

Access to funding

Existing funds are looking to invest in AI businesses and more funds are popping up. Governments are starting competitions, angel investors are having a flutter, and entrepreneurs are investing in their own skills to bootstrap their way to gamechanging products and tools.

Lack of money is not an excuse. If you want it enough, you can find the funding. Ask around, ask Twitter, phone a friend. Go on a deep dive of

12 Black Women in AI Paving the Way for a Better World

Google to find those pockets of cash that you can plough into development. The excitement is at its peak, so act now to get your termsheets signed and your suppliers lined up and working on your ideas. You can even validate an idea before spending any money at all; create a basic landing page, test value propositions with Reddit ads and see what kind of initial interest you get.

More trust in AI

Those working in AI long before now were ahead of the curve. That curve has caught up, but where do they stand? At best, the early movers have a solid foundation on which to build. At worst, they peaked too soon and ran out of money, energy or both.

Along with the hype has come a new openness to AI. Business owners are testing platforms out and sharing their findings. People are willing to give it a go. This marks the perfect time for your new business to have its first wave of customers. Make the most of the exploration phase and create the tool they experiment with and stick to for life. You don’t need decades of AI experience to do this. You can start from scratch and learn as you build. If you have the decades of experience, the floodgates are now open and you have a head start.

More tools available

With the growing number of entrepreneurs taking AI into their own hands, there are more tools available with which to run your business. Even if you’re not planning on pivoting into an AI business, you can leverage the technology to surpass the competition or scale much faster. A new company once needed a new person for every department, now you could feasibly have just one employee, as long as they are proficient in handling the tools.

With your fixed costs potentially far lower, you can take more risks. You can simmer below the surface for longer, you can fund your development with consultancy if you like. Use tools for graphic design, copywriting and marketing. Use tools for data analysis and outreach. Hire one person to run five platforms, not five people to do five separate tasks. Make good use of the bigger profit margin and build better products that people love to use.

The space is wide open

Artificial intelligence has entered the collective consciousness of far more entrepreneurs, so we’re thinking in different ways. Problems can be solved by prompts. Challenges eliminated by Chat GPT. The fact that technology is providing so many solutions is leading to a technology-first approach. In turn this leads to new ideas for AI products that can be codified into existence.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, by author Al (Albert) Ries, explains basic marketing principles that, ideally, your business conforms to. A quick glance down the list with AI in mind makes it clear that this is very possible. Act now, act fast, and you can be the first in the market, the first in the category and the first in the mind. You can own a word, you can own an entire rung on the ladder, and you can adhere to the law of unpredictability with your nimbleness and quick thinking.

New opportunities for entrepreneurs are everywhere you look. Make use of the new funds, the enhanced levels of trust, the new tools out there that you can use to lower costs and the collective consciousness in coming up with the next flurry of ideas. Surf this wave or wait another decade for the next, the choice is yours.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ jodiecook/2023/04/24/the-rise-of-aientrepreneurs-how-technology-is-creating-newopportunities

Companion article: 12 Black Women in AI Paving the Way for a Better World

Image credit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/12black-women-ai-paving-way-better-worldcaroline-lair/

AI Village at DEF CON Announces Largest-ever Public Generative A You're Invited!

Posted by Sven Cattell, Rumman Chowdhury, Austin Carson on 03 May 2023

LARGEST ANNUAL HACKER convention to host thousands to find bugs in Large Language Models (LLM) built by Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability. This event is supported by the White House O ffice of Science, Technology, and Policy, the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, and the Congressional AI Caucus.

AI Village (AIV) is hosting the first public generative AI red team event at DEF CON 31 with our partners at Humane Intelligence, SeedAI, and the AI Vulnerability Database. We will be testing models kindly provided by Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability with participation from Microsoft, on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI.

We love the explosion of creativity that new generative large language models (LLMs) allow. They can help people get their ideas out faster and better than ever before. They can lower barriers to entry in creative fields, and allow for new kinds of creative content. However, we’re only beginning to understand the embedded and emergent risks that come from automating these new technologies at scale. Hallucinations, jailbreaks, bias, and a drastic leap in capabilities are all new issues security professionals and the public have to deal with.

According to Sven Cattell, the founder of AI Village, “Traditionally, companies have solved this problem with specialized red teams. However this work has largely happened in private. The diverse issues with these models will not be resolved until more people know how to red team and assess them. Bug bounties, live hacking events, and other standard community engagements in security can

be modified for machine learning model based systems. These fill two needs with one deed, addressing the harms and growing the community of researchers that know how to help.”

At DEF CON 2023, we are conducting the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models. Thousands of people will experience hands-on LLM red-teaming for the first time – and we’re bringing in hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities. This is the first time anyone is attempting more than a few hundred experts to assess these models, so we will be learning together. We’ll publish what we learn from this event to help others who want to try the same thing. The more people who know how to best work with these models, and their limitations, the better. This is also an opportunity for new communities to learn skills in AI by exploring its quirks and limitations. We will be providing laptops and timed access to multiple LLMs from the vendors. We will also be providing a capture the flag (CTF) style point system to promote testing a wide range of harms. Red teamers will be expected to abide by the hacker hippocratic oath. The individual who gets the highest number of points wins a high end NVIDIA GPU.

Who are we?

This is a collaborative effort. In addition to thousands of hackers, we are also bringing in partners from community groups and policyoriented nonprofits as well as supporters in government.

The DEF CON community has extensive experience evaluating a huge range of technologies.

AIV hosted the first public bias bounty at DEF CON 29 which has grown into the Bias Buccaneers and Humane Intelligence and we’re working with that team again on this event.

Our nonprofit community partners include Houston Community College – which par ticipated in an educational pilot of this exercise; Black Tech Street from Tulsa, OK; the Internet Education Foundation’s Congressional App Challenge; and the AI Vulnerability Database. In addition to Humane Intelligence and SeedAI, the Wilson Center Science and Technology Innovation Program (STIP) is joining as policy partner.

This challenge is supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy (OSTP) and is aligned with the goals of the Biden-Harris Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. The National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate will also participate, and the Congressional AI Caucus is collaborating on this initiative as part of their AI Primer series. This exercise will be adapted into educational programming for the Congressional AI Caucus and other officials – as well as for the national networks of our community partners.

The participants are using an evaluation platform that is developed and provided by Scale AI. Our CTF challenge is built by Humane Intelligence.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Do you want to participate? We are seeking a laptop sponsor, sponsorship, and travel support for community partners.

Interested in Sponsorship please send an inquiry email to grt@aivillage.org.

https://aivillage.org/generative%20red%20team/ generative-red-team

Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) Hono House Team in 2023 Global 100 Under 40 List

Press Release

THE AFRICA HOUSE TEAM is proud to announce that its executive team and co-founders have been recognized in the Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) 2023 Global 100 Under 40 list. This prestigious honor is bestowed in celebration of the United Nations Decade for People of African Descent

The Africa House executive team, consisting of Nima Elmi (CEO), Prof. Landry Signé (Executive Chairman), and Hyatt Antognini-Amin (CCO), were acknowledged for their exceptional achievements in the category of Politics and Governance. This honor highlights the team’s dedication to serve as the action platform for Africa.

Earlier this year, the Africa House team convened a gathering of prominent global figures during the World Economic Forum's 2023 annual meeting in Davos. In the span of two days, over 400 individuals gathered at Africa House to participate in discussions with a group of influential co-chairs and keynote speakers, including will.i.am , Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and AfCFTA Secretary

General H.E. Wamkele Mene. Participants explored Africa's achievements in trade, technology, health, and innovation. The event proved to be an unforgettable experience for attendees and offered a promising glimpse into the future of the continent. More recently, in April, the Africa House team partnered with the African Union Mission to the United States to host a highly successful forum titled "A Year of African Opportunities" alongside the World Bank and IMF Spring Meeting 2023. This invitation-only event was a testament to the Africa House team's ongoing commitment to promoting opportunities and fostering collaboration in support of Africa's growth and development.

Africa House is recognized alongside other exceptional 2023 honorees, including the AfCFTA Secretariat, Dr. Tedros Adhanom

Ghebreyesus,

Director General of the World Health Organization, and Kylian Mbappé, Professional Football Player. It is worth noting that previous MIPAD award recipients include esteemed individuals such as Trevor Noah, Naomi Osaka, and Colin Kaepernik among others.

“The Africa House team is deeply grateful for the recognition of its achievements and commitment to driving positive change and progress for the African continent and its people, both at home and abroad," said Nima Elmi, CEO of Africa House.

"We are delighted to invite our distinguished fellow Africans and friends of Africa, who are committed to creating impact, to collaborate with Africa House (Davos 2024) on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, from January 15 to 19, 2024. Let us bridge ideas and actions to accelerate Africa's transformation and build a better future for all," said Professor Landry Signé, Executive Chairman at Africa House, Executive Director at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Washington DC, Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution, Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University, and Co-

G H E

P Pa t rtiiciipantts e

Chair of the World Economic Forum

Regional Action Group for Africa. For more information about Africa House, please visit http://myafricahouse.com or contact Hyatt Antognini-Amin, CCO of Africa House, at contact@myafricahouse.com.

About Africa House

Africa House (Davos) is a platform to spearhead Africa's rising by bringing the best and brightest entrepreneurs, initiatives, and opportunities to leaders across industry and government. Africa House is powered by The Giving Back Fund as a non-profit project and supported by a team of experts that bring together a combined over 100 years of experience on the continent and leading African initiatives.

Hyatt Antognini Amin

Project Africa House

+1 202-846-4742

email us here.

https://www.einpresswire. com/article/632619443/ most-influential-peopleof-african-descent-mipadhonors-africa-house-team-in2023-global-100-under-40-list

Image credit: www. brandcrowd.com

You'reinvitedyoutojoinusforour 24thAnnualAfrICANDO.Theconferenceand expowillbeheldon-siteattheDoubleTreebyHiltonHotelMiamiAirport& ConventionCenter(MACC),711NW72ndAvenue,Miami,Florida,USA,andvirtually. RegistrantsunabletotraveltotheUScanparticipateintheconferenceonline.The hybrideventwillfeatureSeminars,ATradeExpo,andaGalaAwardsDinner.

THEME: TheDiaspora: Accelerating U.S.-Africa Trade, Investment, and Technological Innovation

Areas of Focus

Trade and Manufacturing Health Infrastructure Technology Tourism

AfrICANDO isdesignedtoassistcivilsocietyorganizations(CSOs),micro,small,and medium-sizedbusinesses(MSMEs),andtheAfricanDiasporaincreatinglinkageswith USbusinessesandotherstakeholdersby:

Navigating US-Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation using AGOA benefits

Creating Connections with Members of the Diaspora

Forming Strategic Partnerships

Leveraging African Diaspora skills, investment and advocacy to fast-track development

Increasing their product/service visibility

The Top Five Things I’ve Learned from Being a Black Founder

By Porter Braswell

TODAY (4-27-23) WE’RE ANNOUNCING that we’ve entered into an agreement for the acquisition of Jopwell, the first company I started and the foundation for all I’ve been able to accomplish professionally. Eight years ago, I began this journey with my co-founder Ryan Williams – and it’s completely surreal to think we’ve made it to this point.

Jopwell is being acquired by True,* one of the largest executive search firms in the world and a powerhouse innovator in executive talent management. With over 800 employees worldwide, I know True will help Jopwell scale our mission of career advancement for Black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals. We’ve built a great relationship with True’s coCEOs throughout this process – Brad Stadler

and Joe Riggione. Ryan and I are very excited to continue building Jopwell within the True platform, alongside them.

There’s no shortage of articles and thought pieces on how tough it is to be a Black founder in America right now. Capital flows remain abysmally low for us: in 2022, only 1% of the $215.9 billion raised in US venture capital deals went to Black founders. Black (and Latinx) communities remain significantly underrepresented in the founder community, but 1% of funding is still a deeply inequitable proportion given that roughly 6% of US founders are Black.

Despite so many discouraging indicators, it

Ryan Williams (left) and Porter Braswell (right)

seems like young people are increasingly turning to entrepreneurship as a path to wealth creation. 9.3% of Black professionals in the venture ecosystem aged 21-30 are founders, a higher proportion than in any other age range. While it is undeniably difficult to be a Black founder, that doesn’t seem to be deterring the next generation of innovators.

When Ryan and I first started on our path to founding Jopwell, we were totally blind to all these obstacles and statistics. Frankly, if we’d been wiser to them, I’m not sure we would have taken the leap of faith to build this business.

In this environment, it’s crucial we tell stories about Black entrepreneurship: our successes, our failures, our ambitions, and our lessons learned. The financial reality may take years to change, and the fickle nature of VC markets means we can’t rely on them alone. But what we can do is change perceptions. Representation matters, and as a community, we have to ensure aspiring Black entrepreneurs see a pathway to success.

THE STORY OF JOPWELL

Ryan and I both started our careers at Goldman Sachs, where we bought and sold currencies on the FX sales desk. After completing my first year as an analyst in 2012, I knew I wasn’t “called” to do this job. Above all, I was pretty average at it and I hated that feeling. I knew there was something else I was meant to do.

In 2013, I decided I wanted to work in tech and applied for entry-level sales jobs at Uber, Box, DropBox, a friend’s startup, and a company that was going through TechStars. After making it to final-round interviews at all of them, they turned me down for my lack of experience at similar tech companies. Shortly after these failed attempts, I noticed all these organizations had begun talking publicly about their lack of diversity and claiming they weren’t diverse because the talent didn’t exist. It was a “pipeline” challenge.

I became increasingly frustrated by this blatant and deliberate misdirection. I was literally the talent they claimed didn’t exist. But I couldn’t break into the industry, despite being overqualified for the entry-level jobs I’d been applying for.

So I decided that the only way to break in would be to build my own tech company – one

that served all this supposedly nonexistent talent. That’s how we came up with the vision to create the largest pipeline of Black, Latinx, and Native American talent. That vision would eventually become Jopwell.

The idea came easily enough. The much harder part came next. To inform my parents that I was about to quit my desirable job in finance and take a massive risk to build my own business, I decided to write them a letter.

In that letter, I spoke about the importance of taking a leap of faith, following one’s calling, and the importance of living a life where you take big swings. I was pretty proud of it when I polished it off and thought it would be well received.

Instead, my Dad’s response was, “So let me get this straight. You’re non-technical, you’ve never done recruiting, and you’ve never built a business before. And you’re quitting your secure job to go and do that?”

To which I enthusiastically replied: “Yes.”

He ended the conversation there and then by saying he was disappointed in me and that he didn’t understand.

For all the obstacles I’ve had to overcome on this journey, taking a leap of faith while knowing I was disappointing my family remains the most difficult. No article or book or story could have prepared me for it. I had to forget everything the world was telling me, including my parents, and forge my own path ahead. It was the hardest, loneliest experience of my life.

A few years ago, one summer evening while sitting outside in Martha’s Vineyard, my dad and I were having a drink. By this point, my first daughter Mia was about 6 months old. Now that I knew what it was like to be a parent, I was able to communicate to my dad that I actually appreciated him pushing back on me when I took the risk. I realized when he did so that he wasn’t really giving me advice – he was projecting his own insecurities onto me.

My dad grew up in the Bronx. He was the first one in his family to attend college, and worked extremely hard to become a General Counsel for a publicly traded company. Eventually, he also

Black Founder from page 41

became a state Judge. His pathway to success meant putting his head down, doing what was necessary, and ensuring my mom, sister, and I always had financial security.

He wasn’t able to think about quitting a job and starting a company. Failure would have been devastating for everyone he supported. But because of his efforts, along with my mom’s, my sister and I were in a different position. We could take risks he was never able to consider.

Looking back, it was his disapproval of starting this journey that propelled much of our success. Many founders of color have to navigate these nuanced obstacles before even starting the journey. But it means that when we do take that leap to build something, we’re already “battle-tested” in a way. Ultimately those challenges mean we’re in a better position than most to build something impactful.

Now that Jopwell is being acquired, with my two girls sitting across from me watching Bluey, I think it’s fitting to write Part Two of that letter to my parents.

Dear Mom and Dad,

Against all my expectations, you were right. It was a crazy idea to leave Goldman. It was a crazy risk to start this company. And even though you told me not to, I realize now I never could have done it without you.

You spent your lives building enough security for Lauren and me so we could chase our dreams. You couldn’t have predicted what my dreams would be, and I’m sorry things took such a surprising turn. But I’m not sorry I took the risk, because it’s taught me valuable lessons about the world and myself. Lessons I’d never have learned from the path I was on before.

Now that Jopwell is being acquired, I have no desire to say “I told you so.” (OK, almost* no desire.) Instead, I want to share with you what I’ve learned so you see this was never just about vanity or youthful ambition. It was about growth and impact.

So here they are, the Top 5 Lessons I’ve learned along the journey:

You can’t build, scale, or sell

without someone else’s trust

Lots of people have good ideas. But building a successful business isn’t just about having ideas – it’s about cultivating trust. Jopwell wouldn’t be where it is today without the trust of the corporate partners we work with and the talented individuals we connect them to. Both sides of our platform had to trust that we had good intentions and that we could deliver on our vision. That trust is built in so many different ways. But without it, you can’t build anything sustainable.

As a Black founder, success brings privilege…and privilege is a responsibility

I remember some of the first meetings we had when we were raising money for Jopwell. I felt like a total imposter. I didn’t have people in my network who looked like me, who had successfully raised money or exited a business. As a Black founder I realize I have a responsibility to pay it forward, and help more and more founders of color get to this point. Believability is everything for founders, and I want to help more people like me get to a place where they never have to second-guess their credibility.

We need more Black founders to build, scale, and exit

Now that I’m at this stage, I’m realizing I have to have conversations about wealth creation. As you know, we rarely speak openly about this in our household or in our community. But it’s a critical foundation to build upon for future generations’ success.

Education, employment, housing, entrepreneurship – all of them become more readily accessible with the accumulation of wealth. One of the best ways to create that is through successful exits. And Black founders need to be able to see ourselves reaching that stage. We need to normalize Black founders scaling and exiting their own businesses, especially if we expect each other to pay it forward and reinvest back into our community. Black wealth is a communal responsibility, not just an individual ambition. For any Black founders with an exit in their back pocket, it’s critical to remember that.

All it takes to start something is one person who really trusts you

When Ryan and I left our jobs in finance, we took a massive leap of faith. But I never doubted that Ryan trusted me. Without that trust, this wouldn’t have worked. Ryan invested so much in our partnership, and he went from being my co-worker at Goldman to my business partner, the best man at my wedding, and now an uncle to my kids. His faith in us back then has morphed

into something so much more. I can safely say he’s the brother I never had. No matter what business you’re operating in, you just need one person like that, one person who truly has your back, to get things going. Any other problem or gap is solvable, but that kind of support is irreplaceable.

And for me, I was fortunate that I had two people like that. I also had Juliana, my then girlfriend, and now wife. We were just starting to date when I was trying to break into tech. At every rejection, she would be the first to say that next time would be different. I don’t have the space to write about the impact Juliana had on this story, but without her, nothing meaningful I’ve accomplished over the last decade would have been possible.

Never stop thinking about your next move

Success isn’t just earned – it’s rented. And the rent is due every day. You don’t “make it” and then retire. Just like a musician playing a song or an athlete playing a game, you have to keep your mind on what’s coming next. In scaling Jopwell, I learned that I’m a builder. That’s what drives me. I like building new things and I’ve learned just how much remains to be built – especially for our community. I’m incredibly grateful for the success we found with Jopwell, but that will never blind me to how much more remains to be done.

That’s it, that’s what I’ve learned so far. I can’t thank you enough for pushing me, Mom and Dad. I never would have seen this through without your many honest challenges.

You’re probably gonna freak when I tell you I’m about to do it all again. But maybe I’ll save that for another letter.

With so much love and gratitude, Porter

*True’s

https://www.fastcompany.com/90886934/jopwellacquired-by-true-the-top-five-things-ive-learnedfrom-being-a-black-founder

Image crecit: Jopwel

Want to Be More Productive? According to Neuroscience, You Should Prioritize Having Fun

By Nick Sonnenberg

IT'S NO SECRET that your habits outside of work affect your performance at your job. Eating well, getting good sleep, and exercising regularly will serve you in anything you do.

What most people don't consider, however, is the impact their favorite hobbies can have on their performance at work. And it's not just because you come back after a weekend of fun feeling refreshed--there are physiological benefits to spending time on activities that "suck you in," so to speak, that will carry over to nearly everything else you do in your life.

It all comes down to flow, the highly productive state that efficient people seek out relentlessly.

Flow is a meta skill

For the uninitiated, a flow state is an optimal state of consciousness where you feel and perform your best. It's that feeling when you're so absorbed in an activity that time ceases to exist, and before you know it, hours have flown by and you've made tons of progress.

I'm a big fan of flow states. I believe one of the highest leverage points in most businesses is cutting down on distractions and minutiae so people can spend more time in flow states, focusing on work that matters.

It's one reason why I'm a fan of Steven Kotler, the best-selling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He's spent nearly his entire life analyzing flow and developing methods to spend more time in it.

I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on flow, but after diving into Kotler's most recent book, Gnar Country, I had an epiphany that I think many entrepreneurs could benefit from.

See, according to Kotler, flow is not just a

phenomenon that happens randomly. It's a meta skill-a higher-order skill that enables us to better learn other skills and improve our existing ones. And just like any skill, the more time you spend doing it the better you'll get at it.

At first glance, Gnar Country looks more like a ski memoir than a performance book. But that's because Kotler loves skiing. Skiing allows him to enter into a flow state like nothing else can. And over time, he realized that the more time he spent skiing, the more productive he became in other areas of his life.

It might sound ridiculous, but it's a very real phenomenon. The more time you spend in flow, the better you get at achieving flow states in all aspects of your life. That, coupled with the other physiological benefits it provides, means that spending time on our hobbies could be a lot more productive than we think.

Primary flow activities

Flow states happen in all

aspects of our lives. You might get into a flow state while cleaning your house or reading a book, for example.

But everyone has one or a few activities that really suck them in. Kotler calls these "primary flow activities," or the things you've done most in your life that are most likely to get you into flow. These can often take the form of hobbies or pastimes. For Kotler, it's skiing. For me, it's chess.

Your primary flow activity is powerful because it's an opportunity for you to hone your skill of getting into flow. Put simply, the more time I spend playing chess, the more time I spend in flow, and the better I'll get at achieving flow states while working in my business. There are also many physiological benefits to flow states that can improve your health and focus.

Getting into flow acts as a sort of "reset" for your nervous and immune system. Two of the phenomenological characteristics of flow are mastery and control, which are among the most

potent positive emotions one can experience. The neuro-immunological health benefits of these emotions arise from the close relationship between the nervous and immune systems, leading to an increase in the production of T cells and natural killer cells, which fight off disease and target tumors and other sick cells.

Finding your flow

The moral of the story is that prioritizing time spent in your primary flow activity is an inventive (and typically fun) way to live a healthier, more productive life.

If you're not sure what your primary flow activity is, Kotler recommends looking back at your childhood. Research shows that children are actually better at getting into flow states than adults, and that your ability to achieve flow states diminishes over time.

If you think back to your childhood, you can probably remember engrossing yourself in all sorts of activities that nowadays you'd find boring. But often there is one activity that stands out from the rest. Something you absolutely loved and would still love to do if only you had the time. Chances are, that is your primary flow activity.

As busy entrepreneurs, many of us focus on our business above all else. We forget about our hobbies because they're "not important." But the science is real. Prioritizing non-work-related activities that get you into flow is not only fun, but it could also be one of the best business moves you make.

https://www.inc.com/nicholas-sonnenberg/ want-to-be-more-productive-according-toneuroscience-you-should-prioritize-having-fun. html

Image credit: africanamericangolfersdigest.com

Sportskeeda, WordPress.com, blogTO, Metro

PlasticPaving:EgyptianStartup TurnsMillionsofBagsintoTiles

From Reuters

AN EGYPTIAN STARTUP is aiming to turn more than 5 billion plastic bags into tiles tougher than cement as it tackles the twin problems of tonnes of waste entering the Mediterranean Sea and high levels of building sector emissions.

"So far, we have recycled more than 5 million plastic bags, but this is just the beginning," TileGreen cofounder Khaled Raafat told Reuters. "We aim that by 2025, we will have recycled more than 5 billion plastic bags."

At the company's factory, on the outskirts of Cairo, workers carry large barrels loaded with mixed plastic waste to be melted down and compressed.

The resulting tiles are sold to real estate developers and contracting companies for use in outdoor paving.

Egyptian startup makes eco-friendly tiles to reduce rising pollution from cement and building materials in the country

Egypt is one of the worst polluters in the Mediterranean region with around 74,000 tonnes of plastic waste entering the sea per year, according to a 2020 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a non-profit organisation. Plastic waste is often discarded in the street or disposed of in informal dumps or burned.

The North African country, which hosted the United Nations COP27 climate summit last November, has in recent years banned the use of single-use plastics in several provinces.

Environment Minister Yasmine Fouad told Reuters at COP27 that the government was working with

supermarkets to ban single-use plastics by mid-2023 and was aiming to ban them nationally by 2024.

https://www.reuters. com/business/ sustainable-business/ plastic-paving-egyptianstartup-turns-millionsbags-into-tiles-2023-03-20/

◄ An employee of TileGreen factory checks parts of different types of plastic and waste to make interlocking tiles with different colours in the 10th of Ramadan City district northwest of Cairo, Egypt March 15, 2023.

A view of coloured eco-friendly tiles made from different types of plastic and waste in the 10th of Ramadan City district northwest of Cairo, Egypt March 15, 2023.

ThisFuturisticRecyclingPlantisMiningYourOldPhonefor

By Adele Peters

After

IF YOU DROP OFF an old cell phone for recycling, the circuit board inside it will probably be taken out, packed in a crate, and shipped off to a smelter in Europe or Asia who heats it up to more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to melt down the valuable metals it contains. Then the melted metal goes to a refiner. The process works, but it also has a huge carbon footprint.

