Five years ago, the non-profit tech company Ushahidi exploited existing technology to create a powerful platform that allowed users to crowdsource crisis information sent over SMS. Now the Kenyan company is set to do the same with the BRCK, a wireless, rugged, battery-powered modem ready for any environment. As the BRCK’s Kickstarter campaign gathers steam, Ushahidi co-founder and TED Fellow Erik Hersman tells us his vision for the BRCK and how it could change how we connect — in Africa and beyond.

It sounds like the BRCK could be a pretty groundbreaking device.

Yes. It’s always hard for people in the West to understand, just the same as it was hard for technologist to understand Ushahidi. They looked at it and said, “Yeah, what’s special about that?” To be honest, technologically there’s nothing special, and there wasn’t even five years ago. It was that we were just using technology differently to solve a certain type of problem.

Same thing with the BRCK. It actually uses a 15-year-old technology. Modems and routers are not new — it’s the way we’re putting them together into a package that makes it really valuable. So sure, you can tether your phone. Sure, you could buy a wifi device. Those will each last two hours and can be shared with five people. Ours lasts 8 to 12 hours and can be shared with 20 people. Ours is made to deal with power on/power off all the time.

Then there’s a cloud backend. You can go to our site and get into your own devices from anywhere in the world, and write software for it from that level. There’s also a hardware side where you can basically plug anything into it, and the devices stack like bricks. So you can plug in extra batteries, maybe a water sensor. Maybe you want connect a Raspberry Pi CPU to it and make a little server. Fine — you can do all that and actually control that anywhere in the world. So layer two is how the BRCK becomes this bridge between the cloud and the internet of things.

Who are the intended users?
At the moment, I think there are two kinds of users for the BRCK. In Africa, it’s will be anybody who needs to connect to the Web often, and who feel the pain of power outages and the less-than-stellar ISP activity that we have in Kenya or in Nigeria or wherever you are. Small businesses across Africa will use it for connectivity.

In the West, I think the user type are the people who travel, who go camping, who go backpacking or hiking and want some type of internet connectivity in a rugged case. We’re happy if it gets picked up in the US and Europe, but we are much more interested in providing a device that works for people like us here in Africa.

But I’m guessing there are many other possible applications we haven’t even thought of yet.

Where did the idea for the BRCK come from?

It came to mind as a product during a meeting with some colleagues in South Africa. On the plane back, I pulled out my notebook and started writing down the different things that would make a router/modem for Africa really work. At that time, it was just a fun idea.

It wasn’t until last summer that we got serious about it. We got a prototype level and said, “Oh, this might actually work.” We got a guy that came on part-time and would do the prototyping with us, and it kept accelerating. Rapid prototyping is very hard to do in Kenya, because you don’t have all the tools you would have elsewhere and you can’t overnight components that you might need, if you bought the wrong ones — which we did. But when we realized this was at a very serious point, we hired two people, one with expertise in actual product prototyping in manufacturing, and a firmware guy who’s really deep into the IO side of firmware design, which is difficult stuff.

Everybody says you can’t do hardware in Africa, and we’re like, well, let’s try before we just say you can’t. And what we’ve found is that they’re wrong. You can do it, it’s just harder.

Will the BRCK come with a network connection?

It’s made just like your normal everyday router. So you can plug an ethernet cord into it and just use it that way, or of course use it over a wifi network. We want it to come with a SIM card in it. We’re still trying to figure out who will be our global partner on that – we’re talking to various providers right now. Either way, you can just pop any SIM card into it for 3G connectivity. It’s unlocked, so you don’t have to worry about that. That automatically creates a wifi hotspot that you can move anywhere. And if you have more than 20 people, you can put more BRCKs around, and they automatically mesh, so it makes it easy to expand.

What about battery time?

Our minimum requirement is that, if the power goes out, you’ll still have a full eight-hour work day’s worth of connectivity. We’re trying to make sure that it can take almost any type of input as well. You can plug an extra battery pack, for example. It has this micro USB slot, but underneath it is also has a GPIO port, which allows you to plug in any type of sensor.

The BRCK can take anything from four to 15 volts, so you could plug in any solar kit. You can plug it into your car charger. If you want something seriously off-grid for a long time, then grab a car battery and that will last you, with full-time usage, probably 10 to 20 days. It doesn’t have a huge drawing power, but it does decrease depending on the amount of people on the device.

It has 16GB of on board storage as well, so you can make a DropBox sync right there if you want, or you can make the whole device into a BPN, that kind of thing.

I can imagine this will be a godsend for rural communities, boat communities, photojournalists, and other off-grid folks.