A sprawling new e-waste recycling facility near San Diego takes a different approach: The company, called Camston Wrather, doesn’t use heat, pressure, or chemicals. After it shreds the circuit boards to separate plastic from metal, it uses a proprietary “particle reduction” process to break down the materials mechanically. The result, which looks like sand, goes to a refiner. The company says its carbon footprint is around 90% lower than smelting. It also uses up to 95% less water than if it were mining materials from the ground.

It’s a solution for one part of the massive problem of electronic waste. More than 50 million metric tons of it are generated globally each year, from

computers and phones to smartwatches and TVs. In the U.S., where the average household has 24 electronic devices, e-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream. Another part of the problem comes from manufacturers not designing gadgets to be repaired, but rather continually pushing the shiniest new products at consumers.

Most discarded gadgets aren’t recycled; only half of U.S. states have laws requiring e-waste recycling. Some electronics end up in landfills; others are forgotten in drawers. But even when devices are recycled, the recycling itself creates its own environmental challenges. (In the worstcase scenario, some e-waste is recycled in illegal scrapyards in Asia where workers burn imported trash and breathe in toxic fumes.) Camston Wrather wants to make recycling more sustainable.

As demand for precious metals keeps growing— for making everything from solar panels to EV batteries—recycling can help bolster supplies. The company says that it’s less expensive to get gold through its process than via traditional

it shreds the circuit boards to separate plastic from metal, it uses a proprietary “particle reduction” process to brea materials mechanically. The result, which looks like sand, goes to a refiner.

mining. In part, that’s because e-waste has such a high concentration of precious metals.

“Today, a financeable gold mine has 1 gram of gold per ton of ore,” says Dirk Wray, chairman and CEO of Camston Wrather. “E-waste has anywhere from 100 to 200 grams per tonne. And it’s rich with 22 metals.” While circuit boards are often shipped overseas for processing, the company wants to help build a shorter supply chain in the U.S. by working domestically.

At six other locations around the country, the company breaks down old gadgets to take out materials like aluminum and plastic for recycling; then the circuit boards are sent to the new facility in Southern California. The plant can process 1.5 million pounds per month—still a tiny fraction of

the flood of electronic waste that’s constantly being created. “You’d need about 500 of our plants to handle the problem globally,” Wray says.

The recycled metals are sold to manufacturers who want to avoid the environmental and social problems that come with traditional mining. Though the process is cheaper than mining, the green metals are sold at a premium; Camston Wrather is using the profits to quicken expansion. The second and third facilities that will use the new recycling technology are under development.

At a large scale, e-waste recycling could begin to replace some mines. “Would you be able to stop all mining?” Wray poses. “Probably not all mining, but a substantial amount.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90881028/thisfuturistic-new-recycling-plant-is-mining-your-oldphone-for-gold

Image credit: Camston Wrather

Development

AfricanDeveloperCreatesNewSoftwareso Africans can use Bitcoin Without Internet Access

By Sharelle Burt

CITIZENS IN AFRICA

are using new and exciting ways to get paid without having internet access.

Thanks to South African software developer Kgothatso Ngako, Forbes reported, the people of Africa can make bitcoin peer-to-peer transactions with Machankura, the new solution that makes Bitcoin access easy even if they’re not online.

In tech terms, it provides access to the Lightning Network through an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data interface, utilizing mobile phones’ Subscriber Identity Module telecommunication network.

Machankura is a hit. It’s being used by approximately 3,000 users in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Namibia. Program director at the educational initiative Qala Africa, Femi Longe, said Africans really need to reconsider traditional currency.

“Africans need to think about

bitcoin in their context and how it could be used to solve the problems that they face,” Longe said.

A demo on YouTube shows exactly how it works.

Machankura is a great start but there is more work to be done in this space–tural and underdeveloped areas still need ways to gain access—but it offers a business advantage for researchers looking to reach the 2.9 billion people that lack reliable internet access, according to the International Telecommunications Union.

Cryptocurrency brings a financial gain to Africa because of their minimum transaction fees and high security—a “means of storing wealth and a means of obtaining credit Incentives to save and invest,” according to Pulse Ghana. It also helps reduce the cost of international

money transfers, which makes it easier for Africans living abroad to send money home to their families and vice versa.

Though it’s in the early stages, Machankura hosts a Lightningfriendly bitcoin wallet offering, allowing users to send to a wallet, giving a user name or phone number. They can also choose to send to any other Lightning wallet using a Lightning address. If approved, the user will receive a screen message explaining the successful payment and showing the Lightning address that received the funds.

https://www.blackenterprise. com/african-developer-createssoftware-for-africans-to-usebitcoin-without-internet-access/ Image credit: sabcnews.com

2023 State of Black America Report Details Threat to Democracy and Hate in America

By Derek Major

THE NATIONAL URBAN

LEAGUE released its annual State of Black America report detailing the social, educational and political issues Black Americans face today.

This year’s report, Democracy in Peril: Confronting the Threat Within, raised the alarm about the extremist ideology taking root in the nation’s classrooms, law enforcement, military institutions and Congress. The NUL’s report also examined the rise and normalization of hate and white supremacy, how it results in misguided public policy, and the threat to our safety and democracy.

“Historically, the report was designed to ensure that the social and economic conditions of Black America were reported publicly on an annual basis,” President Marc Morial told BLACK ENTERPRISE. “The report is a detailed statistical snapshot of the social and economic conditions of Black America compared to white Americans.”

The report, released Saturday, April 21st used data and information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the AntiDefamation League, and the UCLA School of Law. The data showed how hate, white

supremacy, and extremism have infiltrated the country’s politics, education, and other vital institutions

“That means the entire movement to suppress the vote, to overturn elections, to if you will, disrupt democracy, like we saw in Tennessee with the expulsion of the two Black legislators, is energized, animated, and fueled by this hate movement in the United States,” said Morial.

“Additionally, the effort to ban and suppress Black books, Black history teaching, and studies is also part of their agenda. So what we’re doing is not only calling it out, we’re connecting the dots, the reason being is for people to understand that this campaign of hate, supremacy, and extremism is a threat to everything we do because it’s a threat to democracy.”

The report also featured essays and contributions from prominent political figures, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke, Southern Poverty Law Center Director of the Intelligence Project Susan Corke, and Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Morial said the rise of hate

is coming at the same time President Joe Biden has selected the most diverse administration in U.S. history, as part of the deep divisions concerning the future of the U.S.

“There’s a deep debate in the country about the future of the country; there’s a deep divide about where we are going, that’s what this says,” said Morial.

“On one hand, you can have a diverse administration, a record number of Black judges, and an administration committed to racial equity. On the other hand, there are those out there who deeply resent the focus on racial equity, and we have to be clear-eyed that we have to persuade, encourage, and combat whatever is required for us to sustain these commitments and this progress.”

The State of Black America also celebrates Morial’s two decades with the NUL and features a timeline of his milestones and accomplishments with the organization under his leadership.

The NUL will distribute the report to elected officials, university presidents, grassroots leaders, business leaders, and labor leaders.

“The report is free, and anyone can read it, which is why we want to say to people the report is available online, and you should take a look at it, read it, and absorb it,” Morial added.

https://www.blackenterprise. com/2023-state-of-blackamerica-report/

WhyUgandaWantstoJointhe SingleAfricaAirTransportMarket

By Tatenda Karuwa

The Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) is a project of the African Union to create a single market for air transport in Africa. Once completely in force, the single market is supposed to allow significant freedom of air transport in Africa, advancing the AU's Agenda 2063.

UGANDA HAS MOVED positively to join the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) following a stakeholder meeting organized by the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA) in Kampala earlier this week (4-28,2023).

For many years Uganda was doubtful about joining SAATM, but after lengthy deliberation, it may be ready to sign on to the project. To date, 34 out of 54 African nations have come onboard to open up Africa's skies and promote the value of aviation throughout the continent. The 34 nations represent over 80% of the existing market in Africa.

Advances to join SAATM

Following the stakeholder's meeting, Uganda showed interest in signing on to the project by forming a committee involving players from different sectors. The committee will include the Ministry of Finance, Works and Transports, the Uganda Tourism Board, and private sector stakeholders.

During the meeting, the importance of the Single African Air Transport Market was discussed, citing the benefits an enhanced aviation market would bring to various sectors in the country. Pitching the idea to the nation, UCAA Deputy Director General Olive Birungi Lumonya said;

“Flying is efficient, quicker, and safer but is not utilized much as the other forms of travel. If this agreement is signed by Uganda, we will be joining the rest of Africa

in reducing the cost of travel and increasing air traffic and business.”

In East Africa, Uganda and Tanzania are the only major aviation countries that have not signed on to the project. Before the pandemic, Ugandan authorities were focused on various domestic projects, which stopped them from signing onto SAATM.

The East Africans were in the process of reviving Uganda Airlines; hence they were worried about the competition a unified air transport market would bring on the flag carrier. Deputy Director General Lumonya added;

“Initially, Uganda did not sign the Solemn Declaration to join SAATM pending the establishment of mechanisms to give assurance to the revival of Uganda Airlines, which at that time had not commenced operations taking into consideration a highly competitive market resulting from the grant of unrestricted fifth freedom traffic rights to African Airlines.”

They were also developing Entebbe International Airport (EBB) into a major regional hub. With its domestic projects almost complete, and the African aviation market nearing pre-pandemic levels, Uganda may be ready to join SAATM.

The importance

Uganda joining SAATM SAATM is a flagship project of the African Union to create a single unified air transport market in Africa. It will fast-track the development of civil aviation on the continent and act as an impetus to Africa's economic integration agenda.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) fully supports the initiative and suggests that if 12 key African states opened their markets and increased connectivity, an extra 155,00 jobs and $1.3 billion in annual GDP would be created in those countries. Uganda is expected to benefit from up to 5,000 jobs and over 1.2 million in annual revenue.

Uganda has become a key player in African aviation. Its flag carrier has grown, adding 12 destinations in nine countries since 2019. Entebbe International, its main airport, is one of the busiest in the region. Joining its neighbors Kenya and Rwanda in SAATM would be monumental towards developing regional air travel.

World air travel has almost fully recovered from the pandemic. While Africa is leading in the recovery, East Africa has seen the most significant numbers compared to other African regions. This can be leveraged to develop fifth-freedom flights and reduce airfares across the continent.

Despite having about 18% of the world's population, Africa contributes about 2% of global air travel. This is because many states restrict their air service markets to protect their national carriers, and for that reason, many countries have not signed on to the open skies initiative.

Most states have realized the adverse effects of these restrictions. A major aviation country like Uganda joining SAATM will be a big step towards having more signatories and open skies for Africa. This will reduce the incredibly high airfares and promote intra-Africa connectivity.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90855324/canadasuper-pig-invasive-species-boar-hybrid-explained

Background information: https://www.nepad.org/ publication/single-african-air-transport-market

Background video: https://au.int/en/ videos/20201009/saatm

Image credit: SimpleFlying, newtimes.co.rw

of

Can’t Have Solar on Your Own Roof?

Community Solar is About to Become Much More Common

- from a USA point of view

By Dan Gearino—Inside Climate News

ON A FARM field east of Faribault, Minnesota, a 1.3-megawatt solar array provides electricity to serve about 180 subscribers.

The project, which occupies about six acres, is an example of community solar—also called “shared solar” or “solar gardens”—a kind of development in which subscribers receive credits on their monthly utility bills for the solar electricity produced.

Community solar is poised to become much more common thanks to a new $7 billion fund tied to the Inflation Reduction Act. The EPA began the process of setting up the fund last week.

I’ve found that one of the biggest challenges in writing about community solar is explaining what it is, so I turned to Maria McCoy, a researcher for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that closely tracks the programs.

“Community solar is meant to be an option for folks who can’t put solar on their own roofs, whether they don’t own a home or have the financial ability to put solar up there or have a lot of shady trees,” she said.

The large majority of subscribers and projects are in six states: Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York. About 20 states have active programs and many of the rest have rules that limit the ability of developers to do subscription-based projects.

Community solar has its origins in ideas about democratizing access to clean energy, which has translated into laws mostly in blue states.

McCoy, whose organization’s main office is in Minneapolis, has an up-close view of one of the largest and oldest community solar programs in the country, which exists in the territory of Xcel Energy, Minnesota’s largest utility.

The program, started in 2014, has nearly 30,000 subscribers across the state who have signed up to participate in one of about 850 solar projects.

Faribault Community Solar went online in 2019, developed by Cooperative Energy Futures, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that builds projects to serve low- and moderate-income households. The city of Faribault is about 50 miles south of Minneapolis.

Customers get a monthly bill credit from Xcel, and the savings is one of the main selling points for subscribing.

This model is designed to encourage development of solar power while also providing savings.

While you might imagine electrons flowing from the solar projects to their subscribers, it doesn’t work that way. For nearly all community solar projects (and utility-scale solar and wind), the electricity goes into the grid for use by anyone, and the subscriptions and credits are a matter of bookkeeping.

The Xcel program’s successes and growing pains have served as lessons for other states. One of the biggest criticisms of the program has been that it doesn’t do enough to provide benefits to low-income households.

Minnesota is no longer the national leader in community solar, at least as measured by the number of projects or the generating capacity of

those projects. That title belongs to New York after substantial growth in 2022. The New York program has gained momentum thanks to initiatives by the state government and the nonprofit sector, including some that focus on giving low-income households access to solar.

The state had 728 projects online as of the end of the third quarter of 2022, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

One example is a 1.2-megawatt project in Brooklyn built across 40 New York Housing Authority Rooftops. The project serves about 500 low- and moderate-income households, although most community solar projects do not focus exclusively on low-income communities.

Several states are in the early stages of setting up community solar programs. The one I’m watching most closely is California, which revised its rules for the programs with a new law in 2022. California leads the country in rooftop solar and utility-scale solar, and should have a large market for community solar now that it has rules in place to encourage the projects.

Some states have programs that they describe as community solar, but which clean energy advocates say are utility-controlled efforts that only mimic some attributes of community solar. A good example is Florida Power & Light’s SolarTogether program, which one group, Solar United Neighbors, says is “fake community solar”

◄ 1.2-megawatt project in Brooklyn built across 40 New York Housing Authority Rooftops.

because consumers pay a premium to participate and don’t receive any bill savings while the utility is able to earn a guaranteed profit by building the systems and charging customers for the electricity. (When I said that about 20 states have community solar, I wasn’t including Florida.)

The federal government now has $7 billion that can go to community solar through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Joe Biden in August.

The EPA has said the fund will award up to 60 grants and that it “will prioritize delivering financial and technical assistance to projects that deploy residential and community solar, associated storage technologies, and related upgrades.”

McCoy expects that the states that already have community solar programs will be best equipped to benefit from the fund. The applicants can include states, cities, and Tribal governments, among others. If they are successful in getting grants, the next step likely would be to work with a developer to build a project or projects.

The grants have the potential to substantially increase access to community solar. For perspective, developers spent about $1.3 billion on U.S. community solar projects in 2022, according to the research firm Wood Mackenzie.

The firm issued a forecast last week showing that the community solar market will double by 2027, with an additional 6 gigawatts of solar capacity coming online (the report was done in collaboration with the Coalition for Community Solar Access, a group that includes solar companies and clean energy nonprofits).

That’s a lot of new capacity, but it would be just the start of what’s needed if community solar is going to become a major part of the transition to clean energy.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News https://www.fastcompany.com/90856150/ community-solar-funding-inflation-reduction-act

As Wheat Prices Rise, Students Reimagine a Brea

By Zita Amwanga

EVERY MORNING, MADE L Chololo, a technical school in on the hob and begins cook passersby.

Kombozi, a mother of five, is Kisangani by selling spaghetti residents are known. But she’ cassava flour.

After working as a street fo wheat to cassava spaghetti w markets and drove up prices. DRC imports nearly all of its the region.

Kombozi buys her cassava University of Kisangani by a gr will help offset wheat shortage

Enabel, the Belgian governm 10 students work on a volunte

“I am very proud of these stu to ensure spaghetti remains a Each day, the students can p which they sell for 1,000 Congo of wheat spaghetti sells for u spaghetti to restaurant owner student.

Sembaito grants that the wo have to purchase the manioc to dry it in the sun because we The packaging is made o

▲

With the help of Enabel, the Belgian development agency, students from the University of Kisangani have set up a small plant to manufacture cassava spaghetti. They are able to produce over 100 packets of 250 grams (9 ounces) each per day ZITA AMWANGA, GPJ DRC

Madeleine Kombozi sells cassava flour spaghetti to students in Kisangani ZITA AMWANGA, GPJ DRC

L EINE KOMBOZI, 38, sets up a stall in front of the Institut the Makiso commune in the center of the city. She turns ing pasta, known locally as spaghetti, for students and s one of many women who make a living in the streets of , a popular breakfast among the Boyomese, as Kisangani ’s probably the only one who cooks spaghetti made from ood vendor for over two years, Kombozi switched from when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global grain wheat. Cassava, on the other hand, is widely available in spaghetti from a small manufacturing plant set up in the roup of biotechnology students who hope their experiment es.

ment’s development agency, donated the equipment, and eer basis, advised by professor Onauchu Didy. udents, who learned to mix business with pleasure in order vailable for housewives,” Didy says. produce over 100 packets of 250 grams (9 ounces) each, olese francs (49 cents). In Kisangani, a similar size package up to 30,000 francs ($14.77). “We are already supplying s and other merchants,” says Jonathan Sembaito, 28, a ork isn’t easy, as the production is entirely manual. “We [cassava] from 10 to 11 months before, and then we have e do not have dryers,” he says. of paper imported from Uganda — to combat non-

biodegradable waste and mitigate environmental pollution, Sembaito says — and delivery delays can also slow down the process.

While 25 kilograms (55 pounds) a day will hardly supply a city of 1.37 million, Kombozi’s clients at least are pleased. “They eat without complaining,” she says. “They have never mentioned the different tastes.”

https://globalpressjournal.com/africa/democraticrepublic-of-congo/wheat-prices-rise-universitystudents-reimagine-breakfast-staple/

▲ Students Kodjemuka Ngandepole Julien, front, and Ramazani Kuminga Chirac roll out cassava flour pasta dough at the University of Kisangani ZITA AMWANGA, GPJ DRC

Crispr Wants to Feed the World

By Jennifer Doudna

TEN YEARS

AFTER its discovery, the implications of Crispr genome editing are profound and farreaching, and we are only getting started. This tool, adapted from a bacterial immune system, allows us to cut and edit the genetic code in any living cell to make highly targeted changes and repairs. A small number of people with genetic diseases have been helped by Crispr therapies, highlighting the potential to impact the lives of those suffering from the approximately 7,000 genetic diseases with known causes. Trials are ongoing in diseases ranging from diabetes to infectious disease.

In 2023, we will begin to benefit from new Crisprbased solutions in other areas. For instance, following on the heels of the initial clinical trial results, the first agricultural applications using Crispr have recently entered the market: A US Food and Drug Administration–approved edit to cattle genes re-creates a slick coat that is occasionally found in nature and allows cows to tolerate increasing temperatures; a Crispr-edited tomato, approved for sale in Japan, has enhanced nutritional qualities. In other crops, Crispr is being used experimentally to increase yield, reduce pesticide and water use, and protect against disease.

The next space for Crispr innovations will be climate change, the defining fight of our times. In 2023, bold new efforts using Crispr to target climate change will begin.

First, new research aims at reducing carbon emissions from agriculture. Agriculture is responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and these mainly come from

microbes found either in soil, for example in rice paddies, or in the guts of farm animals. This new research is focusing on how to use Crispr to edit these microbes or shift the composition of microbial communities to reduce or even eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, we are finding ways to improve the inherent ability of plants and microbes to capture carbon and store it in the soil. Plants “breathe in” carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and use it to make energy, but usually the carbon is cycled back into the atmosphere fairly quickly. New research aims to work with plants and soil microbes to not just capture carbon but also store it in soil for long periods of time, replacing some of the soil carbon that has been lost in vast quantities since the advent of modern agriculture.

Third, we are developing new ways to minimize farmer inputs like fertilizers and pesticides that have high carbon costs, as well as other environmental health costs. New Crispr research aims to edit staple crops like rice so they can grow with less fertilizer. Crispr can be used to make plants resistant to common pathogens and pests, reducing the need for high-carbon-emission chemical inputs.

Finally, we need ways to help agriculture deal with the degree of climate change that has already occurred or is inevitable. New research is using Crispr to engineer plants that can produce more food and other materials with less water and that are tolerant to temperature extremes.

A great deal of the attention surrounding Crispr has focused on the medical applications, and for good reason: The results are promising, and the personal stories are uplifting, offering hope to many who have suffered from long-neglected genetic diseases. In 2023, as Crispr moves into agriculture and climate, we will have the opportunity to radically improve human health in a holistic way that can better safeguard our society and enable millions of people around the world to flourish.

https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-gene-editingclimate/

Image credit: Yo Hosoyamada

EXECUTIVE-LED TRADE MISSION TO AFRICA

STOPS IN: SOUTH AFRICA| GHANA| NIGERIA

Discover New Business Opportunities in South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria!

As part of its Global Diversity Export Initiative (GDEI), the U.S. Department of Commerce invites you to apply for a business development trade mission to Africa August 6-15, 2023. Mission participants will travel to South Africa, Ghana, and an optional stop in Nigeria.

Designed to create commercial connections between U.S. sellers from underserved communities and African buyers and distributors, this mission is an ideal opportunity for U.S. companies in the automotive, ICT, safety & security, and consumer goods (i.e. haircare, cosmetics, toiletries, etc.) industries seeking to enter or expand their presence in these key markets on the African continent.

Why Join This Trade Mission?

By participating in this executive-led trade mission, your company can leverage the federal government’s credibility and contacts and enhance your ability to secure meetings and gain greater exposure in Africa. Participants will: Experience three African marketsfor U.S. goods & services in person and up close

Gain market insights from in-country trade experts

Make personal industry contacts

Meet potential buyers and partners

Solidify business strategies

Advance specific projects.

GDEIisaninitiativeoftheDepartmentofCommerce’sInternational TradeAdministration-U.S.CommercialServiceandtargetsminority, women,LGBTQ+,veteran,anddisabled-ownedcompanieswith programsthatassistwithinternationaltradesupport.

Learn More & Apply

Scanthecode,orvisit: trade.gov/global-diversityexport-initiative-mission-africa

Date: August 6-15, 2023

Stops: South Africa, Ghana, and optional stop in Nigeria

Target Industry Sectors: Automotive, ConsumerGood, ICT, Safety & Security

Cost:

SME*/Trade Associations

$3,725 South Africa and Ghanaonly

$5,720 South Africa, Ghana & Nigeria**

Large Company

$6,520 South Africa and Ghana only

$10,300 South Africa, Ghana & Nigeria

Additional Company Participants

$800 SMEs/ $1300 Large Company (Limit 2 participants per company)

*SMEdeterminedbySBAguidelines

**Grantsmaybeavailable

Contact Us

Eve.Lerman@trade.gov

Dusan.Marinkovic@trade.gov

Sponsorship Opportunities Available

Nathalie.Jeudy@trade.gov

Fernando.Bentz@trade.gov

These ‘Supertrees’ Grow a

Climate-Friendly Alternative to Palm Oil

By Adele Peters

ON A FORMER SUGARCANE plantation in Oahu that was abandoned for decades, rows of trees now grow in the degraded soil. The trees— called pongamia —aren’t new to Hawaii. But a company called Terviva is the first to farm them, after discovering a way to process the trees’ beans to make them into food.

Oil and protein from the beans could help partially replace both palm oil and soy, two of the world’s largest drivers of deforestation. Palm oil hidden in products like ice cream and pizza dough has helped destroy nearly 25 million acres of forest in Indonesia and brought orangutans to the brink of extinction. Soy grown to feed cattle and pigs has felled swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Pongamia, by contrast, can bring trees back to areas that were previously cleared.

“We effectively sink carbon when we grow on that land because we’re reforesting that land with these trees,” says Naveen Sikka, Terviva’s founder and CEO. “We get carbon credits for what we do.”

Sikka first started researching the trees as a graduate student more than a decade ago, exploring how the oil in pongamia beans could be used to make biofuel. As his startup was launching, the biofuels market crashed. But he was simultaneously considering how the crop could be used for food. The oil has a long history of use— in India, it’s been used in oil lamps and varnish, for example. But because the beans are naturally bitter, they weren’t eaten.

At first, the team thought it might only be possible to make the protein in the beans into animal feed. But as they studied what made the beans bitter, they discovered a simple way to process them to remove that bitterness. The resulting oil, which

the company calls Ponova, is rich in Omega-9 fatty acids, like olive oil. It’s also about 25% saturated fat, giving it a buttery mouthfeel. In the first product to use the oil, a limitededition plant-based protein bar from Aloha made with other ingredients grown in Hawaii, the oil gives a “light, full richness” to the bar, Sikka says. In products like plant-based meat, it could partially replace coconut oil; because it has a lower fat content, the end products would be healthier.

Because the tree is unusually resilient and can grow on degraded land with few resources—some people have dubbed it a “supertree”—it could eventually compete with low-cost palm oil. “When we use degraded agricultural land that’s inherently low-value, and when we use low inputs, we’re inherently lowering the cost of production,” Sikka says. “Then the biology of the tree allows us to make a lot of beans per acre, and so you get a lot of yield on a small land base.”

While it takes around four years before newly planted trees can be harvested, once production begins, the trees can produce as much oil per acre as palm trees, and produce as much as four times more per acre than soy farming. The company tested dozens of different wild pongamia varieties to find the trees that would be most productive.

The trees, which adapted for drought in the wild, grow with little water. And unlike most crops, they can also capture nitrogen from the air so they need little fertilizer. The carbon footprint is lower than any other plant-based oil, Sikka says. If you add in the fact that the trees capture carbon (one tree can

capture around a metric ton of CO2 over its 30-year life), the product is carbon negative. It’s an outlier in the global food system, which is responsible for around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

The company is developing two other ingredients from the protein in the beans: a flour and a concentrated protein that could be used in plant-based meat. It also plans to sell biofuel while the market for the new foods is still developing.

There’s a large amount of degraded or abandoned land available where the crop could grow. In Florida, the company is working with citrus farmers who lost their trees in a disease that destroyed the local orange industry. “Farmers have to be careful before they try something new,” Sikka says. “So, frankly, to adopt a new crop, you have to work somewhere where farmers have fewer alternatives.”

While crops like soybeans are grown in relatively few places, Terviva wants to work with farmers around the world—both to make supply chains more resilient and to bring new economic opportunity to struggling farmers. When we spoke, Sikka was in

India, visiting a village where locals have been gathering the beans from wild trees and where more orchards of the trees will soon be planted. The beans are being harvested now, and the company expects to buy 30 to 40 tons from the community. At $500 a ton, in a place where people live on $1 a day, the new market can be life-changing, he says. The company also will soon begin working in droughtstricken parts of Australia and on degraded land abandoned by the palm industry in Indonesia.

It’s not possible to fully replace the massive palm oil industry, Sikka says, or soybean farming. But the company aims to have 500,000 acres of pongamia in the ground by 2030, and 10 million acres planted by 2040, enough to replace around 15% of soybean production. “What we can do is stop the expansion of it as dramatically as it is, right? We’re out of land for soybeans, and [farmers are] going to chop down rainforests to grow it. And that,” says Sikka, “is what we don’t want to see happening.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90871132/thesesupertrees-grow-a-climate-friendly-alternative-topalm-oil

Image credit: Treviva

Pongamia

New ‘Mega Ranch’ will Grow 45 Million Pounds of Mushroom Root for Plant-Based Meat

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

LAST JULY, New York-based startup MyForest Foods announced the opening of a vertical farm that would grow three million pounds of mycelium a year, all for plant-based bacon. Now competitor is blowing them out of the water with a facility that will be able to produce more than 45 million pounds of product once it’s fully scaled up. The company announced the opening of a factory it’s calling “Mega Ranch” in Thornton, Colorado (a suburb north of Denver) last week.

Meati makes a variety of plant-based imitation meat products, or “animal-free whole-food proteins,” including a classic steak, carne asada, a classic cutlet, and a crispy cutlet. The meats are made of 95 percent mushroom root, with additional ingredients including oat fiber, seasonings, fruit and vegetable juices, and lycopene (for color). With up to 17 grams of protein and 12 grams of dietary fiber

per serving, the company says the meats are comparable to their animal-derived counterparts in nutritional value.

Mushroom roots are called mycelium, and they’re a different sort of root than what you typically see at the bottom of most plants and trees. Mycelium is a root-like structure of fungus made of a mass of branching, thread-like strands called hyphae. The hyphae absorb nutrients from soil or another substrate so the fungus can grow.

Companies are using mycelium as a base for all sor ts of vegan materials, from packaging to leather to biomedical scaffolds. It’s a viable ingredient both because it’s easy to manipulate—the nutrients in the substrate it’s grown on can be tweaked to yield different properties, like making it stiffer or more flexible—and because it grows fast; Meati says its proprietary growth formula can turn a teaspoon

Grilled Classic Steak Sandwich

of spores into the equivalent of hundreds of cows’ worth of whole-food protein in just a few days.

The mycelium is grown in stainless steel vats (similar to fermentation tanks at breweries), where it’s fed a liquid rich in sugar and nutrients that helps it grow faster than it would in the wild. Meati harvests mycelium fibers from the vats, then must

assemble them in such a way that the texture resembles animal muscle.

Meati’s new Colorado plant will occupy 100,000 square feet, and will enable the company to produce tens of millions of pounds of its products by the end of this year. The products are already sold through retail and foodservice partners that include Sprouts Farmers Market, Sweetgreen, and Birdcall, and Meati’s aiming to get start selling at 7,000 new locations by the end of this year.

The company’s total funding to date is over $250 million. They expect to bring in tens of millions in revenue this year and hundreds of millions in 2024. Despite the Mega Ranch opening this year, they’re already scouting out a location for a “Giga Ranch” that will be able to produce hundreds of millions of pounds of product annually.

Despite the somewhat ailing state of the plantbased meat industry, Meati’s co-founder and CEO, Tyler Huggins, sees nothing but growth in his company’s future. “There is no shortage of stuff coming out, and we have no lack of demand,” he told TechCrunch. “Our pipeline is robust, and everything we produce in the next year or more is already pre-sold. It’s now about unlocking capacity to get the product out there.”

https://singularityhub.com/2023/01/30/new-megaranch-will-grow-45-million-pounds-of-mushroomroot-for-plant-based-meat/

Image credit: Meati

Dry-rubbed Grilled Classic Steak

Classic Steak Teriyaki Bowl

Chef Fatmata Binta Leads

FAO Event to Celebrate International Year of Millets in Africa

AT A SPECIAL EVENT at the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Regional Office for Africa, millets took centre stage and were celebrated for their potential in addressing climate change, boosting nutrition and increasing farmers’ incomes. The ‘Dine on a Mat’ event saw ambassadors, highcommissioners, government ministers, UN and development partners and other high-level guests take part in a dinner of fonio and other millets prepared by Chef Fatmata Binta for the International Year of Millets 2023.

Chef Binta is an advocate for fonio – an ancient African super grain – and for supporting women fonio producers. She won the Basque Culinary World Prize in 2022 for her Dine on a Mat concept which brings together her Fulani cultural heritage and her culinary training.

“Millets have a lot of potential for agricultural transformation. If we can increase productivity, and add value along the supply chain through processing it will benefit those who are producing, especially a lot of women,” said FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa Abebe Haile-Gabriel at the event.

“Fonio is very easy to grow, you don’t need to plough the land too much, you can harvest within 8 to 12 weeks and it has so many benefits, so it is something we need to add to our diets,” said Chef Binta, who is collaborating with FAO throughout the International Year of Millets. “Right now we are talking a lot about sourcing loca, connecting with

farmers, and I think it’s important now to start using ingredients that are underutilized – that’s the way forward,” she said.

The Ambassador of India to Ghana H.E. Sugandh Rajaram, whose country first proposed the international year to the United Nations, attended the event. Other guests included representatives from the Governments of Ghana, Australia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Italy, Japan, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Korea, Spain, Togo, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States of America’s USAID, the African Development Bank, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the Pan-African Agribusiness Apex Chamber (PAAC), the UN Resident Coordinator and the World Food Programme.

Fonio – a star from Africa

Fonio was the star ingredient at the Dine on a Mat event, including in a salad served with nuts and herbs. “I encourage everyone to use more millets, look for recipes online, and explore what you can do with these ancient super grains,” said Chef Binta.

Millets were among the first plants to be domesticated and have been an important food for hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia.

They include sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, amaranth, fonio and teff

These small grains are packed with minerals including iron, fibre, antioxidants and protein, have a low glycaemic index and are gluten-free. Despite their history and nutritional value, they account for less than 3% of the global grains trade.

Millets are a climate solution

Millets are climate-resilient crops because they can grow on arid lands with minimal inputs and maintenance, are tolerant or resistant to diseases and pests, and are more resilient to climate shocks than other cereals.

The residues from millet harvests are used as livestock feed and are an important adjunct to feed security, especially during harsh seasons such as drought.

Greater consumption of millets can offer opportunities to smallholder farmers through sustainable increased production. By promoting millets and regaining market opportunities, additional sources of revenue can be created for smallholders and in the food sector, boosting economic growth.

Governments and policy makers can prioritize the production and trade of millets, take legislative

actions to promote their cultivation and innovative methods for harvest and post-harvest processes. Millets can also be put on the menu at public schools and hospitals.

The private sector can invest in the sustainable production of millets by facilitating access to credit or other financial support, millet-specific training, farming equipment and new technologies that improve the processing of millets. The food industry can increase production and promotion of milletsbased products.

Everyone can promote and enjoy millets in their daily lives. As part of her collaboration with FAO, Chef Binta has launched a global Instagram Chefs Challenge that encourages chefs and any other passionate cooks to share a millet recipe using the hashtag #IYM2023

https:www.modernghana.com/news/1219235/ chef-fatmata-binta-leads-fao-event-to-celebrate. html

Image credits: journalsofindia.com

Chef Adjoa Kittoe's Fonio Croquettes

How Australian Wildfires Worsened African Droughts and Atlantic Hurricanes

By Niharika Sharma

A FRESH EXAMPLE of global climate interconnectedness has emerged in the effects of Australia’s catastrophic wildfires of 2019-20 playing out across the world.

Research suggests that the massive blaze down under a few years ago led to intensified droughts and famine in Africa and fueled Atlantic hurricanes.

The study was published on May 10 by Science Advances, a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary openaccess scientific journal. It said the Australian wildfires contributed to a rare three-year La Niña from late 2019 through 2022 as the smoke it

emitted shifted the cloud and rain belts.

“Many people quickly forgot about the Australian fires, especially as the covid pandemic exploded, but the earth system has a long memory, and the impacts of the fires lingered for years,” said atmospheric scientist John Fasullo, the lead author of the study.

The research was funded by the US National Science Foundation, NASA, and the US department of energy

Australian wildfire set off a massive La Nina

Widely regarded as one of the worst in history, the Australian wildfires of 2019-20 blackened more than 60,000 square miles of land, killing dozens of people and an estimated one billion animals. Their massive spread followed a period of extreme drought and record-breaking temperatures in the region.

The Science Advances study found that the blaze set off a three-year La Nina, a phenomenon triggered by the cooling of the earth’s surface caused by an exceptional amount of smoke in the atmosphere.

This episode of La Nina left many parts of the world under extreme conditions, fatal for human life. These conditions include one of the most severe droughts in Africa, that threatened millions

of people with starvation. The drought left food prices skyrocketing. The Atlantic Ocean region, meanwhile, experienced some of the worst tropical storms in 2020.

Other instances of its effect were the floods in Pakistan in 2022 leaving more than 1,000 people dead and the heavy rains in Canada and Australia.

Scarily, this was just the beginning, the study says. Its authors warn that the fires and La Niña “may become more prevalent under climate change as wildfires are projected to intensify and become more frequent.”

https://qz.com/how-the-australian-wildfire-fueleddisasters-globally-1850431345

Image credit: Reuters, New York Post

Hydrologist Gideon Groenewald feels cracks in the clay in the dried up municipal dam in droughtstricken Graaff-Reinet, South Africa. Reuters.

1 in 4 People in the World Do Not Have Access to Clean Drinking Water, the U.N. Says

By The Associated Press

A NEW REPORT launched on the eve of the first major U.N. conference on water in over 45 years says 26% of the world's population doesn't have access to safe drinking water and 46% lack access to basic sanitation.

The U.N. World Water Development Report 2023 painted a stark picture of the huge gap that needs to be filled to meet U.N. goals to ensure all people have access to clean water and sanitation by 2030.

Richard Connor, editor-in-chief of the report, told a news conference that the estimated cost of meeting the goals is somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion a year.

But equally important, Connor said, is forging partnerships with investors, financiers, governments and climate change communities to ensure that money is invested in ways to sustain the environment and provide potable water to the

2 billion people who don't have it and sanitation to the 3.6 million in need.

According to the report, water use has been increasing globally by roughly 1% per year over the last 40 years "and is expected to grow at a similar rate through to 2050, driven by a combination of population growth, socio-economic development and changing consumption patterns."

Connor said that actual increase in demand is happening in developing countries and emerging economies where it is driven by industrial growth and especially the rapid increase in the population of cities. It is in these urban areas "that you're having a real big increase in demand," he said.

With agriculture using 70% of all water globally, Connor said, irrigation for crops has to be more efficient — as it is in some countries that now use drip irrigation, which saves water. "That allows water to be available to cities," he said.

As a result of climate change, the report said, "seasonal water scarcity will increase in regions where it is currently abundant — such as Central Africa, East Asia and parts of South America — and worsen in regions where water is already in short supply, such as the Middle East and the Sahara in Africa."

On average, "10% of the global population lives in countries with high or critical water stress" — and up to 3.5 billion people live under conditions of water stress at least one month a year, said the report issued by UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Since 2000, floods in the tropics have quadrupled while floods in the north mid-latitudes have increased 2.5-fold, the report said. Trends in droughts are more difficult to establish, it said, "although an increase in intensity or frequency of droughts and 'heat extremes' can be expected in most regions as a direct result of climate change."

As for water pollution, Connor said, the biggest source of pollution is untreated wastewater "Globally, 80% of wastewater is released to the environment without any treatment," he said, "and in many developing countries it's pretty much 99%."

These and other issues including protecting aquatic ecosystems, improving management of water resources, increasing water reuse and promoting cooperation across borders on water use will be discussed during the three-day U.N. Water Conference co-chaired by King WillemAlexander of the Netherlands and Tajikistan's President Emomali Rahmon opening Wednesday morning.

There are 171 countries, including over 100 ministers, on the speakers list along with more than 20 organizations. The meeting will also include five "interactive dialogues" and dozens of side events.

https://www.kvpr.org/npr-news/2023-03-21/1-in4-people-in-the-world-do-not-have-access-toclean-drinking-water-the-u-n-says

Image credit: Fareed Khan/AP, unwater.org

WHO Officially Launches mRNA Vaccine Tech Hub in Cape Town

By Al Jazeera

THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO) has officially launched its mRNA vaccine technology hub in Cape Town, a facility established during the COVID-19 pandemic to help poorer countries struggling to access lifesaving medication.

In 2021, the WHO picked South African biotech firm Afrigen Biologics for a pilot project to give poor and middle-income countries the knowhow and licences to make COVID vaccines. At the time, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called it a historic step.

Afrigen Biologics has used the publicly available sequence of Moderna Inc’s mRNA COVID vaccine to make its own version of the shot, AfriVac 2121, at lab scale and is now scaling up production.

The vaccine candidate, which must still be tested on people, is the first to be made based on a widely used vaccine without the assistance and approval of the developer. It is also the first mRNA vaccine designed, developed and produced at lab scale on the African continent.

“I am … here in Cape Town with our partners to support a sustainable model for mRNA technology transfer to give low- and middle-income countries equitable access to vaccines and other lifesaving health products,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement on Thursday, the day the vaccine hub was launched.

The hub decided to pursue the vaccine on its own after global pharmaceutical firms, including Moderna and P fizer, declined to provide the

technical know-how to replicate their vaccines, mainly over intellectual property concerns.

The five-day visit by Tedros and senior health officials will include discussions over the programme’s sustainability, the science of mRNA technologies and its potential use to combat other diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis that disproportionately affect poorer countries.

The WHO said 70% of the global population had received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine as of March but that figure was still below 30% in lowincome countries.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/who-

officially-launches-mrna-vaccine-tech-hub-incape-town/ar-AA1a5MFU

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

[File: Fabrice Coffrini/pool via Reuters] © Provided by Al Jazeera

THE COUNTRIES WITH THE WORST MALARIA RATES

From Quartz Daily Brief 4-25-2023

TODAY IS WORLD MALARIA DAY (April 26th), but one region— Africa —continues to carry a disproportionately high share of cases of the mosquito-borne disease, 95% of them to be exact.

Vaccine advancements could start to curb these statistics. This month, Ghana became the first country in the world to approve Oxford’s new malaria vaccine for use in children aged between five months and three years, with Nigeria following suit

Image credit: Photo: Baz Ratner (Reuters)

THE MINISTER OF ICT and Innovation, Paula Ingabire says about 3,000 schools that are not connected to the internet will have access to it by 2024 through financing from China Exim Bank and the World Bank

Ingabire made the disclosure during a plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies in which she was providing answers to issues affecting the ICT sector last week.

Currently, she said, there are 6,756 schools, consisting of primary, secondary and TVET schools in the country. Of these schools, about 3,000 schools – equivalent to 44.4% of the total – are not connected to the internet, she indicated.

Jean-Bosco Munyembabazi, a Head Teacher of Nemba primary school in Gakenke district, told The New Times that it is one of the schools that do not have access to the internet.

He said the internet is needed, expressing that “living without it is a sort of isolation, like living in an area where one has no access to a road.”

“There are systems that schools use which require internet, such as SDMS [School Data Management System], and Teacher Management Information System (TMIS),” he said,

“Also, the Rwanda Education Board (REB) puts textbooks online, and it requires that we get them, but we do not have the internet to do that. So, you understand that accessing such teaching aids is another challenge and we are still waiting for it to

Rwanda to Connect 3,000 Schools to Internet by 2024

By Emmanuel Ntirenganya

Edited by DAWN Team

be addressed,” he pointed out.

Still, he said that the internet can also help pupils to do basic research online, which can help improve their learning.

Going forward, Ingabire said that the Government has a plan to connect all the remaining schools to the internet under the Smart Education Project.

“We have Smart Education Project, through the $30 million financing we got from China Exim Bank, under which we will connect at least 1,500 schools,” she said, indicating that the project has started, such that the 1,500 schools will be connected to the internet from this year (2023) to the next year (2024).

She said that there is a $200 million project– the Rwanda Digital Acceleration Project – funded by the World Bank, which will be implemented within five years, indicating that the large part of that funding was allocated to infrastructure “for last mile connectivity, including internet access for schools”.

Overall, the objectives of the World Bank financed project are to increase access to broadband, digital public services, and strengthen the digital innovation ecosystem.

“By using the funds from the China Exim Bank, and those from the World Bank, she said, it was observed that about 3,000 schools that are not connected to the internet will have access to it by 2024,” she observed. Another factor being considered, is to provide electricity to schools that do not have it, including the use of solar energy where possible.

https://www.newtimes.co.rw/article/4963/news/

Students during IT class at GS Rweru in Bugesera District. Sam Ngendahimana

https://myrootsinafrica.com/

MOU on Commercial Development Between Zambia and the USA

Press Release

visit to Zambia, key initiatives in the MOU include undertaking strategic projects aimed to facilitate increased trade in key sectors and creation of jobs.

Speaking during the signing, Hon. Mulenga said the MOU is as a result of the Republican President, Hakainde Hichilema’s visits to the United States of America and the Minister’s subsequent meeting with the Secretary of Commerce of the Unites States of America, and that this was further cemented by the visit of the Vice President last week.

The Minister indicated that the MOU caters for a wide range of investment sectors including capacity building for SME’s and Technical Assistance for bankable projects.

THE GOVERNMENT of the Republic of Zambia and the Government of the United States of America (USA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the development and implementation of commercial projects in Zambia. These commercial projects will be in the energy, manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, transport and infrastructure sectors, among others.

The Zambia – US Commercial Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry, Hon. Chipoka Mulenga MP on behalf of the Government of Zambia and the U.S Secretary of Commerce, Ms. Gina Raimondo on behalf of the Government of the United States of America. As announced by Vice President Kamala Harris during her recent

Meanwhile, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Middle East and Africa in the Department of Commerce, Ms. Camille Richardson who witnessed the completion of the signing on behalf of the U.S Secretary of Commerce indicated that the MOU is focused on how to strengthen business ties between the two countries while increasing the flow of goods and services.

His Excellency, Mr. Michael Gonzales, Ambassador of the United States of America in Zambia indicated that the Memorandum of Understanding will set forth a direction for the commercial engagements, prioritize the key sectors that are critical to Zambia, and catalyze the various elements across the U.S. Government to enable the private sector to flourish, to trade, to invest and to create jobs.

Press Release: https://www.mcti.gov.zm/?p=4506

MOU: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/ files/2023-04/zambia%20mou%20033023.pdf

Image credit: unflags.com

Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry, Hon. Chipoka Mulenga MP signs MOU with U.S Secretary of Commerce, Ms. Gina Raimondo.

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https://african-exchanges.org/download-category/newsletters/

African Securities Exchanges Association and Pan-African Payment Settlement System Sign

MoU to Enhance Cross-border Trading

Press Release

THE AFRICAN SECURITIES Exchanges Association (ASEA) and the Pan-African Payments and Settlement System (PAPSS) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on ways to enhance the payments process for cross-border securities transactions in Africa. The MoU was signed during ASEA’s 73rd Executive Committee Meeting on April 14, 2023, in conjunction with the 11th Building Africa Financial Markets (BAFM) Seminar hosted by the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE).

The partnership between ASEA and PAPSS aims to improve the cross-border payments system in Africa and promote the development of the continent’s financial markets. This MoU is particularly timely given the recent launch of ASEA’s African Exchanges Linkage Project (AELP) in December 2022, which aims to facilitate cross-border trading. With support from the African Development Bank (AfDB), ASEA has made significant progress in integrating member exchanges across the continent through the AELP, covering seven exchanges and 14 countries in its first phase, with plans to expand to 15 exchanges across 22 countries.

Commenting on the MoU, the President of ASEA, Mr. Thapelo Tsheole, said: “The signing of the MoU between ASEA and PAPSS marks a significant step towards enhancing the efficiency and liquidity

of African securities exchanges. We look forward to working closely with PAPSS to identify potential ways of easing payments and settlements as we seek to facilitate cross-border trading of securities among member Exchanges. In the coming weeks, we will hold consultative meetings to establish an implementation plan for this collaboration. ”

PAPSS is a Financial Market Infrastructure supported by the AfCFTA Secretariat, the African Union Commission and African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). The platform aims to enhance trade and economic integration across Africa by providing a secure, reliable, and efficient means of settling cross-border transactions.

Mr. Mike Ogbalu III, CEO of PAPSS said: “The MoU marks a significant achievement for both ASEA and PAPSS, demonstrating a shared commitment to enhancing Africa’s financial markets and driving the continent’s economic growth. We look forward to a swift implementation of the MoU as we hold regular consultative meetings.”

https://african-exchanges.org/african-securitiesexchanges-association-and-pan-african-paymentsettlement-system-sign-mou-to-enhance-crossborder-trading/

SBA Expands its Lending Network to Spur Access to Capital for Underrepresented Founders

By Melissa Angell

MORE PATHWAYS to secure a government-guaranteed small business loan are about to come online. The Small Business Administration this week announced its plan to open its lending network, inviting in more types of non-bank lenders, including fintechs.

The SBA is lifting a 40-year moratorium that prevented the agency from bringing in new lenders to its flagship 7(a) and 504 loan programs, thanks to a final rule published Wednesday, April 12th. While the agency works with a number of banks, the SBA has constrained its lending network to just 14 nonbank Small Business Lending Companies (SBLC) since 1982.

The measure aims to close the access to capital gap that entrepreneurs in underserved areas face. By expanding its lending network, the SBA's expectation is that these additional lenders will extend loans--especially small-dollar loans--to the entrepreneurs who may have been overlooked by traditional financial instiutions.

Small-dollar lending is on the decline, the agency says. The amount of lenders originating 7(a) loans under $50,000 dipped by more than 40% in the past five

to seven years, according to the SBA.

It's worth noting that fintechs and alternative lenders were previously eligible for SBLC designation before the final rule, but to do so, they'd have to wait for one of the 14 existing SBLCs to sell their license. Even with expanding the program, there's only three licenses up for grabs at the moment for for-profit institutions.

The SBA is also creating a new Community Advantage SBLC license for its nonprofit missionoriented lenders. The Community Advantage pilot loan program, which launched in 2011, extends loans between $50,000 to $250,000 to female, minority, and veteran entrepreneurs operating in underserved communities.

Should increased demand make more than three additional SBLCs necessary, the SBA might need more money. "That puts the onus back on Congress to say, if you want more lenders, more SBLCs in the program, you'll have to appropriate more resources to the SBA," says Ryan Metcalf, head of U.S. regulatory affairs at Denverbased Funding Circle, a small business loan platform.

Of course, that also begs the

question: How will the SBA determine which three additional lenders to grant licenses to?

Assuming that the program draws considerable interest from fintechs, Metcalf says the hope is that the SBA will adhere to a transparent selection process to determine who is the most experienced lender.

U.S. Small Business Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman said that the rule changes demonstrate the Biden Administration's commitment to making lending more equitable.

"These rule changes demonstrate that commitment by providing governmentguaranteed lenders with all the tools they need to close the gaps that still exist for small businesses who need capital," Guzman said in a statement.

The final rule goes into effect on May 12.

https://www.inc.com/ melissa-angell/sba-expandsits-lending-network-tospur-access-to-capital-forunderrepresented-founders.html

Image: bizneworleans.com

Coalition Wants to Make More Women Operators and Investors at the Same Time

By Natasha Mascarenhas June 28, 2022

IN 2020, THRIVE CAPITAL asked a cohort of folks — including Glossier VP of Communications Ashley Mayer, Cityblock Health co-founder Toyin Ajayi, Umbrella co-founder Lindsay Ullman and Tribe AI co-founder Jackie Nelson — if they wanted to be scouts, or invest tiny checks on behalf of the firm with a potential for shared upside.

Instead, the four-person group had an idea: Why not pool the scout capital they were being offered and formalize it into a micro-fund to be invested out together. Checks wouldn’t just come with one stamp of approval, but four; and instead of playing subtle scouts, the four operators can see and back a broader range of companies.

After all, invest for the job you want, right?

Twenty checks and two years later, the quartet decided to pitch another idea, this time as a firmer bet on themselves and to a broader group of investors. The vision, launching publicly for the first time today, is Coalition, a fund and operator network designed to increase diversity on cap tables and help founders access some of the top minds in tech.

The fund is a $12.5 million investment vehicle with investors including the founders of Zola, Box, Glossier, Chief and Solv; as well as senior executives at startups including Stripe, Chime, Airtable, Maven, Gusto and Ro. Traditional

investment firms also cut checks into the debut fund, such as General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Homebrew, BoxGroup, Lowercarbon Capital and, of course, Thrive Capital, which lit the fire in the first place.

Coalition has been on the market for over six months and has invested in a dozen startups, including Mos, MicroAcquire, Zaya Care and Aunt Flow, as well as a slew of stealthy startups.

In addition to investing, the co-founders have brought together a network of women in the operator space who are interested in investing. Members include Annie Pearl, chief product officer at Calendly; Cynthia Burks, former chief people and culture officer at Genentech; Noora Raj Brown, EVP of brand at Goop; and Shani Taylor, head of commercial customer success at Airtable.