Yes, I think there will be many people we didn’t expect who will need what the BRCK will provide. In fact, what I want to know from the TED community is: What other circles of people or communities be interested in the BRCK and should know about the Kickstarter campaign? Are there other niche communities — or even big communities — that this would make sense for? I think we’re closing in on $90,000 of the $125,000 we need. We need at least that amount to get to our minimum production run to get our economies of scale on certain components.

How does the BRCK fit in with your vision at Ushahidi?

At Ushahidi, we believe that older technology is not fully utilized. Where in the West people move to a new technology really quickly, in Africa we don’t. So there’s a reason why USSD and SMS are still really big things on mobile phones here. It’s why we think Ushahidi worked — this idea that you don’t have to throw away the old right away, you can actually use it for other things. And sometimes the problem sets that you’re solving for aren’t going to come from places that look like Cambridge or Camden; they’re going to look more like Nairobi or New Delhi. And these neighborhoods and communities are sometimes using technology that isn’t made for them. They’re trying to shoehorn in a newer technology.

Part of our job at Ushahidi is taking a look at those things and questioning the very nature of where they are and why they stand there. And then if possible — if it has something to do with increasing information flow from ordinary people, we’ll look at it. That’s why the BRCK is something that Ushahidi is interested in doing as well.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Anas Aremeyaw Anas can’t show you his face, but his name carries enough weight. Famous in Ghana for his investigative journalism, Anas’ stories like “Enemies of the nation,” about corruption at customs in the Port of Tema, have blown the cover on crime all over Africa.

He started 14 years ago, when he had just come out of college. He received a tip that police were taking bribes from kids in the streets, so he decided to go undercover selling peanuts. Thus began his dedication to exposing corruption through immersive journalism, following 3 basic principles: naming, shaming and jailing.

Anas has gone undercover as a Catholic priest in a Bangkok prison and as a bartender in a Chinese sex mafia ring in Ghana. Thanks to Anas the mafia men in the latter story will be in prison for the next 40 years for the abuse of the sex workers.

Just last month Anas broke a story with the film Spirit Child, about the tragic practice in northern Ghana of killing deformed children believed to carry ill omens. Anas brought a prosthetic baby from London with a fake deformity and caught men in the act of preparing a concoction to have the baby killed. The police were standing by, and court proceedings are happening now. In “Spell of the albino” Anas follows the albino limb trade in Tanzania, where albinos are regularly killed because their body parts are believed to be lucky in witchcraft rituals. He went undercover as a businessman looking to get rich and caught the practice on film for the first time.

And today at TED, Anas breaks his latest story. He’s been undercover for the past six months at Nsawam Prison in southern Ghana, where conditions are inhumane. He shows a shocking video of a room in the prison full of dead bodies piled atop one another. The sanitation conditions in the prison are unspeakably bad, and it’s easier to get heroin, cocaine and cannabis in the prison than out. He will be breaking the story in Ghana in a month.

Not everyone has been a fan of Anas’ work. Some accuse him of a breach in ethics. But as he says, what’s the point of a journalist who doesn’t benefit society? He concludes: “What the evil man has destroyed, the good man has built.” So fight, and build again.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Saki Mafundikwa founded the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts, ZIVA, a Bauhaus-style school focused on African heritage. (“Vigital” denotes visual arts taught using digital tools.) It’s the first graphic design and new media college in the nation, and he wanted his students to understand the power of design–and in particular to understand “the long tradition of writing” in Africa. It’s a topic he commemorated in his book Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Africa, and now he’s here to take us through just some of the writing systems of the vast continent.

The Adinkra symbols of the Akan people of Ghana and the Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, are some 400 years old and appear on cloth and art around the region. Pictographs by the Jokwe people of Angola represent the sun and the moon. In the Ituri society in the Democratic Republic of Congo, men create cloth from the bark of the tree; women paint on patterns based on the same polyphonic structures they use in singing, like a musical scroll celebrated in fashion.

It’s a lyrical, poetic trip through the writing systems of many African nations, and it matters for more than just theoretical interest. For Mafundikwa, African designers’ propensity to look to foreign influences is a wasted opportunity. Ron Eglash: The fractals at the heart of African designs ”Designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design. They are more apt to look outwards than inwards for inspiration,” he says. “The creative spirit is as potent as it has ever been. What they are looking for is right within their grasp, right within them.” Africa has a lot to offer to those who want to learn, in other words, including to those looking at the field of fractals within mathematics.

For instance, while the invention of the alphabet is attributed to Mesopotamia in 1600 BC, a more recent discovery suggests that this momentous occasion may have occurred centuries earlier, at Wadi el-Hol in the Thebes desert in western Egypt, where inscriptions dated from between 1800 and 1900 BC were discovered in 1998. “Only a few of these early inscriptions have been interpreted. But it’s clear: this is humanity’s first alphabet,” says Mafundikwa. It is time for African students of design to be inspired by their own continent’s incredible advances, and to remember the words of Marcus Garvey: “A people without a knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

However, when doctor and clinical researcher Boghuma Kabisen Titanji met Celine five years later, she had gone without antiretrovirals for a year and a half. She had little understanding of what the clinical trial she had been a part of was studying. Meanwhile, she couldn’t afford a bus ticket to the local health clinic, and was too sick to walk there.