There are a ton of funds out there right now that say they are committed to building community. Beyond a focus on diversity, Coalition has a twist in its strategy that caught my attention.

The firm struck a deal with General Catalyst and Thrive, two of its LPs, to pilot a new economic model meant to bring diverse operators into deals at scale. Here’s how it works, Mayer describes:

GC or Thrive connects us with a founder, and we learn about that business and what areas of operational expertise would be most valuable. We then surface and vet relevant operator profiles, increasingly via referrals from operators already in the network. When an operator match is made (both the founder and operator want to work together), GC or Thrive carves out a portion of their firm’s upside in that specific investment for the operator, in exchange for advisory support.

Those economics are based on the equivalent of a meaningful angel check in the most recent

round, with full upside exposure in the event of an exit. Individual operators have aligned long-term incentives with the company (or companies) they’re supporting.

Coalition does not charge anything to be part of the Network, and says it does not plan to.

The GC/Thrive deal is also a way to get people from diverse backgrounds onto cap tables, without needing to front-load cash themselves. It’s a pushback on the idea that anyone can angel invest or spin up a rolling fund — which is especially untrue for founders and operators from historically overlooked backgrounds.

“Operators may have high net worth on paper, lots of visibility, and lots of potential future wealth, but very little liquidity,” Mayer said. Capital matters, and this deal is meant to both de-risk and onramp at the same time.

The two-pronged approach of fund and network helps Coalition cover multiple fronts: founders can turn to the firm for capital or the network for advice at no further dilution. Aspiring investors and advisors can turn to the firm to begin building out their portfolio, and LPs can put money into an operation that is committed to broadening diversity on cap tables, known to have economic benefits.

The operator network is almost a full circle moment to how Coalition started in the first place, rooted in helping smart folks break into venture. Mayer said that Coalition, the fund, doesn’t have a formal scout program because of the fund’s size, but the network is their way of incentivizing people to bring deals and share in the economics of it.

One potential confusion for founders could be in deciding when to come to Coalition “the fund,” versus when to come to General Catalyst or Thrive for money yet get support from Coalition “the network.” There’s a world where the fund’s investments, and the network’s support, are competitive. And for the founding team, which is incentivized to land amazing deals with LP money, it can feel even greyer.

Check size helps the founding team avoid this, for now.

Mayer said that the team hasn’t “yet run into any

conflicts between the fund and network” although admits that theoretically they could invest in a company through the fund and work with the startup through the Coalition Network. However, given Coalition’s check size, it almost always has to invest alongside a lead investor, meaning that collaboration is key to its success.

“We’re building the destination for founders who want to access top operational expertise, whether they’re excited to work with the four of us or are intrigued by the broader network,” Mayer said. “And it’s the place where operators come to access curated opportunities focused on the cap table.”

If this sounds like a lot of moving parts, it’s intentional. Mayer explained that she and her three co-founders saw the value of taking a “portfolio approach” to careers, basically going deep on their respective operator roles while also angel investing, and eventual scout investing. Three of them previously worked in venture but left it because they missed the experience of operating. Now, they’re trying to scale a way for people to keep their day jobs, and build beyond it. Ajayi said that “as one of few women of color leading a venture-backed company, I feel a deep obligation to hold the door open for others.”

“We all built Coalition in addition to our very busy jobs because we saw how much incredible operational talent was under-activated, and we know that diverse cap tables are one of the best paths to wealth creation and a more equitable startup ecosystem,” Ajayi added.

Mayer is the only full-time GP, while the others are part-time.

“Taking more of a portfolio approach to your career makes you better at your day job,” Mayer said. “One of the best ways to grow in your career is by looking out and not putting on blinders and only being heads down in your day job.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/28/coalitionwants-to-make-more-women-operators-andinvestors-at-the-same-damn-time/

Image credit: Lori Wilson Photography

Richelieu Dennis Sold his Company and was Named a Sellout, but Says the ‘Opportunity’ Helps Black Businesses and the Community

By Shanique Yates

WHEN IT COMES TO SCALING and growing Black-owned businesses, Richelieu Dennis is the man with the master plan.

He played a pivotal role in spearheading the largest consumer products transaction between a

Richelier

DennisSource: Erica Westley

Photography via Esusu

majority Black-owned company during his negotiation of the acquisition by Unilever of the company he cofounded, Sundial Brands.

Moving On Up

Although deals like this are often historic, they are met with disdain from the Black community, which fears the company will lose its value to the culture. Dennis broke down his thoughts on

the reasons behind the backlash and why some members of the community may think these Black owners are selling out.

“There’s a few reasons,” he told AfroTech. “One, it is not something that happens frequently, and often in our community…[it’s not] where people can get an understanding or appreciation or have the right track records to look at. So, historically, there’s been these things that have happened in our community that have led to different levels of trust and mistrust.”

The Response From The Community

Furthermore, Dennis admits that although people’s responses are warranted due to past behaviors and incidents, there is new hope from Black entrepreneurs rising up with a culture-first mindset to prevent things like this from happening in the future.

“Obviously, our community is concerned when businesses and brands that are built to serve them get sold, that they will see lack of understanding, lack of focus, lack of interest happening, but I will say that there’s a new breed of Black business owners and there’s a new breed of Black businesses that are emerging, and those businesses are highly conscious of the community they serve,” Dennis said. “And so I think what you’re starting to see is Black entrepreneurs develop and build businesses that are steeped in purpose, focused on the mission.”

He continued: “And they are now at the position where they can dictate to the partners that are interested to acquire them, they can dictate to them what their values are, what their purpose is. Those companies are also now looking to make acquisitions of Black-owned businesses, and they understand the importance of serving the Black community because that’s why these businesses are growing.”

Paying It Forward

As the person who led the monumental deal in which Unilever acquired Sundial Brands, the maker of Shea Moisture, for a whopping $1.6 billion, Dennis used his expertise to simultaneously launch the New Voices Fund as a part of the deal.

The program, which was created with entrepreneurial women of color in mind, has

continued to invest in Black women founders who may be experiencing challenges such as access to capital, resources, relationships with retailers, and more.

One of the first brands to be a part of the New Voices Fund was Mielle Organics, the company owned by Monique Rodriguez, which was previously reported by AfroTech. The company faced backlash earlier this year following the announcement of its decision to join the Procter & Gamble family.

For Dennis, this is a part of the bigger reason for helping businesses such as Mielle to grow and scale and ultimately make the decision to take the company to the next level.

There's More Where That Came From

“We have to build our businesses, we have to create value in them, we have to unlock that value,” he said. “And we have to take that value and invest it back into our community so that other families get the same opportunities. I think, because that hasn’t happened enough, at scale for many people, our community hasn’t seen the positive impacts that this can have, they’ve only seen the negative.”

Dennis continued: “I think what we did with Sundial and what we did with Shea Moisture is the blueprint and a case study of what can happen when we start to do this… and now we’re looking to see that happen, not just with us, but now with hundreds of different companies that we’ve invested in.”

New Voices Fund

Today, New Voices continues to help Black and women of color entrepreneurs to access the capital and resources needed to thrive.

They continue to push the needle forward for Black-owned brands like The Lip Bar, Slutty Vegan, The Honey Pot, and more.

What’s more, in February 2023, the company celebrated ringing the Nasdaq Stock Market opening bell.

https://afrotech.com/richelieu-dennis-helpingblack-owned-businesses-scale?item=2

Image credit: latestinbeauty.com, retailmenot. com, Indeed, linkedin.com, nonwovens-industry. com

Year-end Reflections and a Call for Change

By Hemant Taneja December 20, 2022

Why we need to embrace responsible innovation more than ever before

This letter was originally sent to our Limited Partners in December 2022

THER E’S AN OLD Chinese proverb: ‘May you live in interesting times.’

No question we are indeed living in interesting times today. The combination of economic, societal, political, climate, and pandemic challenges have made this an unprecedented time for the world, the technology sector and the venture business. At the same time, we’re entering an equally ‘interesting’ business climate...where market headwinds are strong and strengthening, where businesses are still navigating post-pandemic challenges, and where the jolting effects of re-globalization are just beginning to be felt.

As a technology investor for over 20 years, I have always believed (and still do) that technology holds the power to solve our biggest societal problems. But we have to admit that technology is also creating and exacerbating them. I’ve written extensively about the dangers of the unintended consequences of innovation. Those unintended consequences are deepening and accelerating at an alarming pace, thanks to Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws. It took 150 years for us to see the unintended consequences of the combustion engine in the form of climate change. It’s taken only 15 short years to see the unintended consequences of social media platforms in creating a highly fractured and divisive society and testing the limits of our democratic system.

So, we find ourselves confronting a strange reality: the legacy of one of the greatest periods of innovation and investment in human history is that we lack inclusive prosperity, we have eroded respectful society, and we are

threatening the sustainability of our planet. We have some serious problems ahead of us; now is the time for us as an industry to get serious about how we’re going to address them. The magnitude of these problems are far beyond what the venture industry has historically tackled. As such, we have to transcend the traditional VC mindset if we're going to make a difference. The way we're going about solving these things right now is not going to get it done.

The truth is, the venture business (as a whole) has not risen to the occasion. Despite a decade of extraordinary growth and prosperity, venture capitalists, for the most part, have abdicated responsibility for the kinds of companies we help create and their impact on the world. Dare I say it: venture has gotten comfortable and lazy. As an industry, we think our only job is to spawn companies, ‘disrupt’ markets, deliver strong returns for our LPs and personal wealth for ourselves…and assume society will figure out the rest. This is not the way to build enduring companies or leave a meaningful legacy. We have to ask ourselves: is the role of venture just to create great tech teams that get absorbed by big tech platforms to make them even bigger? How does that make a difference in the world? In the early days of venture, there was a greater focus on funding and fostering truly transformative technologies. We have gotten away from that and need to find our way back.

The feeding frenzy of the last few years has also spawned a whole lot of undisciplined business behaviors in the venture space: paying far ahead; investing at the peak of the market; the SPAC mania; buying public stocks; the crypto craze; poor governance; a ‘growth at any cost’ mindset… all fueled by a hubris that we somehow know better and are smarter than everyone else.

At the same time, there have been loud, prominent voices in and around the tech ecosystem railing against ‘ESG’--suggesting

it is at best a distraction, at worst ‘the devil’. I’ll admit it: ESG as a framework is flawed. ESG is about measuring outputs for large scale existing companies; it doesn’t perfectly apply to venture–which needs to look at inputs in order to navigate the ambiguity of our business and build and scale companies over long time horizons. But its intent is right and ever more essential. We need new frameworks to govern how we build these next generation platforms…because the scale, scope and import of the technology companies that are being built today are greater than ever. Tomorrow’s most important technology companies will impact billions of lives and livelihoods in ever more profound ways–as we seek to become a true digital society and reorganize all aspects of life and business online. The nature of what we’re building is fundamentally different than it once was. As investment and tech leaders, we must step up and take responsibility for the companies we help create and scale. You need to look no further than the FTX meltdown to understand the consequences of new technology frontiers exploited with little governance, oversight or integrity.

Simply put, we need to do better.

GC avoided many of these missteps but we were not entirely immune. Our well intended SAIL vehicles (our version of SPACs designed to align stakeholder incentives and promote longterm company building) are winding down as the IPO markets remain challenged; we, too, made a handful of investments that were paying far ahead. But we largely avoided public market investing and sidestepped the crypto craze, recognizing that, at this speculative stage of the market, the ‘killer app’ was greed itself.

Reflecting back on the last few years, we have been on our own transformation journey… evolving from one fund to five funds (creation, ignition, endurance, health assurance and customer value) and remaking ourselves as an

institution that goes above and beyond traditional early stage capital (but retains it at our core). We have been re-architecting ourselves to become the investment firm of the future. It is said ‘fortune favors the prepared mind’, and we have been comparatively well prepared, thoughtful and intentional in how we’ve been building the platform over the course of the last several years. As a result of this (and admittedly, some serendipity) we’ve found ourselves well positioned to capitalize on the changing market dynamics. We started formulating our health assurance thesis in early 2019…a year ahead of the global pandemic and the accelerated digital transformation of the healthcare sector; we expanded our platform to create new tools to help founders fund customer acquisition (our Customer Value strategy) a full year ahead of today’s market downturn and during a time we believe that product has found excellent product-market fit; we published our Responsible Innovation thesis as early as 2019 (The era of move fast and break things is over) and formed the non-profit RI Labs over a year ago, well before the growing demands for more tangible action by many LPs. We committed to articulating our mission, vision and values back in 2019, and that framework has served as a powerful true north for the firm and the difference we’re committed to collectively making in the world. We believed then (as we do now) that tomorrow’s most financially successful, compounding businesses will be those that operate in the best interest of society.

As I look to the year ahead, we will continue to focus on the areas of meaningful transformation where we think the greatest opportunities will be created. True to our name, we see ourselves as ‘agents of change’--accelerating the transformation of companies, industries and society at large We’re focused on what we believe are the biggest epicenters of transformation, including healthcare

see page 84

Call for Change

from page 83

(where we are determined to accelerate our lead in investments and partnerships through the lens of our health assurance thesis); fintech and crypto (where we are focused on the convergence of those two ecosystems and what that means for a more inclusive financial system); AI (with a renewed focus on its responsible use and deployment); climate (admittedly we are in the early stages of this, but its importance is undeniable); the digital transformation of India (where we see tremendous opportunity to spawn some truly globally important companies); and the need to build more globally resilient systems in the areas of education and workforce transformation, security, defense and intelligence. These are a handful of things we’re working on. The list will evolve and change (part of our organizational growth mindset) but everything we seek to do will revolve around creating enduring companies that begin to address society’s biggest problems.

In this year-end reflection we at General Catalyst are calling for a change: for our industry to double down on the principles of Responsible Innovation and to commit to new behaviors as we build and scale companies in this brave new world. Specifically, we’re advocating for the following 9 ‘reframes’:

1. From celebrating disruption to embracing ‘radical collaboration’ (committing to working with innovation-minded leaders within the industries we’re actively trying to transform)

2. From pure serendipity to greater intentionality (leaning into the power of a prepared mind; having a clear point of view and thesis on how the world is changing and how it needs to change–and working to advance that thesis through thoughtful strategic investments)

3. From elitism to inclusive opportunity (acknowledging that our industry has contributed to the consolidation of wealth and power among a select few and by committing to create inclusive opportunity as part of a fairer and more sustainable society; always asking the question: ”who wins and who loses?”)

4. From just backing or even building companies to transforming industries and society (taking

a broader perspective on the large scale changes we’re trying to affect)

5. From ‘exit’ as the sole endgame to building enduring enterprises that also create liquidity for investors (truly acting in service of building enduring, compounding businesses that stand the test of time)

6. From financial OR societal benefit to financial AND societal benefit (abandoning the false choice of doing good or doing well)

7. From ‘ESG’ (focused on corporate outputs) to responsible innovation (focused on a new set of inputs–purpose built for the venture space–at all stages of company building)

8. From a ‘cult of personality’ to a ‘cult of purpose’ (abandoning the egoic worship of the individual investor or founder in favor of a sense of shared purpose and outcomes)

9. From investment partnership to cohesive company (where team, mission and culture really matter and we become enduring businesses in our own right)

I know there’s a lot of inherent cynicism in the world and in our industry. Some critics might dismiss this call to arms as the privilege of someone who has already enjoyed success and now has the luxury to consider impact and legacy. But I would argue that it is a necessity for our business as we move forward. This is a movement and it is growing…as evidenced by the exceptional and diverse talents outside our own investment team who are joining us on our journey. And supported by all of my magnificent partners at General Catalyst, including our chairman and my mentor Ken Chenault, who set us on this path and continues to inspire our progress. I believe our resolve to lead here will best prepare us for success in the future.

You can interpret the Chinese proverb as a curse or a blessing. We are short-term cautious about the days ahead, but long-term optimistic, driven by a belief that these interesting times will yield some of the world’s most interesting and impactful companies

https://www.generalcatalyst.com/perspectives/ hemants-year-end-letter-to-lps

Image credit: pitchbook.com, golden.com

AFROTECH™ 2023 Speaker Application

AfroTech is the world’s leading ecosystem for premium content and a network for Black culture and technology. The AFROTECH™experiences within this ecosystem include the AFROTECH™ Executive series, AFROTECH™ Conference, AFROTECH™ World and more. We are now accepting participants for speaking & hos ting opportunities who are experts in their field, workshop leaders, hosts/ MC 's, etc. for 2023 programming.

Criteria:

• Submissions should clearly prove you are a leader in the industry/field you are submitting for

• Specific topics, workshops or Q&As where AFROTECH attendees will have a tangible takeaway they can apply immediately in their career or company.

• Topics should be specific, unique and narrow. We WILL NOT accept general proposals such as: “How to Raise Funds” or “Pivoting Your Career”

• Panels will be expected to speak on a specific subject(s) and should consist of 2 speakers and a moderator.

• Previous attendance at AfroTech preferred, but not required.

As an accepted speaker, you will enjoy the below speaker benefits:

• 2 complimentary GA tickets (yourself + guest)

• Promotion as a speaker on the event website

• Personalized social asset for promotion

**We ask that you do not reach out directly to the AfroTech team for a status update on your application. This may result in being disqualified**

Final review of speakers will be completed as of June 30th. Please do not submit for AFROTECH™ Conference 2023 past June 30th. Any submissions after this date will be considered for future events.

Thank you for your interest in giving back to our community, we hope to see you at one of our AfroTech Events!

AFROTECH™ Conference 2023 November 1-5

APPLY HERE!

Twitter Backed Minority-Led VC Firms But Has Now Dropped Its Support Team, Leaving Fund M

By Josh Rodgers

ELON MUSK’S acquisition of Twitter has been a rollercoaster experience

The purchase of the social media giant came with significant changes including massive layoffs and payments for the once-coveted blue check.

Not to mention, AfroTech reported that one of the significant shifts with Musk as CEO was the closing of Twitter’s Africa office. The Ghana office had only 20 employees but was closed just days after officially opening.

Twitter Backed Minority-Led VC Firms But Has Now Dropped Its Support Team, Leaving Fund Managers Scrambling

Surprising moves like the layoffs and added restrictions have been back to back as Musk navigates his power leading the company. A recent development in the shake-up is the dissolution of its corporate development team that supported minority-owned venture capital firms.

According to Forbes, Twitter could be backing out of its promise of millions to venture capital firms and small businesses.

It All Started Well

Forbes reports that Twitter began investing in firms more than two years before Elon Musk took over the organization. Many organizations that received financial backing were minority- and woman-owned.

The social media outlet, led by Twitter’s corporate development team, dispensed $1 million to $2 million in checks to smaller venture capital (VC) firms. In addition, Twitter would buy about 10 to 12 startups each year. So investing in VC firms would help support underrepresented small businesses and create targets for what type of small businesses the company would acquire next. Forbes reports this method of investing also helps its diversity goals.

“Our diversity goals weren’t about being woke, they were about how people used our service and making sure we didn’t dilute our [company-wide staffing] diversity goals through M+A,” one former Twitter employee said to Forbes. “It was working.”

The Tides Began To Change

And while everything seemed to be going well for Twitter’s work in this area, things took a turn under

Managers Scrambling

the Musk administration. Several people linked to the program either were laid off or quit voluntarily, noting they saw the “writing on the walls.”

“The pool of people who knew about the venture investing in any detail dwindled to virtually one person,” said one venture capitalist. “They were told that there was basically one person in finance who still knew anything about the investing program, and so if they wanted to get the rest of the capital that they had not yet called, he was their best hope.”

At the beginning of this year, those who received funds from Twitter received a message from one of the company’s former corporate development team members informing them of the dissolution and outlining what was at stake for their businesses. They were told someone representing Musk would follow up with them.

Forbes notes it was able to reach many of the VC firm leaders, but none of them wanted to speak on the record for fear of negative backlash.

The Uncertainty Of What's Next

Fund managers have reason to remain quiet about Twitter’s possible payment default. If Twitter officially defaults on payments, Forbes outlined VC firms’ options as the next steps — shrink their fund size or tack on additional interest until payment is finally received.

Kari Harris, a funds practice chair for Mintz

investments, notes that she rarely sees these types of defaults actually occur.

“There are real-world consequences of a default,” Harris said. “The reality is that it never happens. 99% of the time, the parties are going to work it out and come up with an answer.”

One VC firm leader told Forbes that it would be happy to speak out on who defaulted as a way to protect its image if it could find a buyer to take over Twitter’s promised responsibilities to the firm.

But regardless of what happens, it puts all parties in a precarious situation as they seek a plan forward amid uncertainty. What was once a promising investment strategy has now become a nightmare for the parties involved.

A Proven History

“It was supposed to be an investment that would be impactful without being an impact investment, and we loved that,” one VC firm leader stated, according to Forbes.

The current actions’ effect on underrepresented business owners adds to the long inequity claims against Twitter, including the elimination of employee resource groups (ERGs) and the previously reported increase in racially infused language on the site. All of the actions mentioned earlier occurred and heightened under the leadership of Elon Musk.

https://afrotech.com/twitter-backed-vc-firms-may-beat-risk-of-losing-funds

Image credit: Planeta, ikigailaw.com

Color of Change Partners with BOMESI to Secure MultiMillion-Dollar Commitment from Major Corporations to Support Black-Owned Media

COLOR OF CHANGE PARTNERS with the Black Owned Media Equity & Sustainability Institute (BOMESI) to hold brands accountable for pledges made during the height of civil unrest in 2020. A number of corporations including P&G, and HP Inc. have committed to supporting BOMESI’s efforts to sustain Black owned media. BOMESI is fiscally sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

The millions in corporate contributions will go to Black-owned media companies in the form of direct advertising spends and in the form of donations to BOMESI, as it builds additional infrastructure and capacity to accomplish its mission to advance Black-owned media businesses and educate the public on the importance of these platforms.

In June 2020, following a deluge of corporate solidarity statements that failed to address how business practices and policies upheld systems of inequity, BOMESI launched a public database of all Black-owned media and called on companies to increase their advertising spend with Black media. The historic commitment to BOMESI follows

internal engagement with senior leadership at the participating companies by Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. By leveraging the power of their seven million members, Color Of Change engaged in tough negotiations with corporate executives for months to convey the need and demand funding for Blackowned media companies.

“Black-owned media is irreplaceable in our communities. From amplifying underrepresented and displaced Black Louisiana residents after Hurricane Ida, to highlighting healthcare disparities and promoting Black-owned businesses, media run by and for Black viewers is already far too limited. As monopolistic content gatekeepers like Facebook increasingly control and manipulate streams of information, independent Black media companies are essential to amplify our stories, create employment opportunities, and provide advertisement opportunities for Black businesses,” said Color Of Change Senior Campaign Director Jade Magnus Ogunnaike. “These corporate financial commitments provide

a roadmap for peer companies and send a strong message that those who rely on our purchasing power will be held accountable for reinvesting back in Black communities. This is a necessary step in empowering Black media to reclaim the stories and narratives that will yield greater equity for Black communities.”

Through its partnerships, BOMESI’s goal is to provide space for an ecosystem of Black-owned media publishers to connect and exchange learnings, educate publishers and brands on the best ways to establish deal flow and working relationships, and ultimately create economic empowerment through increased budgets, and diverse campaigns.

“For too long, systemic barriers in the advertising industry have kept independent Black-owned media from access to deal flow. This impacts the sustainability of both legacy and next gen publishers that center and serve an underrepresented community that needs journalists, and publishers who understand them to be at the forefront of sharing crucial information and keeping our stories alive with grace and integrity. We must be mindful of who gets to own their story, and what levers affect the ability for those stories to have impact,” Rhonesha Byng, co-founder BOMESI, and founder/CEO of Her Agenda.

Color Of Change has a long track record of effective corporate accountability campaigning across the media and entertainment industries. In 2021 alone, Color Of Change successfully pressured NBC Universal to drop the Golden Globes and pushed for the cancellation of police procedural shows like Cops. Color Of Change also led a successful campaign to push Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter to ban former president Donald Trump from its platforms after he incited the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.

“The advertising industry has systematically excluded Black-owned media from plans and budgets for almost two centuries. This was done while simultaneously exploiting Black bodies to market and sell products across the globe. Today

we address that hypocrisy and begin the work of undoing the harm that continues to affect the sustainability of Black-owned media,” DeVon Christopher Johnson, Co-Founder BOMESI, CEO/ Group Publisher, BleuLife Media Group.

In addition to the major corporations, BOMESI’s initiative is backed by the involvement of Black Media Initiative at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, Fabrik, as well as the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) as strategic partners, and its philanthropic partners, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

About Color Of Change:

Color Of Change is the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. We help people respond effectively to injustice in the world around us. As a national online force driven by over 7 million members, we move decision-makers in corporations and government to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America. Visit www.colorofchange.org.

About BOMESI:

The Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute was created to unite and advance Blackowned media businesses, educate the public on the importance of these platforms, and provide resources to increase visibility. Black-owned media outlets have been a beacon for Black communities for over 190 years. We curated a public database of Black-owned media companies across the country. They have stood on the front lines of issues such as voting rights, civil rights, fair pay for all, unionization, education equity, healthcare disparities, and many other issues that impact Black people and reflect the current state of civil unrest. For more visit, https://blackownedmedia. org.

https://blackownedmedia.org/bulletin/colorof-change-partners-with-bomesi-to-securemulti-million-dollar-commitment-from-majorcorporations-to-support-black-owned-media/ Image credit: Color of Change, BOMESI

Zimbabwe is Launching a Local Digital Currency Alternative to the US Dollar

By Ananya Bhattacharya

Zimbabwe is introducing local digital tokens in the hope of reducing reliance on the US dollar.

Starting Monday (May 8), Zimbabwe will circulate digital tokens backed by gold reserves that people can use to conduct peer-to-peer payments and transact with businesses, John P. Mangudya, the governor of the Reserve bank of Zimbabwe, announced on April 28. International gold prices determined by the London Bullion Market Association will dictate the local pricing of the tokens.

Mangudya hopes the tokens offer an innovative new payment option to Zimbabwean citizens: “The issuance of the gold-backed digital tokens is meant to expand the value-preserving instruments available in the economy and enhance divisibility of the investment instruments and widen their access and usage by the public,” he said.

The tokens will be available to purchase via banks and transactions will be enabled through “e-gold wallets or e-gold cards” held by banks. There is a vesting period of 180 days, after which the tokens can be traded.

The minimum spend for individuals to purchase digital tokens is $10 for individuals and $5,000 for financial institutions, corporates and other entities, according to a May 4 press release by the central bank.

The alternative to the US dollar is a bid to shore up the country’s faltering currency, which is officially valued at around 1,000 Zimbabwean dollars for $1, but can sell at almost double the price in the illegal market.

A brief timeline of Zimbabwe’s currency collapse 1998-2007: Due to monetary policy mismanagement, Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate

Zimba

hit 47% in 1998. Over the next decade, hyperinflation kept on getting worse. The government’s poorly implemented land reform initiatives stymied agricultural production, and a food supply crunch sent prices spiraling upward. The banking sector collapsed due to economic sanctions imposed by the US, European Union, and the IMF. Then, the Zimbabwe government printed huge sums of new bills to fund action in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and underreported it, tipping the scales.

2008: Trust in Zimbabwe’s currency wanes as people see their pensions and savings wiped out by hyperinflation.

2009: Zimbabwe launches a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars banknote, worth around $33 in the black market. Shortly after, Zimbabwe is forced to scrap its own currency and start using the US dollar as legal tender. Under the multi-currency system, people also start using the Botswana pula (BWP), Indian rupee (INR), euro (EUR), and South African rand (ZAR). The local currency’s demonetization is complete by 2015.

October 2019: The government reintroduces a Zimbabwean currency and bans the use of foreign currencies for local transactions. But the black market thrived and the switch didn’t really happen. Eventually, the government lifted the ban on the US dollar.

July 2022: Zimbabwe launches 22-carat gold coins to be sold to the public to tame runaway inflation.

One big number: Zimbabwe’s peak hyperinflation

79,600,000,000%: Zimbabwe’s inflation rate per month at its peak in November 2008, which was essentially 98% daily. This is the second-highest hyperinflation in history. It’s second to Hungary in the aftermath of World War II, where prices doubled every 15 hours at one point as the government used inflation as a tax on its citizens to help pay its postwar reparations and make its payments to the occupying Soviet army, and to restore productive capacity.

The move towards de-dollarizing

The US dollar has ruled global reserves for more than 80 years. That’s partially why it became a mainstay for a Zimbabwe-in-crisis. But several countries are trying to distance themselves from the currency to free themselves from ties to the US economy and financial system. Russia has promoted de-dollarization since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to sanctions. In light of the Ukraine war, the attempt has accelerated. This year, though, the calls for de-dollarization have grown louder and spread wider.

Brazil and Argentina have been weighing a common currency to reduce reliance on the US dollar in trade. India and Malaysia have agreed to trade in the Indian rupee. China and Brazil reached an agreement to settle trades in each others’ currencies. There’s chatter about Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, agreeing to do select trades in Chinese yuan, too.

But breaking America’s currency dominance won’t be easy. The US dollar is inherently built for modern trade, given its structural strength, relative stability, the breadth and depth of dollar-denominated asset markets, and the continued reliance of developing nations on the US dollar inside their supply chains and asset bases. A switch, if at all, would take decades, even generations, economist Peter C. Earle wrote for the American Institute for Economic Research.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zimbabwelaunching-local-digital-currency-153600868.html

abwe’s 100-trillion-dollar note gains in value

Adelaide Now

INVERSE EXCLUSIVE: HERE’S A VIDEO OF HUMANE’S WEARABLE AI PROJECTOR IN ACTION

By Raymond Wong

HUMANE, the top-secret tech startup founded by ex-Apple vets Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, just showed off the first demo for its projector-based wearable at a TED talk. Axios’ Ina Fried broke the news, and Inverse has seen a recording of the full TED talk given by Chaudhri.

Journalist Zarif Ali, who had tweeted out an image of Humane’s wearable projecting a phone call function onto Chaudhri’s palm, says the full TED talk video is slated to become available April 22.

During the TED talk, after a quick summary on the fast rise and immense potential of AI and chatbots like ChatGPT, and even shouting out Bill Gates’s prediction that AI will be as profound as the graphical user interface that ushered in personal computing, Chaudhri shares his vision for the wearable.

“What do we do with all these incredible [AI] developments? And how do we actually harness

these to genuinely make our life better?” he asks. “If we get this right, AI will unlock a world of possibility. Today, I want to share with you what we think is a solution to that end. And it's the first time we're doing so openly. It's a new kind of wearable device, that and platform that's built entirely from the ground up for artificial intelligence. And it's completely standalone. You don't need a smartphone or any other device to pair with it.”

“It interacts with the world the way you interact with the world, hearing what you hear, seeing what you see, while being privacy first, and safe, and completely fading into the background of your life,” Chaudhri says.

THINGS HUMANE’S WEARABLE CAN DO

How does the phone function work? Designer Michael Mofina, who says he caught the TED talk live before the link was removed, told Inverse: “In terms of the call, as soon as [Chaudhri] raised his

View the video & graphics by following the link shown at the end of this article.

hand the device displayed the appropriate incoming call interface, no menu to navigate through.”

In a reply to a retweet of his image, Ali said that the Chaudhri demoed “a translation feature that translates to another language using your own voice model for natural conversation.” Axios reported that Chaudhri was translating his voice from English to French using the wearable. Per Mofina, “The translation came out in French but it was using an AI-generated version of his voice to speak it. No projected interface for the translation.”

Ali also described two other features. There’s “a ‘catch me up’ feature that scrapes your meetings, etc, and gives you a quick list of important things you may have missed. Mofina added this: “The device gave him a recap of crucial info without disturbing him with notifications. ‘You got an email, and Bethany sent you some photos.’”

In one demo, Chaudhri taps the wearable and asks: “Where can I find a gift for my wife before I have to leave tomorrow?” The AI response: “Vancouver's Granville Island is a lively shopping district.”

And take a look at this video Mofina tweeted out. “Let’s say you’re health conscious or you have certain types of food considerations,” says Chaudhri. He takes out a candy bar, holds it in front of the device, taps on the Humane device and asks “Can I eat this?” The device responds with “A milky bar contains cocoa butter. Given your intolerance, you may want to avoid it.”

“What’s cool is my AI knows what’s best for me, but I’m in total control,” says Chaudhri. He taps on the wearable again. “Im gonna eat it anyway.” The AI replies back with some humor: “Enjoy it.”

SCREENLESS, SEAMLESS, SENSING

It’s been widely speculated that Humane’s “iPhone killer” would be a projector of sorts, and that appears to be the case. “AI will be the driving force behind the next leap in device design” reads a slide in Chaudhri’s presentation.

“We like to say that the experience is screenless, seamless, and sensing, allowing you to access the power of compute while remaining present in your surroundings, fixing a balance that's felt out of place for some time now,” says Chaudhri.

In a screenshot, you can see an image of the wearable device attached to Chaudhri’s jacket.

There appears to be a camera and a pair (or more) of sensors.

One thing Mofina says Chaudhri shared at SXSW this year was that Humane’s wearable wouldn’t have a “wake word” like Siri or Alexa. “He was shown interacting with it by voice by tapping it to start speaking to it. It also has LED lights that indicate when it’s listening, and when a call is coming in.”

In his talk, Chaudhri expresses the need to replace screens — screens for computers of all shapes (computers, smartphones, tables, smartwatches) that he helped popularize while at Apple. “For the human-technology relationship to actually evolve beyond screens, we need something radically different.”

Several Twitter users have raised some important questions about how Humane’s wearable works, details of which were not shared in-depth at the TED talk.

“I wonder how much the Humane projector weighs? Will it weigh down a light shirt? Is it attached with a pin or a magnet?” tweeted MacRumors contributing writer Steve Moser. “What’s it like to accidentally shine it right into someone’s eyeball? Is there a recording light when the camera is on? How wide of an angle does it project?” We’re all wondering the same, Moser. We’re all wondering the same.

https://www.inverse.com/tech/humane-aiwearable-camera-sensor-projector-video-demo Image credit: SCREENSHOTs VIA ZARIF ALI

Snap’s AR is Getting Down to Business

By Harry McCraclem

IN A WORLD in which augmented reality can feel like it’s perennially tomorrow’s news, Snapchat is one of the few places it’s already being embraced at scale. Each day, 250 million of the app’s 375 million daily active users summon its AR lenses to transform themselves with new virtual hairstyles (or no hair at all), baby faces, instant face tattoos, rainbow teeth, fantasy pets, and much, much more. But for one of its latest forays into AR, Snap is going in a direction that’s less about quirky entertainment than a more practical concern: helping other companies sell stuff. It’s a new business called AR Enterprise Services—or ARES for short—that the company unveiled last month and spotlighted at its Snap Partner Summit conference in Santa Monica, California. ARES takes the foundational technologies that

power Snapchat’s AR and turns them into a software-as-a-service platform that developers can use to incorporate AR in their own apps and websites. It’s a logical way to make the company’s sizable investment in AR pay off in ways that go beyond keeping Snapchat fans glued to the app.

Over the years, Snap has “learned a lot about what we need to do from a technical perspective and a creative perspective to deliver AR that actually adds a lot of value in someone’s life,” says Snap cofounder and CTO Bobby Murphy. “We do that through the hundreds of millions of people who are engaging with AR in our service every day. And now we have a chance, through ARES, to work with other companies and really work on delivering similar value.”

For starters, most of that value will come from using AR to improve the shopping experience for clothing, shoes, and related accoutrements. ARES’ Shopping Suite service includes technologies such as Fit Finder, which assists consumers with size recommendations tailored to their taste and body shape, and AR Try-On, a virtual dressing room. Snap’s early customers for these tools have included fashion brands Princess Polly, Gobi Cashmere, and Farm Rio, along with sunglasses maker Goodr.

The goal is to give shoppers the best possible sense of how they’ll look before they purchase items, in a way that conventional e-commerce can’t match. “We’ve proven that you can reduce returns, which gives you a more predictable revenue stream,” says Jill Popelka, who heads up ARES. “We’ve proven that you can increase conversions. This use of augmented reality with artificial intelligence—the experience plus the fit and sizing—give you an incredibly confident consumer.” According to Snap, Princess Polly has already used ARES for 50 million size and fit interactions, reducing the return rate by 24%.

Even before it decided to offer an AR platform, Snap had a fair amount of experience as a technology provider to other organizations. It’s

she quickly learned that for all of Snap’s expertise in AR, it needed to rethink some of its cherished values to make ARES work.

“[Snap CEO] Evan [Spiegel] and his team are developers of consumer apps,” she explains. “They believe it should be 1,000% perfect before it’s released. And I said, ‘Well, actually, each of our customers, each of these big retailers, they’re going to want to have some flexibility in what they do with it. So you can’t create perfectly productized, linesdrawn, no-changes products. You have to allow for some flexibility.'”

There’s a brickand-mortar retail element to ARES as well. The service powers “AR Mirrors,” large cameraenabled screens in public places that let you see a full-body image of yourself with AR overlays. In pilot programs, Men’s Wearhouse and Nike have offered in-store virtual try-ons via AR Mirror. Nike has also used the technology for in-store games and plans to test an AR Mirror optimized for footwear try-ons that will let shoppers see how they look in custom shoes at retail before they order the real deal.

collaborated with companies such as Disney and Samsung on AR projects and offers Camera Kit, an SDK that lets developers build its AR lenses into their own apps. But Popelka, who joined the company last June after 25 years deep in the enterprise weeds at SAP and Accenture, says that

Working with Snap, the Coca-Cola Company has built an AR Mirror into a prototype vending machine, turning the area where you might expect to see a giant, static Coke logo into an interactive experience you can initiate with a wave of your hand. Along with helping you purchase drinks, it will offer diversions such as the ability to play with animated soda-pop bubbles and try on virtual Coke apparel.

This AR vending machine is one of several ventures into immersive technology that Coke has made recently. (Others include creating an

see page 96

AR music experience based on technology from Niantic and launching a soft drink on Fortnite.) Though the beverage giant certainly hopes that the end result could be more people bonding with its brand and buying its products, it’s still in a mode where it’s happy to experiment. Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s head of global creative strategy and content, says that reaction to the prototype will determine where it goes with Snap’s AR: “We want to create, learn, listen, and perfect it.”

Snap ARES from page 95 do cool, profitable stuff with AR boost Snap’s own bottom line? The company would certainly benefit from a robust enterprise business. It’s currently dependent on advertising revenues, which have been squeezed by factors outside its control, such as the changes Apple has made to help consumers opt out of ad tracking. Last August, as the tech industry began to gird itself for tougher economic times, Snap announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce. Its stock is currently down 87% from its September 2021 peak. (Snap will report first-quarter results on April 27.)

For all the possibilities of Snap’s initial ARES services, there’s a lot more the company could do with AR in an enterprise context. The new business could intersect at some point with Snap’s Spectacles glasses,

NASA Helicopter Cap

By Mark Kaufman

NASA'S EXTRATERRESTRIAL helicopter, Ingenuity, flew 40 feet into the Martian air and snapped an astonishing landscape on another world.

which have been around since 2016, with the newest version offered by invite only to selected creators. Murphy says that could open up an array of world-facing AR experiences, extending ideas already seen in efforts such as a virtual Cinderella’s Castle mural at Disney World that Snap created in partnership with Disney.

Then there’s a mundane but crucial question about ARES: Will helping other organizations

Snap Spectacles

According to Murphy, Snap is optimistic about ARES’ potential to become a real business. But for the moment, it’s focused on making sure it’s a reliable partner for those who are embedding Snap technology in their own products.

“Our primary objective now is to really work on developing the tools and the support function and our enterprise function to be able to deliver as much value as possible to our partners,” he says. “But absolutely, we see an opportunity for this to become a meaningful source of revenue over the long term.”

https://www.fastcompany. com/90883309/snap-arenterprise-services-bobbymurphy-jill-popelka

On its 51st flight, the experimental craft — with rotors reaching four feet long from tip to tip — rose atop a hill just beyond the rim of Belva crater. The recently released view is grandiose. It looks, dare one say, earthly. The rocky desert is in the foreground. Eroded, windswept hills roll through the horizon. The sky is bright.

And scattered among the vista are some curious signs of human exploration.

• Helicopter legs: On the right and left sides of Ingenuity's image you can spot the ends of two of the spacecraft's legs as it

Martian Landscape

tures Glorious View of Mars, with Some Surprises

hovers in the air.

• Helicopter shadow: At center-right, just to the right of a small grey rock, you can see Ingenuity's small shadow on the ground.

• The Perseverance rover: Perhaps most conspicuous is NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed with Ingenuity in February 2021 with a primary goal of seeking out potential evidence of past microbial life on Mars — if any ever existed, that is. The car-sized, six-wheeled rover is near the top left.

• Rover tracks: You can also spot the large robot's trail. From Perseverance, follow two horizontal lines running to the right across the image. The wheels are metallic, so they're truly noisy as they rumble over Mars' rocky terrain.

• Trash!: When the rover and its landing gear plummeted through the Martian atmosphere before a series of challenging landing maneuvers, debris such as wires and insulation were scattered throughout the desert. Just below the rover you can spot what NASA calls a "small piece of debris."

All of Ingenuity's grand aerial views are an unexpected gift. Mission planners hoped they could get five flights out of the little chopper. Now it's exceeded 50, with many more planned.

The experimental Mars explorer is currently flying over more challenging terrain, a region rife with "dunes, boulders, and rocks, and surrounded by hills that could have us for lunch," Josh Anderson, NASA's Ingenuity operations lead, explained a couple weeks ago.

Stay tuned as Ingenuity and Perseverance explore deeper into Mars' Jezero Crater, a land that is arid desert today, but once teemed with flowing water and muddy deltas.

https://www.msn.com/ en-us/news/technology/ nasa-helicopter-capturesglorious-view-of-mars-withsome-surprises/ar-AA1avXTA

Image credit: Space.com

Martian Landscape

NASA Trash on Mars

3 Ways to Protect Yourself from ‘Shoulder Surfers’

(Phone Thieves who also Steal Your PIN)

By Michael Grothaus

RECENTLY The Wall Street Journal reported on a recent trend in phone theft: Thieves in major cities are no longer simply snatching pricy smartphones— they want the users’ PINs, too. The reason? A stolen phone may fetch a nice payment on the black market, but the financial data locked behind your phone’s PIN can net tens of thousands of dollars more.

The main method a thief uses to learn a phone’s PIN, or passcode, is called “shoulder surfing,” which means that the thief literally observes the owner entering their phone’s PIN and then decides to grab that person’s phone. Once they snatch it, the thief can unlock it with the observed PIN, then change the PIN and even account passwords for the owner’s online services, thus locking the owner out of remote tracking of the stolen phone and eliminating their ability to remotely delete data from the stolen device. That PIN also lets the thief gain access to many financial apps on the stolen phone, which the thief can then use to transfer money from the victim’s accounts.

Shoulder surfers can target anyone, regardless of whether

they use an iPhone or Android device, and particularly if they use a simple 4-digit PIN to unlock their phone, as most people do. But it’s 2023, and with the amount of personal data (health records, photos, notes, and messages) and financial data (bank apps, money transfer apps, photos of tax records or other financial statements) residing on our phones, protecting all that sensitive information with only a 4-digit PIN is asking for trouble.

Thankfully, there are easy ways built into the iPhone’s iOS and Android operating systems to help you protect your device from shoulder surfing. Here are three that you need to know.

1. WHEN IN PUBLIC, USE BIOMETRICS TO UNLOCK YOUR PHONE,

NOT A PIN CODE

While every phone asks you to set up a PIN code that unlocks the device, most also give you the option of gaining access via biometric authentication. Most iPhones, for instance, offer a facial recognition feature, called Face ID, or fingerprint recognition, called Touch ID, while nearly all Android phones offer fingerprint authentication and some offer facial recognition (though facial recognition on Android phones can be much easier to trick than on iPhones).

Regardless of which phone you have, you should always enable facial or fingerprint authentication and use such authentication to unlock your phone whenever you are out in public—whether that’s at a bar or in line for groceries. A thief can still snatch your phone,

but they can’t steal your face or fingerprint to unlock the device, too.

To enable Face ID or Touch ID on an iPhone go to Settings > Face ID/Touch ID & Passcode.

To enable biometric authentication on Android devices, go to the Settings app and look under the Security section. The exact location of the fingerprint setup will depend on which Android device you have (for a Samsung phone, see here; for a Google Pixel phone, see here).

2. NEVER, EVER, USE A NUMERIC 4-DIGIT PIN

Of course, even when you set up facial or fingerprint authentication, your phone will still have a PIN that can unlock the device. Since a PIN can be viewed and entered by a thief, and thus is much less secure than biometric authentication, you’ll want to make your PIN as secure as possible.

This means that you should never, ever use just a numeric 4-digit PIN. A numeric 4-digit PIN is inherently weak for a few reasons. One is that there are only 9,999 possible permutations, meaning someone with a lot of time on their hands could simply try every number between 0000 and 9999. Another is that a numeric 4-digit PIN is incredibly easy for a thief to observe and remember before they snatch your phone. Also, chances are

you use the same PIN for your phone as you do for your debit card. If the thief snatches that, too, they could withdraw your cash from any ATM of their choosing.

If you do want your PIN to be solely numeric, at least chose a 6-digit one. This means that there are now 100 times the number of possible permutations—999,999— making it much harder for a thief to carry out a brute force unlock or observe and remember your PIN in the first place.

To change your 4-digit PIN on an iPhone, go to Settings > Face ID/Touch ID & Passcode and tap Change Passcode, then tap Passcode Options and chose a 6-digit PIN. The steps to changing your PIN on an Android device may vary slightly based on your phone, but it will usually be found in the Settings app under the Lock Screen or Security settings.

3. FOR THE MOST SECURITY, USE AN ALPHANUMERIC PASSCODE

While a 6-digit PIN is vastly more secure than a 4-digit PIN, it’s not the most secure PIN option. That would be using no numeric PIN at all, and instead setting an alphanumeric passcode—a string of letters and numbers.

Alphanumeric passcodes are incredibly secure for a few reasons. Given that they can contain all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0 through 9 in any order or combination you want, they are

incredibly hard to guess because there are billions of possible combinations. Second, because they use numbers and letters, the user needs to use the phone’s small keyboard (and not just a large numeric keypad) to enter the alphanumeric passcode. It’s much harder for a thief to track multiple tiny keystrokes that are hidden by your fingertips than it is to observe which big number buttons you tap using a traditional numeric PIN entry keypad.

Using an alphanumeric passcode is the most secure PIN option available on most smartphones. And remember, you won’t need to enter it every time you unlock your phone if you have biometric authentication enabled. But if you do need to enter the alphanumeric passcode in public, it will be much harder for the thief to observe and remember your code.

To change your numeric PIN to an alphanumeric passcode on an iPhone, go to Settings > Face ID/Touch ID & Passcode and tap Change Passcode, then tap Passcode Options and tap Custom Alphanumeric Code, then choose the one you want. The steps to changing your PIN to an alphanumeric passcode on an Android device may vary slightly based on your phone, but it will usually be found in the Settings app under the Lock Screen or Security settings.

https://www.digitaltrends. com/mobile/google-meetintroduces-360-degree-virtualbackgrounds/

Image credit: cyclonis.com

This Zimbabwean Entrepreneur Created a Digital Platform to Teach African Languages

By Abu Mubarik

AT THE AGE OF SEVEN, Chido Dzinotyiwei moved to neighboring South Africa with her family. While in the rainbow nation, she grew up speaking English and Zulu, to the neglect of her native Shona language.

She recalls the times she traveled with her parents back to Zimbabwe to visit relatives and how she struggled to communicate in Shona, which is the dominant language in the Southern African country.

“When I was young, I could grasp English and isiZulu at school, but it became difficult to speak Shona when I went back home to visit because my vocabulary and accent were off. Fortunately, I had old Shona books and started reading and reminding myself of the language. Before I knew it, I was fluent in my home language again,” she told City Press.

According to Dzinotyiwei, her inability to communicate in her native language frustrated her as she felt she was losing a part of her identity and culture. Aside from her, she later discovered that

there are so many people like her dotted across Africa who cannot speak their local languages due to urbanization and emigration.

In the case of Zimbabwe, she notes that economic upheavals since 1990 have compelled many Zimbabweans to pour into South Africa and further abroad in search of greener pastures.

This means that several Zimbabweans and other nationals have not had the chance to become proficient in the language of their parent’s birthplace.

Her frustration over her inability to speak Shona led Dzinotyiwei and fellow Zimbabwean, Dorcas Kwaramba, to launch Vambo Academy. The platform is an educational technology (EdTech) platform that uses digital resources to offer language learning, translation, and knowledge services. Vambo teaches indigenous languages online and offers a dictionary, blog posts, and podcasts on cultural topics.

So far, the platform offers 10 languages spoken in South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland, as well as two of Zimbabwe’s most dominant languages, Shona and Ndebele. For now, the platform is web-based.

Vambo offers unique features that leading language teaching platforms do not have, like faceto-face tutorials with a human teacher, instead of a robot.

“It’s not just automated. You can actually sit [virtually] with a local, book a session, and speak about nuances around the language or something you want to learn,” Dzinotyiwei told La Prensa Latina.

However, the founders are working around the clock to develop an app that will mimic language teaching platforms like Duolingo, Memrise, and Babbel.

Currently, Vambo’s main market is in South Africa, but Dzinotyiwei and her team hope to expand it to include more languages across the continent of Africa.

Since launching Vambo, the platform has offered 650 lessons. It offers one-on-one or group sessions with a fee of $10 per lesson for 45 minutes.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ this-zimbabwean-entrepreneur-created-adigital-platform-to-teach-african-languages/arAA19AWpt

https://www.facebook.com/VamboAcademy/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/ vamboacademy/ Image credit: Vambo Academy, LinkedIn

This is the Ultimate, no BS ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for UX and UI

By Shai Krishna founder of gethired.design

SIMILAR TO HOW CALCULATORS were once thought to replace mathematicians, many fear that AI will replace designers. However, this is a misconception. Just as calculators didn’t replace mathematicians, AI won’t replace designers either.

Instead, AI will offer designers new tools and capabilities to increase their efficiency and creativity. In this post, we’ll explore why AI won’t replace designers, but rather enhance their work.

This blog is an attempt to the personal mission of mine at gethired. design to build superpower designers who can become recession proof. So, let’s talk about how to embrace ChatGPT to become irreplaceable in your team.

1. GENERATE A CHECKLIST FOR UI DESIGN USING CHATGPT

Creating a UI design checklist is a helpful tool for designers to ensure that all the necessary design elements are considered. With ChatGPT, designers can easily generate a comprehensive checklist that covers essential elements, such as user flow, accessibility, color scheme, typography, consistency, and usability.

Copy this Prompt: “Create a checklist for UI elements for a perfect [Screen / feature] in a table.”

2. CREATE USERFLOW FOR UX DES

Picture this: You’ve just launched you on paper, you’re not getting the engage your head, wondering why users aren’t a user flow comes in. It’s the key to unlo with your product, helping you to identif y overall user experience.

By mapping out a user’s journey, you and potential roadblocks. And here’s ho

Copy this Prompt: “Can you create u

3. GENERATE A DESIGN SYSTEM US

Design systems ensure consistency, but creating one can be complex and t generating a system tailored to your nee layout grids, and iconography.

Copy this Prompt: “Write a design sy Represent in a table with the states like d

Designers

SIGN

r latest product, and while it looks great ement you were hoping for. You scratch sticking around. This is where creating ocking the mystery of how users interact y pain points and, ultimately, improve the u’ll gain insight into their goals, actions, w you can use Chat GPT: user flow for a [app type]?”