Celine’s case hammered home an important question for Titanji: What happens to research subjects after the research is over?

As Titanji explain in today’s talk, filmed at TEDxGoodenoughCollege, HIV researchers have a wide variety of reasons for choosing to do research in sub-Saharan Africa rather than in their countries of origin. The first reason: because 70% of the approximately 30 million people with the disease live in the region. But there are other factors, too, less high-minded ones: because review of clinical research is far less stringent there, because the poor populations there are likely to sign on for any offer of medical assistance, and because there is a far lower risk of litigation there. Whatever the reason for doing research in sub-Saharan Africa, Titanji wants to make that researchers recruit their test subjects and take care of them with proper respect.

“I do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting HIV clinical trials in developing countries is bad. On the contrary, clinical trials are extremely useful tools and are much needed … However the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation,” Titanji says. “How do we ensure that in the search for the cure we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic?”

To hear the four areas that Titanji suggests researchers think deeply about before conducting studies, watch her talk. And here, 9 more powerful talks with ideas for rethinking — and hopefully stopping — the spread of HIV and AIDS.

In 2007, at TEDAfrica, Euvin Naidoo gave an opening talk about investing in African countries — laying out 10 markets and metrics to watch as African nations gained capacity.

Today, in a follow-up post, investor Ryan Hoover looks at these 10 metrics that Naidoo laid out — and charts how much has changed in the past five years. It’s a fascinating post. A sample:

7. Africa’s Booming Banks

2007: Naidoo next remarked on the potential of the banking sector and the reforms taking place in Nigeria that consolidated that country’s 85 banks into 25. He noted that only 10% of Nigerians were banked.

2012: Five years later, and 36% of the Nigerian population is now served by the formal financial sector. Analysts at Bain Capital expect the sub-Saharan banking industry to continue growing at 15% annually all the way to 2020.

Read all 10 metrics >>

Congratulations to the first class of admitted students at AIMS Senegal, the newest AIMS center and the latest achievement from cosmologist and TED Prize winner Neil Turok and his NextEinstein Initiative.

In 2008 Turok wished for the TED community to help “unlock and nurture scientific talent across Africa, so that within our lifetimes we are celebrating an African Einstein.” This proposal is known as the NextEinstein Initiative, Turok’s vision to expand his groundbreaking postgrad program, the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), founded in South Africa in 2003, to a network of 15 centers across Africa. In Turok’s recent talk from Google Zeitgeist, he tells us about his vision for AIMS: “There are plenty of spaces for much more innovative educational centers in the world, and frankly that’s where I think the future will go. It willl go to enterprise. Enterprise should be attached to education and science.”

Since Turok’s 2008 talk AIMS-NEI has made tremendous strides. The second AIMS program launched in Abuja, Nigeria in July 2008, and last month AIMS Senegal welcomed its first class. In the next two years AIMS-NEI anticipates the addition of two new centers in Ghana and Ethiopia. By 2013 all five centers will be fully operating, and the world will be on its way to meeting its first African Einstein.

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3k

Watch Chimamanda Adichie’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

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On Saturday August 15, a TEDx event was held in Kibera, the largest squatter city in Africa and home to nearly a million Kenyans. Suraj Sudhakar, an Acumen Fellow, hosted the ambitious event. Sudhakar has begun several projects in low-income communities, from improving housing conditions through financial consolidation to sanitation by promotion of the Eco-toilet concept. His vision for the TEDx conference was to spark discussion on subjects other than HIV/AIDS and poverty, which are commonly associated with Kibera.

Speakers included Tonee Ndungu of the Kenya Wazimba Youth Foundation which uses mobile phones for large-scale networking and communication, Otieno Gomba founder of Ghetto Art, a studio for Kibera’s artists, and software developer and tech blogger Wilfred Mworia.

Mworia has an engaging account of the afternoon on his blog, and provides a link to his Flickr account with many photos of this inspirational event. For even more photos, check out Tonee Ndungu’s twitpics.

The event in Mworia’s words:

I attended TEDxNairobi a week earlier which was a much much bigger event at a bigger venue. But the interesting thing is, even being in this smaller event being held in the middle of a slum, in a shanty church building, surrounding by the dirt and grime of Kibera… there was still great inspiration (if not greater) and great ideas! And I think that’s the beauty of TED, the fact that despite where you are, in whatever circumstances, people (if motivated enough) will always come up with great ‘ideas worth sharing’! And that says something very deep about the human spirit and the dignity of human beings. That whether rich or poor we all have that capacity for creativity.