SING CHATGPT

efficiency, and quality in design work, time consuming. ChatGPT can help by eds, covering typography, color palettes, ystem documentation for a [UI Element]? default, clicked, hover, active, focus, and

disabled. Describe these states with design token (color, font).”

disabl

4.

GENERATE A COLOR PALETTE USING CHATGPT

By leveraging the power of AI, ChatGPT develops a range of colors that are tailored to your brand’s personality and style, saving you time and energy.

Copy this Prompt: “Can you suggest primary, secondary, and tertiary colors for an [App / Website]? Represent in a table.”

5. PREPARE USER INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Prepare for user interviews like a pro with ChatGPT. Get insights on the best questions to ask and how to structure your interviews, all

d ed D Desc i ribbe thhesesttattes i wi h th t tokken ( (c l olor f fo t nt) ”

ChatGPT from page 103

in one place. Elevate your user-research game today.

Copy this Prompt: “Generate a user interview questions for an [Idea/App].”

Copy this Prompt: “Can you create Represent in a table.”

7.

USE CHATGPT TO WRITE WEBSIT

Are you tired of generic website copy t too, until I tried ChatGPT. Now, I’m abl use Lorem Ipsums. With ChatGPT’s AIpersonalized and high-quality content th to your target audience. Give this prom experience with compelling copy.

Copy this Prompt: “You’re a UX writer message for a [App/Website].”

6. BUILD A USER PERSONA USING CHATGPT

Create effective marketing campaigns and understand your audience better by building user personas with ChatGPT. Gain valuable insights on demographics, behaviors, and motivations.

8. SPEAK WITH ANNOYING CLIENTS

We can now use ChatGPT to genera tactful, while also expressing a need for It has worked wonders for me in handlin

Copy this Prompt: “Negotiate with a c even after delivering the project. Can yo

a user persona for an [App/Website]?

E COPIES (UX WRITING)

hat fails to engage your audience? I was e to design better because I no longer -powered capabilities, you can generate hat perfectly fits your brand and speaks pt a try and elevate your website’s user r now. Generate 10 versions of 404 error

ate a message that is professional and payment in a clear and concise manner. ng some annoying clients. lient who hasn’t paid me the final amount u generate a message I can send him?”

In summary, the concern that AI will replace designers is unfounded. Just like calculators did not replace mathematicians, AI won’t replace designers. Instead, AI offers designers new tools and capabilities to increase their efficiency and creativity.

I created this as a prompt cheat sheet blog to help you accelerate your design work flow. It is part of our mission at gethired.design to empower designers to become recession-proof and enhance their work.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90881860/ultimate-chatgptcheatsheet-for-ux-and-ui-designers

This article originally appeared on Medium and is reprinted with permission.

Image credit: hitc.com

“You either run for food, or you run to avoid becoming food,” Huang told an admiring audience. “Either way, run.”

Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia CEO,

5 African Startups that are Trailblazing In the Continent’s Growing Tech Ecosystem

From Ngozi Nwanji

AS TALENT ACROSS the African continent consistently rises in numbers, its tech ecosystem is growing right along with it. From securing millions of dollars for funding initiatives such as for climate change to creating innovative technology that aims to disrupt industries, there is a movement of African founders and tech entrepreneurs who aim to build a promising future.

In light of the rising tech trailblazers, AfroTech is highlighting African startups that are not only making waves but are gearing up to make a lasting impact.

Shuttlers

Back in 2021, Damilola Olokesusi, founder of Shuttlers, became one of the few women to receive major venture capital in Africa after raising $1.6 million to improve the continent’s mobility industry. Now, in April 2023, the Nigerian mobility company has raised $4 million in a new funding round led by Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) and is on its way to going live in five more cities, according to TechCrunch.

“We have built an infrastructure that allows us to expand into different geographies within and outside Nigeria and supports multiple stakeholders, from partners and drivers to marshals and administrative bodies,” Olokesusi told the outlet. “Our main focus is to take over the bus-sharing space and be this huge startup that, you know, is very profitable.”

Rwazi

Co-founded and launched by Eric Sewankambo and Joseph Rutakangwa in 2021, Rwazi is a market intelligence startup that supports brands in sourcing critical data before entering into markets, as previously reported by AfroTech. With a network of over 50,000 consumers, the Mauritius-based startup collects data directly from users by them logging their purchases in an app. In March 2023, Rwazi raised a $4 million seed funding round for its expansion. As of this writing, Rwazi’s products are available in 40 African countries and in South Asia and Latin America markets.

Afriex

Afriex, based in Lagos and San Fransisco, provides reliability for its users to send and receive money. According to Crunchbase, Afriex has raised a $11.4 million over 5 rounds. The funding went toward its core money transfer product and vision to launch a stablecoin.

”Because we are building this

of connected financial institutions, we have built on-ramps for local Nigerian banks and on-ramps for local currency exchanges,” co-founder Tope Alabi told Forbes. “We are building this web3 mesh of financial institutions that could almost become something like the next Visa.”

network

DrugStoc

Chibuzo Opara and Adham Yehia are the cofounders of DrugStoc — Africa’s leading health tech platform. The Nigerian tech startup was launched in response to the barriers within the continent’s broken pharmaceutical supply chains.

As AfroTech previously told you, not only is the startup committed to supporting those in need of pharmaceutical products but also healthcare providers.

In 2021, DrugStoc raised $4.4 million in a Series A funding round led by Africa HealthCare Master Fund. Other investors included Vested World, the German Development Bank, and others.

Vendease

Vendease’s ultimate mission is to provide a solution to combat Africa’s food supply issue. In September 2022, the Nigerian marketplace, which helps African restaurants and hotels, raised $30

million in a Series A funding round, TechCrunch reported.

“We’re building technology to efficiently move food from the point of production to the point of consumption,” CEO Tunde Kara told the outlet. “Everything we build at Vendease — financing, logistics, warehousing, inventory management — is tailored towards ensuring that food flows efficiently from that point of production to the point of consumption.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/5african-startups-that-are-trailblazing-in-thecontinent-s-growing-tech-ecosystem/arAA19GrUz

Image credit: finsmes.com, appadvice.com, africabusinesscommunities.com, ch.linkedin.com

The Vendease founding team pose for a picture with the company logo in the background https://sg.news.yahoo. com/two-africa-biggest-tech-investors-120200559.html

WHEN I DECIDED TO LEARN how to code in 2017, I was surprised — not just by how much I enjoyed the creativity involved, but even to find myself working toward becoming a software engineer. It was a complete turn of events for me, as someone who had been pursuing a career as a psychodynamic therapist, and I was so proud to begin sharing my progress on social media.

As I detailed my journey online, I recognized a sense of community building as people began following me, someone with whom they identified — a Black, queer, and neurodivergent woman — in a field where that’s rare. Black women only make up 0.7 percent of the technology workforce in the UK(Opens in a new tab), with even fewer also identifying as neurodivergent and/or queer.

My goal is to inspire and empower those who identify with any or all areas of my intersectionality to get into the tech industry, and to do so, I use the most powerful and accessible tools at my disposal: my voice, my story, and social media.

Sharing my intersectionality

Black, Queer and Neurodivergent in Tech: How One Advocate is Creating Safe Space for Intersectionality

By Jennifer Opal

As a DevOps engineer, multi-award-winning neurodiversity and inclusion advocate, writer, public speaker, and the founder of The Opal Company, I use my platforms(Opens in a new tab) to promote education on topics related to neurodiversity, inclusion, and tech, including understanding intersectionality.

A term coined by civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality describes the complex, cumulative way the effects of multiple forms of discrimination overlap and impact marginalized individuals. In creating an amalgam of identities that is more than the sum of their parts, intersectionality shapes perception — how you experience the world, judgments held against you, and how you influence others.

Throughout my life, I have always been reminded of my Blackness, even more so upon entering the tech industry. When I moved from London to Belfast for my first technical role, as a junior software engineer, I was so excited. But, after a week or two in my new position — working with about 500 people at the head office of one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United Kingdom — I came to the realization I was the only Black woman there. Suddenly, the stares when I walked into the cafeteria made sense, and I began choosing to eat on my own.

Although I was always honest and open about feeling misunderstood, I saw no changes in the

Jennifer Opal. Credit: Mashable / Bob Al-Greene / Image: Jennifer Opal

company's diversity and inclusion practices. I am grateful for the individuals I did connect with — some of whom I still consider friends — but it can be exhausting and isolating to constantly feel responsible for teaching others about your identity and providing inspiration through representation. I tried to reassure myself that what I was sharing would contribute to a better experience for the next person who joined the company and looked like me.

However, the loneliness took a toll on me mentally, and I became miserable and unmotivated. Eventually, I found myself in the throes of extreme anxiety while on a Zoom call in 2021, rocking from side to side with my camera off as I tried to maintain composure. I was referred to a mental health professional for cognitive behavioral therapy and diagnosed with anxiety, which followed diagnoses of dyslexia, dyspraxia, and ADHD three years prior.

This journey eventually led me to being diagnosed as autistic just last month, coincidentally during World Autism Acceptance Week. Although I do have sadness that it took so long to identify this new area of my identity, it’s one I accept, celebrate, and am learning to embrace.

Being neurodivergent can bring gifts such as creativity, unique ways of thinking, and a desire to learn new subjects. It also can present challenges that often make it hard to explain what I need, and it hasn’t been easy progressing in my technology career in environments not designed for a neurodiverse workforce. I use a variety of accommodations, including medication and screen readers, to help me navigate my day-to-day life in and out of the workplace.

But, following my own path, I have earned multiple awards and honors, in addition to being featured in several publications, giving keynote speeches, participating on expert panels, and even co-authoring a book called The Voices in the Shadow about Black women in tech. Most recently, I’ve been selected to serve as a United Nations Women UK delegate on the Commission on the Status of Women.

'You can't be what you can't see.'

In a world with an abundance of opinions on the many layers of my identity, I’ve come to embrace

that there will be people who don't want to hear my story — but there are about 30,000 others following me online, contributing to opportunities to learn and grow, and inspiring me to continue sharing my authentic self. Ultimately, the amount of followers doesn't matter, and the amount of views doesn't matter — it’s the communities that my story does touch that matter the most.

Activist Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, said, "You can't be what you can't see." Being neurodivergent, being queer, being a Black woman, and even being a DevOps engineer means I can be for others what I couldn't see for myself.

"I love how well you've embraced your identity, giving voices to it and by so doing, allowing others to embrace their true identity." "Stand in your power and keep moving mountains." Comments like these replies to a recent post I shared on LinkedIn about being diagnosed with autism as an adult show the sense of mutual support and purpose that drives me to continue to push for awareness and inclusion.

Building a social media presence and publicly sharing yourself with the world can be challenging, especially for those who are part of marginalized communities. However, it can be empowering — not just for you, but for those who may be motivated through your example.

Protecting your digital space

As a technologist who is a part of many marginalized identities, protecting the space I’ve claimed in my industry and on social media is critical to my achievement and my well-being — a foundational piece of being able to share my story. Although it may seem simple to some, I’ve worked to become comfortable trusting my intuition online and blocking people when it feels right.

As someone who genuinely enjoys discussing advice on getting into the tech industry, learning to code, or simply existing as a Black, queer, neurodivergent woman in the corporate world, I want to share myself freely but have been met with disrespect by those exhibiting a sense of entitlement to that degree of access. Although I have a tendency to exhibit hyperfocus in scenarios

see page 110

Creating Safe Space from page 109

of self is just as important a part of managing your social media as any other, and I employ fundamental strategies to safeguard my space online:

Create a Safe Social Environment

Don't feel blameworthy for not responding to people. I used to feel guilty for not replying to a comment or a question quickly enough, at times due to my followers telling me I deserved to feel that way. As a Black woman, and even in my role as an eldest daughter, I had gotten used to always feeling obligated to be available to others at the detriment of myself. But it's important to always put yourself first.

Block Hurtful People and Don't Respond

I've blocked so many people over the years who have been sexist, racist, misogynistic, or just plain rude. At times, I felt guilty, but you never should. We can only keep the door open for those who respect it and close the door for those who don't.

Take Breaks

of conflict or rudeness, I’ve grown to recognize the answer is in trusting how I feel.

Instead of struggling with guilt for not offering the world the big heart my culture and society expect from me, I choose to prioritize my own well-being, and that allows me to continue excelling at doing what I love as

a software engineer and as an advocate.

Although it can be overwhelming, social media plays a huge part in building your brand, establishing yourself as an expert in your field, and developing a network of support.

Protecting your mental and emotional wellness and sense

As a neurodivergent person, I can get overwhelmed very easily. It's in moments like these when I choose to step away from social media. You don't need to announce the social media break; you can just uninstall the apps and breathe.

Be Mindful of What You Share

Don't feel obligated to share everything about your life, location, or opinions. Your entire life does not need to be content. You can keep things to yourself. Setting boundaries is

important to both your mental health and your safety. Make conscious choices about who has access to anything showing your home, and be sure to save content created while traveling for posting once you've returned safely.

Also, use tools like two-factor authentication and strong password practices to secure your social media accounts and maintain control over what is shared on your behalf. Anyone can be susceptible to being hacked, but these safeguards can help protect your digital presence.

Offering inspiration through authenticity

As I find new connections and community through my recent autism diagnosis, I encourage you to keep sharing your story and inspiring people in your corner of the internet — it makes a difference to more people than you may think. Remember, the number of followers you have or don’t have doesn't determine your impact; what is essential is remaining authentic and true to who you are as you welcome the world into your life online.

For those who can identify with any area of my intersectionality, I hope my experience encourages you to be unapologetic about who you are, and to come as you are in every space you enter.

https://mashable.com/article/ jennifer-opal-neurodivergentintersectionality-in-tech

More Information: The Opal Blog, The Opal Company

Image credit: Jennifer Opal

Black Blockchain Summit 2023

In celebration of the 5th anniversary of the Black Blockchain Summit, we are inviting cooperations and organizations that are developing their interest in this technology and wish to explore opportunities to expand their teams and mission in the latest Blockchain technology.

We are hosting a career fair that will be a great opportunity to share a corporate interest in projects with some of the most brilliant and skilled minds in the world!

Get your tickets here for the 21st to 23rd of September 2023.

For more information, visit: Blackblockchainsummit.com

#iloveblackpeople #SatoshiIsBlack #ReparationsNow

Bl k Bl k h i S it

This Startup is Turning the RTO Debate on its Head by Creating a Digital Twin of the Office

By Laya Neelakandan

IMAGINE A WORLD in which every detail in your office, down to the assortment of items on your desk, is available from the comfort of your home. Now, that possibility is not just imaginable, but entirely possible through Katmai, a virtual communications platform launching today that creates the office experience right in your browser.

As soon as you launch Katmai, everything down to the elevators and hallways mirrors exactly those of an actual office environment. From conference rooms to kitchen areas to plants in the corner, the customizable office looks enough like what you might find yourself entering after a 30-minute subway ride into the crowded city.

MEDIATING AN RTO COMPROMISE

After three years of development, Katmai launched today as a virtual mediator in the returnto-office debate. Companies that have RTO mandates have had varying degrees of success, causing a rift between managers and workers (even prompting some CEOs to completely lose their cool) and shedding light on the costs of working in-person. On the other hand, working in an office environment fosters connections that motivate employees to return.

The concept behind the platform is simple: Katmai aims to bring the debate between employers and their teams to a compromise, albeit one where employees get to stay at home while still getting a somewhat authentic office experience virtually.

According to Maximize Market Research, the virtual office platform market is expected to reach $137 billion by 2029. Research compiled by Zippia shows that 74% of U.S. companies are using or planning to put in place a hybrid work schedule, while a recent survey from CBRE of 185 companies with offices in the U.S. revealed that more than half (52%) planned to decrease the size of their offices within the next three years.

Katmai recently raised $22 million in Series A funding to assist in the development of the platform. Founder Erik Braund says he began developing the idea in 2020 when the pandemic derailed in-person operations.

“Our goal isn’t to be meeting software. Our goal is to say, ‘Hey, this is a concurrent session. It’s an always-on thing, and it’s a third place to be together,’” Braund says, referencing the concept of a social setting that is separate from home and work such as a café or park.

Katmai currently has over 40 employees working across the world, from Alaska—the inspiration for the name of the company and a nod to Braund’s home state— all the way to the Netherlands.

When developing the software, Braund says it was important to have the workspace live directly in a web browser rather than in an external app or headset. And instead of using avatars (as in Meta’s metaverse), the program uses your camera so people can see your face as you walk around the office and enter meetings.

While the format somewhat mirrors that of a video game, Braund says he didn’t want to market it only as such to make it more widely appealing. Users can create custom experiences, from a tropical getaway to an office set under the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Once in the office, practically all of the features of both an in-person office and a Zoom or Microsoft Teams-like meeting are available, from being able to close doors and host guests to sharing your

‘IT’S AN ALWAYS-ON THING, AND IT’S A THIRD PLACE TO BE TOGETHER’

screen and using a chat feature with others in the space.

The platform also allows for the spontaneity of an in-person environment, where someone could be walking down a hallway and bump into someone to chat for a few minutes. And just like in an office, you can see who’s in the conference room next to you, but you can’t hear their conversation.

“The underlying fundamental technology that we created was the Katmai engine that merges the 3D world and the audio video conference,” Braund says. “So that’s like the text, the engine, the platform, the invention. That’s what we’ve spent the last three years doing, making it work well and making it work on a variety of devices.”

But the market for these so-called metaverses is not all that small, either. It’s already populated by companies such as Elevated Environments, WorkInSync, Teemyco, Kosy Office, and others.

Currently, Braund says they’re narrowing

their focus to younger and smaller companies, especially because the platform eliminates huge costs from investing in a physical space. Braund also says they’ve noticed the millennial and Gen Z populations responding especially positively to Katmai.

ZOOM FATIGUE VS. THE VIRTUAL OFFICE

It’s still unclear how effective or compelling these RTO alternatives will actually be in the workplace. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, tells Fast Company that his experience with clients has shown lots of “Zoom fatigue” and reluctance to be on camera, adding that it’s difficult to predict whether this model will be compelling enough for daily use.

“The launch of this detailed virtual office platform marks an interesting point in the ongoing remote work debate,” he says. “[But some] don’t like to feel surveilled when they go about their work without a moment of privacy to blow their nose or fix their makeup while at their home office. My prediction is that it will be a struggle to get employees— especially the introverts—to systematically use their cameras this way.”

He says companies must acknowledge and solve these limitations in order to maintain a healthy work environment, noting that by moving to a virtual space, we risk losing aspects like nonverbal cues or spontaneous conversations that often spark innovation.

Braund says they’re continuing to improve upon features of the platform as customers respond with more requests, noting that, at the end of the day, the company is aiming to deliver a complex idea in a simple way.

“We have culture. We have a team. We’re here together. We have all these moments. We don’t have to schedule a zillion meetings. We can have the two-minute conversations with people that are here,” Braund says. “What an incredible way to interact.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90885219/startup-rtovirtual-office-platform

Image credit: Katmai

A Google AI Chatbot May Soon Take Your Drive-Through Food Order at Wendy’s

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

THE RECENT PROLIFERATION of generative AI models—which are now being used to produce online search results, make art, help with customer service calls, and much more—has heightened fears of technological unemployment. Though AI is ultimately likely to create more jobs than it renders obsolete, it will indeed render some obsolete, and it seems that among these will be fast food drivethrough operators.

Recently, Wendy’s and Google Cloud announced that the fast food chain will be piloting a custom-designed AI for drive-through food ordering. Wendy’s FreshAI, as the technology’s been dubbed, will reportedly give drive-through customers a better ordering experience by reducing miscommunications and errors. Since customers can tweak the restaurant’s offerings to their liking—hold the mustard, pile on some extra pickles, take out the onion and sub in more lettuce—the order combinations are endless, and the companies believe an algorithm can do a better job of keeping it all straight than a human can.

The partnership between Wendy’s and Google isn’t new. The companies started collaborating in 2021, when the fast food chain started using Google Cloud’s data analytics, AI, and hybrid cloud tools for mobile ordering and other convenient ways for “customers to access the brand.”

Their new agreement entails an order-taking, question-answering chatbot. Wendy’s says 75 to 80 percent of its orders come from drivethroughs, so the bot better know its stuff. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA, the tool is a large language model (LLM), a type of deep learning algorithm trained on large datasets (as large as the entire internet, in some cases) to learn the relationships between words and the

probability of different words preceding or following one another in a sentence. LLMs establish parameters that allow them to generate text based on prompts—or, in the case of ChatGPT and Wendy’s FreshAI, respond to questions from users in a human-like way in real time.

Wendy’s FreshAI was trained on data from Wendy’s menu, the chain’s business rules, and basic conversation logic. It will be able to have conversations with customers and answer their questions, as well as confirming their orders on a screen and relaying them to the cooks inside.

“It will be very conversational,” Wendy’s CEO, Todd Penegor, told the Wall Street Journal. “You won’t know you’re talking to anybody but an employee.”

The chain’s chief information officer, Kevin Vasconi, gave the AI an even heartier endorsement, saying, “It’s at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it’s probably on average better.”

The algorithm was trained to answer frequently asked questions, so it could be interesting (and entertaining) to hear what it comes up with in response to not-so-frequently-asked questions. The AI will doubtless have some perplexing latenight interactions with hungry, impatient, and inebriated customers who just want to dip their fries in a chocolate milkshake (or as Wendy’s calls it, a Frosty). In fact, Penegor said the chain plans to expand its hours and “lean into late night.”

Google has likely built some hefty guardrails

into the chatbot to keep it from saying anything untoward, but even so, its rollout will be gradual. It will first launch at a couple of restaurants near Columbus, Ohio next month; if that goes well, it will expand to other locations. The pilot restaurants will have a human employee on hand to monitor the AI and take over and talk to drive-through customers if needed.

Besides making the ordering experience better for customers, the AI is meant to take some work off employees’ hands and free them up to focus on making food and keeping the restaurants running smoothly. It could also be extra good for Wendy’s bottom line (and bad for customers’ waistlines) in that it’s programmed to try to upsell people, offering them larger sizes, daily specials, and desserts.

Wendy’s isn’t the first fast food chain to integrate AI into its ordering process. Popeye’s, McDonald’s,

Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Taco Bell, and Wingstop have all experimented with AI order-taking in drive-throughs or over the phone. A Popeye’s in Louisiana reported that after starting to use a chatbot called Tori for drive-through orders, speed of service increased by 20%, drink sales went up by 150%, and customer satisfaction improved by 20%—all with 99.9% accuracy in order-taking.

Could Wendy’s see similar results? We’ll find out, but it seems entirely possible that they will— and that people conversing with algorithms will be the most normal of everyday experiences in the not-too-distant future.

https://singularityhub.com/2023/05/17/an-aichatbot-may-soon-take-your-drive-through-foodorder/

Image credit: Michael Form / Pixabay, medium

For Juneteenth 20

Ibram X. Kendi says a Backlash has ‘Crushed’ t But There’s One Reason he Rem

Story by John Blake  March 18, 2

wake of Floyd’s death, which drew the support of many White people, including students.

Kendi says the current campaign against what one conservative commentator calls “systemic wokeness” is an effort to halt the antiracist momentum generated by the Floyd protests. When asked what happened to that momentum, Kendi gives a wry chuckle.

FEW SCHOLARS HAVE experienced the fickle nature of fame as dramatically as Ibram X. Kendi in the past three years.

Kendi, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist,” became an intellectual celebrity in the summer of 2020 after his books became a go-to source for millions of Americans trying to make sense of the murder of George Floyd. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” became a soughtafter commentator on race and helped add a new word to the way we talk about it: antiracist. The term means to actively fight against racism rather than passively claim to be non-racist.

Then came a backlash. Kendi’s books were banned by some school libraries and he was accused by conservatives of corrupting children and offering a grim view of America that casts everyone as a racist. He also became the central villain in a GOP-led campaign to purge the teaching of systemic racism in American public schools. The campaign took off following the massive wave of racial protests that swept across the country in the

“The momentum was just crushed by a pretty well-organized force and movement of people who are seeking to conserve racism,” he says. “Who’ve tried to change the problem from racism to antiracism. And who’ve tried to change the problem from police violence to the people speaking out against police violence.”

Kendi has written a new book, “How to Be a (Young) Antiracist,” that could help recapture some of that momentum. He and co-author Nic Stone have reframed his aforementioned 2019 bestseller, this time for young adults. This version, according to the book’s publisher, serves as an instruction manual for youth “seeking a way forward in acknowledging, identifying and dismantling racism and injustice.”

The book offers those lessons by recounting how Kendi, as a young person, absorbed some of the same racist beliefs he now argues against. The confident, professorial Kendi that most see in public is replaced in the book by a younger version who struggled with doubts over his intelligence. The book features some of the most personal disclosures of Kendi’s public career.

From Ibram X. Kendi

What may be most surprising, though, is the book’s tone of optimism. Despite the change in

Ibram X. Kendi

the Nation’s Racial Reckoning. mains Hopeful

the political climate since Floyd was murdered nearly three years ago, Kendi still believes racism can be vanquished. He says it’s It’s not an allpowerful “deity” that can never be defeated. That’s one reason he remains hopeful about antiracist activism.

“Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind,” he wrote. “In the grand scope of human existence, race and racism are relatively young. Prior to the construction of race and racism in the 1400s, human beings saw colors but didn’t group them into continental ‘races’ and attack wholly made-up positive and negative characteristics to said races. That’s something we learned to do.”

Kendi, is currently a professor at Boston University and founding director of its Center for Antiracist Research. He recently talked to CNN following the release of his book. His comments have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

You said near the end of your book that this book stretched you in a way that no other had before. How so?

I think because of the depths of vulnerability that I had to reach, and what I had to express publicly. It’s very difficult to be vulnerable with ourselves and to be honest about those hurtful and harmful things we’ve said and done. It’s yet another thing to be willing to share that with the public. And to deal with the shame that other people would know. That’s why it was so difficult.

You talk in the book about having doubts about your own intellect because of standardized testing. How did you overcome those doubts?

I didn’t fully overcome those doubts until I started rethinking what it means to be intelligent. We have been taught that the more intelligent you are, the better test scores you’ll get. But the more I understood intelligence, the more I realized that intelligence should be defined as a great capacity to know. And so I knew that I did have a desire to know, particularly as a researcher. For me it allowed me to better understand my own intelligence. Are people taught racism, or are human beings born with this instinct to assign value to skin color? Some people think racism is just part of being human.

This is hotly debated among scientists and scholars, particularly the instinct part. Based on my research, I don’t think that people are born racist or antiracist. But I think depending on the environment that they are raised in, they go in one or the other direction.

I think human beings are taught instinctually to protect ourselves. When you grow up in a racist society where you’re taught that those “other people” are the source of your pain, those “other people” are not like you because they look differently or because they have different hair texture, it can then lead to people instinctually wanting to protect themselves from those “other people.”

But what if we taught that skin color is as irrelevant as the color of one’s shirt? What if we taught that hair texture is as irrelevant to the

see page 118

Antirecism from page 117

underlying person’s humanity as the glasses that they are wearing? We can teach people to think differently about people who look different to the point where they’ll see the humanity in that person, despite different skin color and hair texture. That’s very optimistic. It reminds of something else I read in your book. You said racism isn’t this all-powerful deity that can’t be defeated. What do you mean by that?

Researching the history of racism — who created it, for what purpose, how its evolved over the last nearly 600 years, how it’s spread around the world, how it’s impacted people — it’s allowed me to really take a step back and see the structure, which then allows me to believe that it can all be deconstructed. Somebody built this (racism). And they’re rebuilding it. But you can actually deconstruct it. Anything that can be constructed, like racism, can be deconstructed.

In the meantime, what kind of practical advice would you give parents about how they can talk to their kids about incidents like in Memphis, where a young Black man (Tyre Nichols) was beaten to death by police officers?

First, it’s important for parents to talk to their children about what happened in Memphis. It’s important because the child is going to ask why: “Why did this happen to him? He wasn’t doing

anything wrong. He kept doing what the officers asked him to do, but they kept beating him?” In answering those questions, you have to talk about the pervasive violence in American policing, particularly toward Black and brown people. You have to talk about the pervasiveness of racist ideas that imagine that Black people are dangerous. At one point at your book, you’ve said that there is no neutrality in the struggle against racism. What does that mean?

Currently there are deep racial inequities in our society. Black people are more likely to die of police violence, of heart disease, of cancer. They’re more likely to be impoverished. They’re less likely to have wealth. They’re more likely to be incarcerated, and on and on. That’s the status quo. If you “do nothing,” what happens to that status quo? You’re part of this society. It’s not like this is a war happening across the world, and you’re deciding to be neutral. No, this war is happening in your own community, in your own society.

And those inequities are the outgrowth of that war. If you do nothing, what happens? It persists. Which is to say, you contributed to its persistence because you’ve chosen to not challenge it. So one’s feigned neutrality is actually being complicit with racism. That’s why it’s important for us to know that we’re either being racist through our actions or inaction, or being antiracist through our actions.

Parents and education officials have banned or tried to ban your books across the country. GOP politicians in Florida have passed laws

◄ Opponents of the academic doctrine known as critical race theory protest outside the Loudoun County School Board headquarters in Ashburn, Virginia, on June 22, 2021. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

that say certain aspects of African American history can’t be taught if they make White people feel guilt or anguish. What’s your reaction to this?

It doesn’t surprise me because as a student of history, abolitionist literature was almost totally banned in the South, especially after the 1830s. During the civil rights movement, particularly throughout the Jim Crow era, you had all sorts of books that told the truth about slavery, about Reconstruction, about American racism, that were banned in many schools.

For the better part of American history, books about people of color or racism have largely been challenged or banned. What’s happened (lately) is more consistent with American history. But just as we fought those book bans in the past or just as my enslaved ancestors found ways to read abolitionist literature, so too can we fight and still read today.

How challenging has it been for you –physically, emotionally, and spiritually – to constantly talk about this complex issue of racism and to be the object of hate from people who don’t know you?

In many ways it has certainly been difficult, just as it as for a physician who routinely treats people who are sick, to have to continuously diagnose, identify and describe the sickness of racism in our society. But at the same time, like physicians who do this every day, it’s so necessary. And we’re so

committed to this work and to healing people and society.

The greatest difficulties are when people try to delegitimize me and my work because they disagree with the evidence. They don’t want to make assessments based on research. They want to make assessments based on their own ideology, or what’s best for their own political faction. Clearly that’s difficult. When people threaten me in all types of ways, of course that’s difficult. But at the same time, I knew what I was getting into. And I’m figuring out ways to get through every day.

So how do you get through the days?

I’ve learned what can be too much. You spend a lot of time trying to care for humanity. It’s important to recognize that you’re part of that humanity. It’s important to care for yourself as well. I’ve been figuring out ways to do that, particularly around my physical and emotional health.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ibram-xkendi-says-a-backlash-has-crushed-the-nations-racial-reckoning-but-there-s-one-reason-heremains-hopeful/ar-AA18MAD7

Image credit: CNN

◄ The Northside Coalition along with other activists are speaking outside the Duval County School District office to protest state ban of critical race theory. wkyc.com July 2, 2021

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"The Oxford English Dictionary added woke to its repertoire in 2017 as “Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”

(Holliday, 2016).

Meet Charlie Mitchell, the First

Black Michelin-starred Chef in New York City

By Joseph

A NEW YORK CITY CHEF is making a big impact on the world of fine dining.

On Friday, February 17th, Craig Melvin stopped by Michelin-starred restaurant Clover Hill in Brooklyn Heights to talk to executive chef and coowner Chef Charlie Mitchell, who was Michelin’s 2022 New York Young Chef Award winner

Mitchell is the first Black chef in New York City history to achieve that status and just the second Black executive chef in the country to receive the honor.

Craig went to the Brooklyn Heights eatery to discuss Mitchell’s achievement and — of course — to try some of the gourmet food that made him a groundbreaker.

“I wanted to always, you know, plant my feet here and be a serious New York City chef. So that was always a goal of mine,” Mitchell told Craig.

“And look at you now,” Craig said. “Dreams come true.”

Mitchell is now being celebrated for more than fine dining. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, the chef of the popular Brooklyn restaurant developed his passion for food and cooking from his grandmother.

Charlie Mitchell, executive chef and co-owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Clover Hill and the first and only Black Michelin-starred chef in New York City. (Natalie Black Photography) © Provided by TODAY

Lamour, Craig Melvin, Joshua Janiak

 Dishes and desserts from Clover Hill (Natalie Black Photography) © Provided by TODAY

“I think the thing that stuck with me the most is she used to do this whole fry fish, like whole fry bass all the time when I was younger,” Mitchell said. “I think that stood out the most.”

“Head on?” Craig asked, to which Mitchell assuredly replied, “Always.”

Mitchell attended culinary school for a few months but preferred on-the-job training instead, finding his way to employment online.

"I ended up Googling restaurants in the metro arefa. Got my first real job,” he said. “And in that kitchen is where I was like, ‘Wow, like I love the way they work. I love how professional it is, using ingredients like I’ve never had, I’ve never learned about.’”

Mitchell spent years growing his experience in world class restaurants like Eleven Madison Park, a New American fine dining restaurant in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. His kitchen experiences eventually led him to a quiet, leafy street in Brooklyn Heights.

When Clover Hill opened a year ago, he became its executive chef and was put in charge of creating the menu. Mitchell’s team plates an eight-course tasting menu that regularly changes with the

best seasonal foods available, one that currently includes dishes like king crab tartlet, Long Island fluke and Spanish octopus.

“I guess it’s challenging but we’re always changing something or we’re always trying to make the dish the best version of itself, right?” Mitchell said. "So we may tweak it every day for two weeks, if we have to, to get it to be like the perfect dish.”

Mitchell and his team’s quest for culinary perfection did not go unnoticed, either. Not only did Clover Hill earn a Michelin star in its first year, but Mitchell was also named best young chef by Michelin.

“That was a complete surprise when they announced that and I was just humbled, you know?” Mitchell said.

“Were you aware at the time of the historic implications?” Craig asked.

“I was not, not at the time,” Mitchell said. “You always think about the people, so many people have come before you. You just assume that someone has already done this, you know, it doesn’t cross your mind that you may be the first see page 122

Charlie Mitchell from page 121

look like us, as executive chefs and fine dining restaurants like this?” Craig said.

Mitchell said he thinks there are two factors at play: One is that working in the culinary industry is the type of career with a lot of long days and long nights; and the other being that young cooks typically don’t make a lot of money in comparison to those in entry level jobs in other industries.

“I think a lot of times, we’re chasing a very different American dream, then to kind of put up with these aggressive environments that are often led by people who don’t look like us,” he said.

Craig then got to taste some of the iconic dishes that earned Clover Hill and Mitchell their standout status in the culinary world.

Craig took a bite of the Hokkaido shark skin flounder, which he called "almost too pretty to touch."

“This is nice, and it’s subtle,” he said.

Then, a taste of Japanese mackerel.

“We dry age it, we hang it, and finish it in a little bit of beeswax so it retains moisture,” Mitchell said, showing some of the fish being prepared.

Mitchell is not done achieving greatness, either. He's a semifinalist for a James Beard Award: Emerging Chef.

Amid all the accolades he's receiving, there are still everyday customers to keep in mind, so Craig asked Mitchell what he wants people to take away when they leave his restaurant.

“Well, number one, I want them to feel like they got their money’s worth,” Mitchell said. “And then from there, I want them to kind of be excited or inspired about food. That is something that is very important to us.”

or second to do really anything, especially here in New York City.”

“Why do you think there aren’t more people who

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/healthtrending/ meet-charlie-mitchell-the-first-black-michelinstarred-chef-in-new-york-city/ar-AA17CMSg

Charlie Mitchell, executive chef and co-owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Clover Hill and the first and only Black Michelin-starred chef in New York City. (Natalie Black Photography) © Provided by TODAY

Chef Wandile Mabaso Launches new YouTube Series ‘The Ritual’ which Explores African Art, Food and Life

By Lutho Pasiya

THERE ARE A LOT OF COOKING VIDEOS on YouTube. Like everything else on the internet, they are not all good.

The best of the genre will teach you basic cooking skills and help you expand your culinary knowledge, while being entertaining.

YouTube cooking channels are among the platform’s most-viewed content. It’s no surprise; millions of people either love to cook or want to learn how.

In association with Stella Artois, the awardwinning Soweto-born chef has launched a threepart series, “The Ritual”, that meditates on African art, food and life, all of which are some of his favourite topics of discussion after kitchen service.

“A ritual for many chefs, ‘after service’, is when we take time to sit down, enjoy a cold beer, and discuss the day, right after service. So, in ‘The Ritual’, I wanted to take a journey into the various aspects of all the things I’m curious about,” said Mabaso.

In episode one, chefs Mmabatho Molefe and Besele Moloi join him in the kitchen, followed by an after-service ritual in which they explore how culture plays a significant role in their shared love for food and passion for cooking.

In episode two, titled “Africasso”, Mabaso journeys to Cape Town to explore the ritual of creating meaningful art with world-class ceramic artists Zizipho Poswa and Andile Dyalvane, whose Imiso Ceramics creates the beautiful, hand-crafted

ceramic plates on which his meals at Les Creatifs are served.

“Being a true pioneer means going beyond the status quo, so I’m all about pushing boundaries and finding often unexpected innovations that have a positive impact. This is the legacy of craftsmanship and something I also really wanted to explore in ‘The Ritual’,” he said.

As such, in episode three, Mabaso shares time with artist and fashion designer, Gladys Semenye and sculptor, Dora Prevost, to discover the meaning of inspiration, the importance of sustainability, representation for women and young Africans, and telling an authentic African story through their craft.

Mabaso is a creative food artist with vast global experience, having worked with internationally renowned chefs in Michelin-star restaurants in New York and Paris.

He returned to South Africa in 2019 to launch his acclaimed restaurant, Les Creatifs, in Johannesburg, and in 2022, he was named Chef of The Year at the annual Luxe Restaurant Awards.

https://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/food-drink/ watch-chef-wandile-mabaso-launches-newyoutube-series-the-ritual-which-explores-africanart-food-and-life-1b3a314e-deb8-4d80-8ecc-

5192b4440396

82-Year-Old Triathlete and Longevity Expert's Top Tip for Staying Mentally and Physically Sharp’

By Rachel Kraus

TODAY, JOSEPH MAROON , MD, FACS is an 82-year-old triathlete, former neurosurgeon, longevity expert, and current member ofAviv's Global Aging Consortium. But when he was in his mid40s (before he ever contemplated running, biking, and swimming in succession), he experienced

what he calls a “life quake.” A personal loss led to a depression so deep that he

had to quit doing neurosurgery. Then one day, a concerned business associate called and asked him to go for a run. Though Dr. Maroon could barely get out of bed, the associate convinced him to throw on an old pair of scrubs and give it a shot.

“I was exhausted and fatigued—but that night was the first night I had slept in three or four months,” Dr. Maroon says. He slowly but surely kept at

it, and even started integrating swimming and cycling into his new fitness regimen, eventually working up to becoming a triathlete. Looking back, he realized that he had been healing his brain with his body Exercise is one way to prevent depression, but it can also treat depression since physical activity stimulates the brain to form new neural connections, which improves brain health overall. After Dr. Maroon was able to start practicing neurosurgery again, he even found he was a better, “more empathetic” doctor for patients. While exercise helped Dr. Maroon rebuild after the life quake, the experience also made him rethink his approach to life as a former "workaholic." Which is why, today, the longevity expert's tip for staying mentally and physically sharp is to cultivate balance in your life and in a world rife with global and personal challenges.

“You have to have that if you're going to function at peak performance,” Dr. Maroon says.

Balance is easier said than done, but Dr. Maroon says a useful exercise is to think of the four components of your life as the four sides of a square. The four sides are work, family/ social, physical, and spiritual. The length of a side represents the amount of time spent and importance given to that aspect. So, with a pen on a piece of paper, draw your square. Seriously: Go ahead and actually do it. If one side is longer or shorter than any other, you’ll get more of a trapezoid than a square, and you can visually see whether your time and priorities are out of whack. Cultivating balance means equalizing those sides to form those 90-degree angles.

Of course, there are times when one part of our life takes more precedence, and experts agree that's okay. The key is to make sure that it's a conscious choice.

“Have mindfulness and awareness,” Dr. Maroon says. “Most people, like I did myself, are automatons. I functioned, I went through the day, I did everything reacting to all of the sensory input from other people and other circumstances without really being aware of where my life was going or what I was doing. Bring awareness and mindfulness on a daily basis to one's square.”

For Dr. Maroon, that balance forms the foundation for reducing stress, integrating physical activity, pursuing meaning, and nourishing the body, in a way that contributes to both mental and physical sharpness. Which he sees as closely interconnected.

“The things that enhance mental sharpness also enhance peak performance physically,” Dr. Maroon says. “They're complementary."

https://vnexplorer.net/im-an-82-year-old-triathleteand-longevity-expert-heres-my-top-tip-for-stayingmentally-and-physically-sharp-s982450.html

Image credit: blackthen.com, Dreamstime, nitascoloringbook.com, rockdraw.com

Lifestyle/Culture

Former Educator Jesse Williams Uses His Passion for Education to Promote Self-Learning Through New App

By Shanique Yates.

TRUE EDUCATION STARTS AT HOME

, and Jesse Williams is on a mission to ensure that learning is fun for everyone involved.

As previously reported by AfroTech, Williams partnered with VISIBILITY to launch Homeschooled, a trivia app that offers excitement for learning like never before.

“We’re about constantly building things for us, by our own hand, that serves a purpose to the collective, but that we can also be enjoying ourselves,” Williams said to summarize the mission he and VISIBILITY have for Homeschooled.

“So much of my work, and much of our work, is very serious in nature and tone, as it should be. So we built a media company that can continue to be in service in that same direction, but with a more playful bend,” he continued.

The Importance Of Self-Learning

The Homeschooled app emphasizes that learning begins at home and is designed with a college campus theme. This allows users to simulate the experience of selecting courses, attending classes, and engaging in friendly competition with peers or other app users.

Although the platform is heavy on the learning

experience, Williams notes that the offerings were intentionally constructed around categories that not only teach important lessons but provide a pleasant time for users.

“There are different ways to retain information, and we thought it’d be fun to create something that you can play on the train, you could play in a waiting room, that you could play it just in your crib, you could play wherever,” Williams said. “That is not a total waste of time. To put it frankly, gaming now is so incredible and the graphics are so ill and the storylines are so ill, but at a certain point, I had to step away from playing my Xbox and PlayStation for certain things. I could easily spend seven hours on this game because it’s so dope, but when I turned it off, what have I gained?”

Education Is Liberating

This is not Williams’ first rodeo in the education

space. He’s been dedicated to supporting schools and students in need through previous partnerships as well as during his time as an educator himself.

That’s right, in an interview with PureWow, he revealed that before his acting career took off, he taught high school students and also once served as a long-term substitute for kindergarteners and seventh graders.

Today, his love for teaching others continues.

“Education is liberal. Education is an ability to self-determine,” Williams told AfroTech in regard to why he continues to put this at the forefront of anything he does. “It is an ability to know yourself better and push at the edges of what you think your possible potential is.”

He continued: “I don’t take full credit for that outlook. That was something that was ingrained in me from my parents and bouncing around from

really disenfranchised school systems into betteroff ones and learning at a very young age that we don’t always get what we deserve. In terms of opportunity, you get what the government is provided for you. You get what your community is provided. You get what your family is, and the circumstances they find themselves in. So education is the great equalizer, it can allow you to sit up straight and to have a sense of not just what you want to do, but what you can do and feel the freedom to experiment and expand and play in certain areas.”

For the “Only Murders In The Building” actor, the purpose of Homeschooled is much greater than him.

“I imagine Homeschooled as one of many, almost like a finger on a hand to a larger canvas of ways in which we can continue to grow, learn and teach with each other,” Williams said.

Click here for more on how to download the Homeschooled app.

https://afrotech.com/jesse-williams-and-visibilityhomeschooled-app

Image credit: www.homeschooled.art

New African and African Diaspora Studies Major Takes Off at MIT

By Pranav Menon | School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

COMMENCEMENT 2022 marked a milestone in MIT’s history, as Stacy Godfreey-Igwe ’22 became the first student to graduate in African and African diaspora studies (AADS)

Godfreey-Igwe also majored in mechanical engineering and is now a fellow at the Science Technology Policy Institute in Washington. She recalls that while she did not initially intend to major in AADS, as the child of Nigerian immigrants she has long had a deep interest in her cultural and ethnic background. This interest, paired with her desire to create a social impact through engineering, led her to forge a new path at MIT.

“I originally came to MIT wanting to see if there were ways to do good with engineering,” GodfreeyIgwe reflects. “I found that maybe my way to enter into that would be in part understanding my cultural identity, and seeing what I could do from there.”

In 2020, Godfreey-Igwe sought advice from MIT's Danielle Wood about the potential for pursuing a double major with mechanical engineering. Wood, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences and of aeronautics and astronautics, had recently begun serving as the faculty advisor for African and African diaspora studies at MIT. When Godfreey-Igwe made the request, a formal major in AADS did not yet exist, although the minor and concentration were available. Wood helped Godfreey-Igwe complete a petition for a customized major in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS). Inspired by Godfreey-Igwe’s request, Wood formally applied through SHASS to receive Institute approval to officially offer the major in AADS.

The request was approved in 2021, and MIT undergraduates now have the option to pursue a major, minor, or concentration in AADS. The

program also collaborates with the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) to offer opportunities for students to gain credit toward AADS while studying abroad at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Currently, approximately 15 MIT undergraduates are pursuing a concentration, minor, or major in AADS.

Wood says the major builds upon the foundation of the preexisting minor and concentration, the framework provided by other interdisciplinary majors, and the intellectual and pedagogical efforts of generations of scholars at MIT, including professors Michel DeGraff, Helen Elaine Lee, D. Fox Harrell, Kenneth Manning, Craig Steven Wilder, and Melissa Nobles. Wood took over as AADS faculty advisor after collaborating with Harrell (previous AADS faculty advisor) and DeGraff to co-instruct the gateway course for the major, 24.912 (Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies)

“There was a long history of people before me who were involved with making this opportunity,” Wood says. “The AADS major thus represents a coming together of threads from across MIT’s schools and departments.”

The AADS major, minor, and concentration curriculum combines a broad exposure to the disciplines of history, arts, social science, and the humanities with opportunities to study comparatively across global contexts. Beyond the introductory subject and fourth-year thesis, the major requires training in a language relevant

to people of Africa and its diasporas (including over 30 Indigenous African languages such as Igbo, Amharic, and Luganda, as well as Haitian Creole, French, Spanish, and Portuguese). In addition to language training, students complete elective subjects that span humanities, arts, social sciences, and history. They also complete a thesis on a topic of their choosing; Godfreey-Igwe, for example, used her thesis to study mass migrations from West Africa to Europe with Amah Edoh, a former faculty member in MIT’s Department of Anthropology. The findings of Godfreey-Igwe’s thesis coded interviews with migrants from

West Africa to challenge traditional assumptions about motivations for migration.

The African and African diaspora studies major invites students from all backgrounds to explore the riches of culture, innovation, thought leadership, and beauty that originate in the continent of Africa and its many diasporas. The major also celebrates opportunities for students such as GodfreeyIgwe, whose identity includes African heritage, to enter a personal journey of self-discovery. The presence of the major adds to the well-rounded list of interdisciplinary offerings, including opportunities to learn about Latinx, Asian, American, Eurasia, and Medieval studies.

Wood says she's grateful to all the teams at MIT that made it possible to officially start the AADS major, adding she hopes it lays a foundation for the addition of further perspectives, such as Indigenous studies. She notes that Andrea Wirth, an academic administrator at MIT who passed away in 2022, was instrumental in establishing the AADS major concentration.

“The addition of the AADS major highlights an example of an institutional change that can tangibly contribute to living out the MIT Values of belonging and community, excellence and curiosity, openness and respect,” says Wood.

https://news.mit.edu/2023/mit-african-and-african-

Stacy Godfreey-Igwe

My Soft Life

By Rachel Cargle

"My soft life commitment includes educating myself on financial literacy and intentionally building toward wealth to avoid living paycheck to paycheck, as so many of my ancestors have had to do. It also includes having a renewed relationship with MONEY, food, land, and nature through things such as growing my own tomatoes, yoga, cycling, running, hiking with friends, enjoying family, and bird watching in the springtime as an act of joy."

IN THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS there has been a growing conversation among Black women about what it means to live outside of the struggle of survival. A widespread intention to reclaim and recommit to what social media has coined as a “soft life.”

My relationship to softness, ease and pleasure has been complicated, which isn’t unheard of for a Black woman in America. Words like “ease” don’t always relate to the reality of how Black women get to exist in this country.

The enslaved Black women of my ancestry, who worked the plantation fields of the American South, weren’t afforded the chance to be familiar with softness. The domestic workers in the homes of white families might not have had the space to explore the concept of pleasure.

Black women in corporate America today, who are expected not only to do their jobs, but also to act as in-house diversity and inclusion professionals, rarely expect to live in ease. And tenderness didn’t seem accessible to the raised fists and passionate demands for justice from the Black women marching in America’s streets against racism and police brutality.

The narrow and sometimes capitalistic

interpretation of the “soft life” era on social media doesn’t account for the significance behind this revived idea. I say revived because this conversation is not new. This intention to cultivate spaces of softness, rest and healing — for Black women in particular — is not simply a millennial hashtag or fodder for online content.

tag or

In her 1851 speech “Ain’t I A Woman,” activist Sojourner Truth questions her own access to care and softness, saying: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”

In the 1970 anthology “The Black Woman,” filmmaker, activist and author Toni Cade Bambara is quoted as saying: “Revolution begins in the self and with the self.” A concept that insists that caring for yourself is perhaps one of the most significant ways you can contribute to collective well-being. In her book “Sisters of the Yam,” the late feminist author bell hooks describes her own attempt to gather women to address what she called a “deep, often unnamed psychic wounding that takes place in the lives of Black folks in this society.”

This conversation spans generations of thought leaders who either hint at or loudly insist that we claim gentler ways for Black women to move through the world.

Online, the soft life concept of today operates on a spectrum. On one end, it’s portrayed as a life that leans into luxury, glorifying things like expensive body oils, lavish vacations and high-end bags. I don’t necessarily relate to this side of the spectrum. While adding a bit of lavishness into one’s lifestyle isn’t all that constitutes a soft life, it doesn’t hurt to

reimagine our relationship to money and what we understand as “for us” in this world.

On the other end of the online spectrum is an approach to a delicate work-life balance and saying “no” to things that don’t bring us joy or fulfillment. And it is this side that I relate to most. More than the material opportunities to find ease, the soft life era relates to our efforts to set healthy boundaries, our ability to be introspective, our openness to ask for help and the prioritizing of our physical and mental well-being.

I’m hopeful that the soft life era will open up pathways for Black women to explore the practices and spaces that invite relief and remind us that we were not born to just survive. The concept is an invitation to envision what living well looks like for our community, moving away from our generational inclination to focus on self-sacrifice and instead really consider what a softer standard could look like.

In embracing a softer life, I’m making decisions based on what’s best for me instead of through the virtue of martyrdom. It means finding what I see as the tiny joys in living. Things like valuing the rhythm of folding my towels, taking a moment to be mesmerized by the sunrise, slowly enjoying the process of making a cup of coffee rather than rushing toward a busy day.

My soft life commitment includes educating myself on financial literacy and intentionally

building toward wealth to avoid living paycheck to paycheck, as so many of my ancestors have had to do. It also includes having a renewed relationship with food, land and nature through things such as growing my own tomatoes, hiking with friends and bird watching in the springtime as an act of joy.

A recent piece titled “Muholi V,” by South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi, speaks directly to this reimagining of rest. The work is a moving, larger-than-life bronze sculpture of a Black figure sleeping peacefully. As the child of a domestic worker during South African apartheid, Muholi has created a work that’s a stunning display of “art as resistance.” A visual call for resting Black bodies to be seen and celebrated just as much as those that are constantly producing for the systems and institutions we exist in.

For those who brush off the conversation around a soft life, who call it overindulgent — you’re right. Black women are moving toward a path of less resistance, a life not steeped in struggle. A soft life that ushers us gently toward our birthright to live well.

Rachel Cargle is an author, activist and founder and president of the Loveland Group and the Loveland Foundation. Her book “A Renaissance of Our Own” will be released in May.

@rachel.cargle

Image: https://www.artbasel.com/rooms/ specialsector/37706/Muholi-V?lang=en

Muholi V, 2022

Cameroonian Chef Christian Abégan: 'Africa Should Reconsider its Place in the Culinary World'

By Franck Foute

Cameroonian chef, author, gastronomy and food safety expert Christian Abégan speaks to us about his passion for African cuisine.

58-YEAR-OLD CHRISTIAN ABÉGAN is one of the continent’s most famous chefs. He has pioneered African gastronomy throughout the world, exploring its heritage, promoting haute cuisine inspired by the land, traditions and knowhow of the African continent. Abégan now plans to pass on this passion by sharing his knowledge of ancestral cuisine.

He sat down with us to discuss the importance of culinary heritage.

Cameroon has just hosted the first edition of the Diaspora Kitchen Festival. How do you see this event?

Christian Abégan: I think it was excellent because the African continent needs to reconsider its place in the culinary world. We suffer from many negative stereotypes about our work, and the introduction of all these chemically-processed products in our cities and even in our countryside is gradually distorting the quality of our traditional dishes and the environmental factors of our crops. France, which is the best place in the world for gastronomy, has been preserved because the French have systemised what a sauce is, how it should be made and not distorted what should be put in it. When you don’t add structure to something, people can change the game and tell a different story.

You have been fighting to preserve this culinary

heritage for many years. Why is that?

I’ve been doing it for 40 years now. I am very sensitive to issues regarding nutrition, and especially quality. We have a continent – I’m talking about the whole continent because I also work with other African countries – that has similar projects, sensitivities and concerns. We need to codify in a way that allows young people to have a basis for creation so that in the coming years they can decide which gastronomic route to take. This should be based on local products, without

chikwangue

distorting the local cuisine’s DNA. This work must be carried out with scientists, the sector’s players, chefs, anthropologists, etc. so that a roadmap of permanent preservation can be created. Is the project of creating an encyclopaedia of specifically Cameroonian cuisine feasible, given the debates regarding the origin of some of the traditional dishes?

These debates have not advanced the cause of culinary Africa or African countries. Nobody has the recipe for salt. If we start looking for the person

who originally created this or that..No! People have always consumed and transformed what they had around them to feed themselves. Cassava is grown in most African countries, but everyone cooks their cassava stick differently: chikwangue in Congo, miondo in Cameroon

However, everything fits together in a didactic way because we need to eat. Claiming origin is only a national base that serves as a reference. It cannot be extended to villages, regions, etc. Although Cameroon is a country with different geographical areas, it remains a whole. We know that each region has things that it is known for, but that are also found in others. We must avoid these subjects that divide rather than unite.

Eating is a civilised act.

You fight to preserve the DNA of traditional dishes but also want African recipes to be recreated around the world. Isn’t this paradoxical?

Universalism comes from the fact that chefs can cook everything together. We associate sushi with Japan. But it is possible to make sushi with any kind of fish, including fish caught in Cameroon. The main thing is to use the basic techniques, which we add to. It is a living art. We dress the products in a different culinary culture, to delight the whole world’s palates.

https://www.theafricareport.com/299941/ cameroonian-chef-christian-abegan-africa-shouldreconsider-its-place-in-the-culinary-world/ Image credit: lechefanto.com, congolinaria.com.br, frogoodies.com

miondo

Howard U. Picks African Diaspora Scholar as next President

From Associated Press

HOWARD UNIVERSITY is turning to an experienced scholar of the African diaspora to serve as its new university president.

Ben Vinson III, currently the provost at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, will officially take over as president from the retiring Wayne Frederick on Sept. 1. Vinson is a historian specializing in studies of the African diaspora, particularly in Latin America.

His appointment comes at a crucial time for the historically Black university; the venerable institution is riding a wave of national prominence, with illustrious alumni, major funding boosts and high-profile staff additions.

Vinson called the Howard position, “the honor of a lifetime,” in a statement put out by the university.

“Howard’s incredible legacy, its remarkable trajectory, combined with the fine talent of its faculty and staff, situate Howard at the uppermost echelons of higher education,” he said.

Vinson grew up partially in the D.C. area and graduated from high school in neighboring Alexandria, Virginia. His list of academic roles includes senior positions at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and George Washington University in Washington.

“I look forward to returning to the DMV (the greater D.C. area), which I consider home, and working with the broader campus community to fortify Howard and help build upon its incredible tradition of delivering excellence, truth, and service to greater humanity,” he said.

Long one of the jewels of the Historically Black College and Universities network, Howard is enjoying a season of plenty. High-profile alumni like Vice President Kamala Harris and the late “Black Panther” actor Chadwick Boseman have brought

fresh prominence and rising enrollment numbers. Major benefactors like NBA star Steph Curry and MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, have come to Howard with significant donations.

The university has also leveraged its prominence to secure a string of headline-grabbing faculty members. Two of America’s most prominent writers on race relations, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, joined the university in 2021, and famed actress and Tony Award winner Phylicia Rashad now heads the College of Fine Arts

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/worldafrica-65355011

Image credit: citybiz.co

Ben Vinson III, PhD

Lifestyle/Culture Whoopi Goldberg’s New Career Announcement

From Adrianna Freedman

superhero," read the caption of the Instagram post. Whoopi later added a comment about the project: "I made this for every woman over a certain age who still knows that somewhere inside her is a superhero with a saggy chest and a big behind and who can still kick a--."

When the Ghost actress' followers saw the post, they immediately congratulated her in the comments section.

"I'm not even a comic book fan, but this [piqued] my interest," one person wrote on Instagram. "YES!!! The world needs more older superheroes!!! Gimme a tough as nails granny over yet another reluctant teen any day!!!" a different user replied. "Oh this is going to be good ," another follower agreed.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG is taking her talents from daytime TV and expanding them in a whole new way.

The View star makes a name for herself each weekday when she hits the table on the ABC talk show. But as she recently shared on Instagram, the 67-year-old actress is co-writing a new graphic novel called The Change published by Dark Horse Comics, the media company behind The Umbrella Academy books that inspired the hit Netflix series. What's more, folks can now pre-order The Change online ahead of its November 28 release

"A new kind of hero is coming to Dark Horse Comics courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who is cowriting The Change, a graphic novel about an older

While Whoopi gave folks a brief overview of The Change online, Dark Horse Comics provided a better clue into the book's premise in an official press release. According to Dark Horse, the graphic novel will center around Isabel Frost, a woman who spent her life dedicated to family. But she also has a love for video games, which she starts to play thanks to her comic book-obsessed grandson and her best friend. As she embraces a new identity online, she learns how it will change her life forever.

Additionally, The Change will be the Sister Act star's first venture into picture books that aren't geared toward children. Whoopi has previously published the kid-friendly Sugar Plum Ballerinas series. The sixth book of the franchise was released this past January

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/ celebs/a43931955/the-view-whoopi-goldbergnew-comic-book-instagram/

Image credit: Dark Horse Comics

Founded by Actors, Mansa Brings its Free Streaming Service for Global Black Culture out of Stealth

By Lauren Forristal @laurenforristal

MANSA, A FREE AD-SUPPORTED streaming service and content aggregator that offers a curated selection of Black cultural content, launched out of stealth today. Mansa offers a wide variety of content, from on-demand titles and digital linear (FAST) channels to short-form videos and usergenerated content.

The company was founded by actors David Oyelowo (“Selma”), Chiké Okonkwo (“La Brea”) and Nate Parker (“The Great Debaters”), along with tech entrepreneur and film financier Zak Tanjeloff, who produced “The Birth of a Nation” and “American Skin.”

The company is also announcing today that it recently closed an $8 million seed round, led by MaC Venture Capital, as well as additional funding from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, Mike Novogratz’s web3-focused Galaxy Digital, Robert F. Smith, Base Ventures, Dubin & Co. and Rainmaker Films.

Mansa is additionally backed by notable investors including former NBA player and former Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson’s Black Capital VC; James Norman, CEO of Pilotly and managing partner of Black Operator Ventures; and Wemimo Abbey, co-founder of the SoftBank-backed Esusu,

among others. Today, there are a few SVOD (subscription video-ondemand) services in the space that cater to Black audiences, such as BET+, ALLBLK , Black Cinema+ and Brown Sugar. However, Tanjeloff says the market is lacking free, adsupported platforms that super-serve this audience.

The company noted that Black audiences make up nearly 40% of the view time on major adsupported streaming services like Tubi (39%) and Pluto TV (36%), according to Nielsen.

“That was sort of our aha moment, which is, can we build a streaming platform for curated global Black culture, and deliver it to the world for free,” Tanjeloff said.

To date, Mansa has licensed more than 1,500 hours of content, including on-demand movies and TV shows, as well as a live TV offering through digital linear (FAST) channels.

Some recognizable titles on the platform right now are “Second Coming” starring Idris Elba, “Boy Genius,”“River Runs Red,”“Canal Street” and Trevor Noah’s comedy special “You Laugh But It’s True,” among others.

Within the “Mansa TV” tab, users can find over 24 licensed FAST channels, such as Maverick Black Cinema, True Crime Now, Judge Faith, Gravitas Movies and more.

Plus, Mansa features user-generated content,

including video podcasts and short-form videos.

Users can scroll through a TikTok-style feed via Mansa’s mobile app, which features trending videos from YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Categories range from music and sports to pop culture, food, travel and fashion.

“Our target audience — Gen Z and younger millennials — are spending almost eight hours a day [watching content],” Tanjeloff said. “For four hours a day [they are] in front of a television screen, watching long-form content, and the other four hours in front of their phone watching short-form content. So what we thought would be interesting was if we can marry the two in a really interesting way that nobody is doing.”

Additionally, Mansa offers a feature that will likely entice its Gen Z and millenial users. Called “Watch Out Loud,” the feature lets users join a watch party (or “Room”) and stream movies and TV shows alongside creators and independent filmmakers.

Users can post text comments underneath the video on mobile. The comments will asynchronously pop up under the video as it plays. A similar concept has been pioneered by Korean video apps, like Viki

In the future, Mansa aims to allow audio and video comments, as well.

The company is working on original titles through its Mansa Originals division, which will roll out over the next few months. Eventually, Mansa will launch original short-form content made by smaller creators.

Mansa says it’s looking to onboard talent to develop original shows for the platform, including up-and-coming and yet-to-be-discovered creators.

Notably, Mansa claims that all creators it produces original content with will receive equity in the company. Plus, creators will get transparent profit participation and access to viewership data.

“We aim to change the paradigm around creator fairness, solving to address long felt challenges in the industry through addressing, ownership, transparency and community on a foundational level,” Oyelowo said in a statement. “Mansa is diligently looking for content creators and companies within entertainment to work with, building a centralized hub where all can

thrive together. To this point, that is something the establishment has been reluctant to do as a matter of practice. We will be announcing some very exciting partnerships and shows very soon.”

According to the company’s website, Mansa is also planning to launch a Future Storytellers Fund, which will finance, develop and distribute the content of 100 Black filmmakers.

Other plans on Mansa’s long-term roadmap include web3 features.

Mansa has been in a beta phase for the past year. While the company declined to disclose specific data, Tanjeloff told us that its retention data is ahead of other platforms in the space.

“From what we can see already, [Mansa] is at or exceeding Pluto TV, Tubi, Crackle and a handful of others, which is really encouraging. It’s such an early stage, and we’ve been blown away by how low our user acquisition costs have been,” he said.

Mansa’s team is comprised of over 30 employees, including key executives with work experience for major media companies like Netflix, BET, Hulu, Roku, Tubi, Redbox and Complex.

“David and Nate are proven creators and producers of culturally relevant and top-selling content. Further, they’ve assembled an all-star cast of content curators, streaming technology product managers and engineers,” said Marlon Nichols, co-founder and managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital, in a statement. “There is no better team to build and grow the category winner in the wide open AVOD sector. They are building the future of advertising and video in a space where there hasn’t been a clear leader. I’m proud to work alongside a committed team that celebrates Black creatives and communities while pushing the culture forward,” he added.

Mansa is currently available in the U.S. on web, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, iOS and Android devices. Later this year, the company plans to roll out its app on Samsung, Vizio and LG.

The streaming service plans to expand international markets in the future. To start, Mansa will launch in Nigeria and then in other African countries later on.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/mansa-

Fragments Returned:

Finland Returns Namibia's Historical Sacred Stones

(l) Finnish Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Jukka Salovaara with Namibia's Education, Arts, and Culture Minister Anna Nghipondoka

FINLAND HAS RETURNED two fragments of sacred historical stones that were carried away by Finnish missionaries during the colonial period.

The stones were taken from Ondonga, a traditional kingdom of the Ovambo people, in what is today northern Namibia

The fragments were handed over on Thursday April 27th by Finnish Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Jukka Salovaara to Namibia's Education, Arts, and Culture Minister Anna Nghipondoka.

They will be kept at the National Museum of Namibia and will eventually be returned to the Ondonga traditional community, local media reported.

Visiting Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said the so-called "Ondonga Power Stone" is not only valuable to the Ondonga community but is also part of the community’s identity and heritage.

President Hage Geingob said that the return of the stone should serve as an example to all those who “stole things from Africa”.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/worldafrica-65355011

Related article: https://icme.mini.icom.museum/ activities/projects/the-power-stones-of-theowambo-kingdoms/

Image credit: Nambian presidency/Facebook

This White Officer led Black Troops During the Civil War. 110 Years after his Death, he was Laid to Rest at Arlington National Cemetery

By Phil Gast

IT WASN’T JUST BULLETS and slashing swords that Isaac C. Hart had to fear during the Civil War.

As a White Army officer leading Black troops, Hart faced the possibility of being treated harshly if taken captive by the Confederacy. The men in his company, part of United States Colored Troops 2nd Regiment Cavalry, had similar concerns, including a threat by the Confederacy to enslave them.

The valor of the major and the troopers was remembered recently at Arlington National Cemetery during an unusual burial ceremony: Hart died 110 years ago and his ashes went unclaimed until a great-great niece recently retrieved them.

The warrior was finally laid to rest following a stirring service involving the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is also known as the Old Guard that guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the cemetery.

His descendant, Rachel Bender, knew some things about Hart – including that he served in two Massachusetts regiments before he joined the USCT regiment for the last year and a half of the war. The cavalry unit helped capture the strategic Bermuda Hundred and took part in the sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia.

But the Albion, Indiana, resident got the shock

page 140

4th United States Colored Troops in the defenses around Washington, DC. - Library of Congress

United States Colored Troops (USCT) see

Isaac C. Hart led Black troops during the Civil War. 110 years after his death, he was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. © Provided by CNN

The wheels were set in motion.

“Arlington was very professional,” Bender told CNN on Friday on the eve of returning home. “They listened to me and did not believe I was crazy. They helped me every inch of the way.”

Thursday’s burial was emotional for Bender’s family and others who attended. “This really touched everyone’s heartstrings. It is a cometogether story,” she said.

Army Chaplain Capt. John Ulrick spoke of his five children, four of whom are Black.

“I love my children with all my heart, and I personally owe a debt of gratitude to Maj. Isaac Hart for fighting for them, for their freedom and for me to be able to be their father,” he told the gathering, according to an Arlington blog post.

At the conclusion of the service, a Black park ranger briefly spoke with Bender.

“We both cried and hugged,” she said.

Bender said she hopes the ceremony will prompt more African-American families to dig into the little-known stories of ancestors who fought for the Union unit.

of her life last November. A man who was at a Cincinnati cemetery spotted Hart’s tagged remains in an urn and reached out to her.

“What do you do if you have an email and someone says they found your relative on a shelf?” Bender said.

Hart, who died at age 74 in 1913, left behind a family, but Bender has not learned why he was never buried or even when he moved to Cincinnati.

After the discovery, she contacted Arlington about the possibility of Hart being buried there.

A history professor and a park ranger, both African-American, told CNN that while increased attention has been given in recent decades to the service of nearly 200,000 men in the USCT, there’s more to be done.

A push to tell more of their stories

Emmanuel Dabney was only 16 when he started working as a seasonal ranger with the National Park Service. He’s now museum curator at Petersburg National Battlefield, and he’s given numerous talks that include information about

An urn containing the remains of Maj. Isaac C. Hart await burial during the service Thursday.Elizabeth Fraser/ U.S. Army

Recognition of Valient Service from page 139

Black troops who fought for the Union.

There was racial prejudice, despite the remarkable contributions the soldiers and sailors made, he said.

Dabney said it was common for USCT cavalry units to not receive proper equipment and horses.

Congress did act to remove a disparity in pay between White and Black soldiers. But getting money into the field was challenging. “Some of these soldiers would die and would never get paid,” Dabney said.

Now 38, Dabney recalls when he began work he thought, “Where are the stories about Black people?”

Over the years, the National Park Service has increased interpretation of the topic, he said. “There is definitely a lot more work to be done.”

The park curator and Holly A. Pinheiro Jr., assistant professor of history at Furman University, praise the 1989 film “Glory” about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a famous African-American unit.

But, as Dabney says, the movie came out a long time ago.

“For a whole generation, they have no idea in a popular sense that there were black Civil War soldiers.”

Dabney and Pinheiro would like to see more documentaries and books about the contributions.

Pinheiro, author of “The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice,” said the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, which opens this summer, will help widen who shares and provides history.

The professor said the contributions of AfricanAmerican soldiers and their families were erased in much of the country after the Civil War because of the “Lost Cause” ideology – the belief that states’ rights, not slavery, was the Confederacy’s principal cause, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Author Ta-Tehisi Coates, writing several years ago in The Atlantic, detailed the dearth of Blacks studying the Civil War. He wrote that the war involved forces for and against slavery, but the

legacy did not belong to African-Americans. Rather, Coates wrote, there was a “comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry.”

Pinheiro says the study of the Civil War remains challenging for millions.

“I understand why it is difficult. I have family members who were formerly enslaved.”

Black volunteers were motivated to strike the blow

About 40,000 Black troops died during the Civil War, from combat, casualty and disease, according to the American Battlefield Trust. The organization says the volunteers were the embodiment of Frederick Douglass’ belief that “Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” Some, in fact, were returned to slavery.

Their service during the Civil War led to three new constitutional amendments, including one that gave them citizenship and provided equal protection for all.

Dabney, the curator at Petersburg, finds a metaphor in the story of Hart, who was a captain promoted to brevet major in 1865 as the war ended.

The officer’s remains were not interred and his story dwelt in the shadows. But with the burial on Thursday, the story of Hart’s fighting to ensure freedom for all is now in the open, Dabney said. So, too, are the sacrifices Black soldiers made. “I hope more of the fog will be lifted from the minds of America,” he said.

A Facebook post by Arlington National Cemetery about the burial elicited numerous comments praising Hart’s service.

“May Army Captain Isaac Hart’s final place of rest at Arlington National bring his descendants immense pride knowing their ancestor willingly offered his life upon the altar of freedom to secure both liberty & justice for all,” read one commenter.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/this-whiteofficer-led-black-troops-during-the-civil-war-110years-after-his-death-he-was-laid-to-rest-atarlington-national-cemetery/ar-AA1ay3xE

Celebrations

African Diaspora Independence Days

J

R CAMEROON - J . 1, 1960

R HAITI - J . 1, 1804

D R SUDAN - J . 1, 1956

F

G GRENADA - F 07, 1974

R T GAMBIA - F . 18, 1965

SAINT LUCIA - F 22, 1979

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - F . 27, 1844

A R EGYPT - F . 28, 1922

WESTERN SAHARA - F . 28, 1976

M

K MOROCCO - M 2, 1956

R GHANA - M 6, 1957

S MAURITIUS - M 12, 1968

R TUNISIA - M 20, 1956

R NAMIBIA - M 21, 1990

A

R SENEGAL - A 4, 1960

S N Z MOROCCO

(M ) - A 7, 1956

R ZIMBABWE - A 18, 1980

MOROCCO (S S Z , M ) - A 27, 1958

R SIERRA LEONE - A . 27, 1961

R TOGO - A 27, 1960

M

P ' D R ETHIOPIA -

M 5, 1941

R CUBA - M 20 ,1902

S ERITREA - M 24, 1993

C - R GUYANA - M 26, 1966

R SOUTH AFRICA - M 31, 1910

J

NIGERIA (B C N ) - J 1, 1961

A A ' R V

(J ) - J 19, 1865

R MOZAMBIQUE - J 25. 1975

D R MADAGASCAR -

J 26, 1960

R DJIBOUTI - J 27, 1977

R SEYCHELLES - J 29, 1976

D R CONGO

(KINSHASA) - J 30, 1960

MOROCCO (I ) - J 30, 1969

R BURUNDI - J 1, 1962

R RWANDA - J 1, 1962

D R SOMALIA - J 1, 1960

D P R

ALGERIA - J 3, 1962

R CAPE VERDE - J 5, 1975

F I R COMOROS - J 6, 1975

R MALAWI - J 6, 1964

C THE BAHAMAS - J 10, 1973

D R SÃO TOMÉ AND PRINCIPE - J 12, 1975

R LI BERIA - J 26, 1847

A

R BENIN - A . 1, 1960

R NIGER - A . 3, 1960

P D R BURKINA

FASO - A . 5, 1960

G JAMAICA - A 06, 1962

R CÔTE D'IVOIRE (I C ) -

A . 7, 1960

R CHAD - A . 11, 1960

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC - A . 13, 1960

R CONGO (BRAZZAVILLE) -

A . 15, 1960

R GABON - A . 16, 1960

R TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO - A

31, 1962

S

K SWAZILAND - S . 6, 1968

F S C ST. KITTS

AND NEVIS - S 19 1983

G BELIZE - S 21, 1981

R MALI - S . 22, 1960

R GUINEA-BISSAU - S . 24, 1973

R BOTSWANA - S . 30, 1966

CAMEROON (B C S ) -

O . 1, 1961

F R NIGERIA - O . 1, 1960

R GUINEA - O . 2, 1958

K LESOTHO - O . 4, 1966

R UGANDA - O . 9, 1962

R EQUATORIAL GUINEA - O . 12, 1968

R

ZAMBIA - O . 24, 1964

G ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES - O 27, 1979

MOROCCO (I Z , T ) -

O . 29, 1956

N

G ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA -

01 N 01, 1981

C DOMINICA - N 03, 1978

P ' R ANGOLA - N . 11, 1975

R SURINAME - N 25, 1975

I R MAURITANIA - N . 28, 1960

BARBADOS - N 30, 1966 D

U R TANZANIA - D . 9, 1961

R KENYA - D . 12, 1963

LIBYA (S P ' L A

J ) - D . 24, 1951

www.thoughtco.com/chronological-list-of-africanindependence-4070467

www.caribbeanelections.com/education/ independence/default.asp

African Diaspora Celebration Days

BLACK HISTORY MONTH - F (USA)

AFRICA ENVIRONMENT AND WANGARI

MAATHAI DAY - M 3

DAY OF REMEMBRANCE OF THE VICTIMES OF SLAVERY AND TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE -

M 25

AFRICA DAY - M 25

JUNETEENTH - J 19 (USA)

NELSON MANDELA DAY - J 18

AFRICA’S WOMEN DAY - J 31

INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT - A 31

Agriculture - Business - Commentary

Development - Education - Governance

History - Investment - Lifestyle/Culture

- Technology/Science

"Awakening the African Giant Within"

The Africa Business Association (ABA) is pleased to invite you to be an integral part of our publication the DAWN - Awakening the African Giant Within. DAWN is a voice through which public and private entities and people share pertinent information and market business and investment opportunities in Africa and the African Diaspora. Gain access to these trillion dollar markets via ABA DAWN outreach and advertising opportunities.

• Outreach to Africa Business and Investment

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Afro Na on Portugal 2023

June 28-30, 2023

Por mao, the Algarve, Portugal

Informa on/Tickets Here

BlerDCon - Fae'd to Black

Hya Regency Crystal City

Arlington, VA USA

July 7 – 9, 2023

Highlightsand celebrate Blerd culture, explore a marketplace of ideas and sharing culture

h ps://blerdcon.com/

Invest Fest 2023

Georgia World Conference Center

285 Andrew Young Interna onal Blvd. NW

Atlanta, GA 30313 USA

August 25 – 27, 2023

Presented by Earn Your Leisure

Find Informa on - Purchase Tickets Here

Resources

Virtual IQ

Ac onable, convenient, and focused Industry Intelligence

h ps://ver caliq.com

Global Market Finder

View exports for U.S. Goods by Schedule B Commodity Codes interac vely

h ps://www.census.gov/library/visualiza ons/ interac ve/export-markets.html

Google Market Finder

Iden fy new poten al markets, discover helpful opera onal informa on and start selling to customers at home and around the world.

h ps://marke inder.thinkwithgoogle.com

Bo omline 2020

Bridging the divide of educa onal inequity

h ps://www.bo omline.org/content/2020annual-report

Export Business Planner

Roadmap for crea ng an export business plan, exploring foreign markets and financing, developing a marke ng plan, and more.

h ps://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/SBA%20 Export%20Business%20Planner.pdf

Trade Map

Trade sta s cs for interna onal business development

h ps://www.trademap.org/Index.aspx

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: The Great Library of Alexandria

library-of-alexandria-reborn