For more insight on squatter cities like Kibera, watch Stewart Brand’s 2006 TED Talk and Robert Neuwirth’s 2005 TED Talk.

Photo: Tonee Ndungu at TEDxKibera August 15, 2009, in Nairobi, Kenya. Credit: Wilfred Mworia

In his 2009 TEDTalk, techno-blogger Erik Hersman breaks down the framework of and uses for Ushahidi, a crisis reporting platform that emerged to help Kenyans avoid violence during riots after the 2008 elections. During this follow-up interview with the TEDBlog, he talks about his African ties, how the TEDFellows program has impacted him and the very beginnings of Ushahidi.

How did Ushahidi begin? We know it began during the aftermath of the 2008 Kenyan elections, but who were the key players and how did they come to contact each other and form this system?

It was very, very fast and loose. We quickly combined our thoughts around the basic idea via Skype and then got the whole thing going in a couple days. Ory, Juliana, Daudi and I knew each other from the Kenyan blogosphere, and as past TEDAfrica Fellows. I knew David Kobia, our lead developer from an interview I had done of him on my WhiteAfrican blog.

Could you give some examples, from your recollections, of the most successful moments of Ushahidi — moments where you knew you were part of an important structure?

The first week was the first indicator. To us, the system was rudimentary, but it worked. To outsiders, especially those in the humanitarian field, it was the first time they had really seen a technology tool used to bypass the establishment and go directly to ordinary people on the ground to get information. It seemed like the only thing to do to us, but it was revolutionary to them.

The other big moments were when we started to get approached by people and organizations from the rest of the world asking us to create one for them. Needless to say, we couldn’t due to our having our own full-time jobs, but it proved there was a need.

Finally, having Al Jazeera pick the tool up for use to collect and monitor the Gaza situation back in January was big. It was the first time an established media organization had used our tool.

What are the elements of the system that contribute most to its success? Anonymity of reports, ability of the population to vote credibility of reports — which to you are the most important or essential?

Well, I think the biggest thing is that Ushahidi fills the gap. It makes it easy for the traditionally unconnected, those in developing world countries and in rural areas, to start sending information in and getting alerts of things that happen around them — all from a simple SMS only enabled mobile phone.

Beyond that there are two very important issues. First, the need for anonymity in environments where you can’t trust the governing bodies. Second, a way to verify information as it comes in.

Just to probe, it seems that Al Jazeera is the only non-grassroots media group using Ushahidi? Why do you think this is? What makes Al Jazeera and Ushahidi a good fit?

There are some other NGOs using Ushahidi, but Al Jazeera is the largest organization using it to date. I happened to be in Qatar last week and had the chance to visit Al Jazeera’s new media team in person. We spent a good portion of the day talking about what they’re trying to do and why Ushahidi makes sense for them. It turns out that they’re really trying to stretch the traditional news in new ways. Ushahidi isn’t the only tool in their repertoire as they get into ways to both gather and disseminate news via mobiles. Finally, because Al Jazeera is largely focused on the parts of the world that most other large media organizations are not, it’s a good fit since that’s where Ushahidi works best as well.

READ MORE: Erik talks about his connection to Africa, attending TED2009, the TEDFellows program and more. Can you touch on your connection to Africa and the changes you have observed or want to see on the continent, or at least in the countries you have lived in, Kenya and Sudan?

I grew up in Sudan and Kenya, and lived in both the rural and urban centers of both countries throughout my life. Technology, since the mid-’90s, has had an inordinate impact on the culture. I’m excited about this, as I believe that technology allows us to bypass inefficiencies — be they government corruption, economics or business-related. It’s why I write about it on my personal blog (WhiteAfrican) and why I started AfriGadget, the group blog that showcases Africans solving everyday problems with their own ingenuity.

Would you also speak to the intersection of your African identity, technology and blogging, and your interest in TED? Is there a connection between these three?

There is an intersection point, and it all started when TED decided that the focus for TEDGlobal 2007 was going to be Africa. That was a pivotal moment, bringing together some of the greatest minds across the continent along with some of their counterparts in the Western world. On top of this, and maybe the most important, was that 100 TEDAfrica fellows were brought together. Because of the energy and creativity put in motion by that event, we are starting to see in initiatives like Ushahidi. Like I stated then, I think we still haven’t seen the full repercussions of that event.

How was your experience at TED and that of giving a TEDTalk?

TED has an aura about it that is both intimidating and exhilarating at the same time. It’s big, with 1200 people this year. It’s glamorous and somewhat surreal as you sit behind someone like Ben Affleck and then walk out the door to see Al Gore speaking on his iPhone. All of that bleeds over into the Fellows program as well.

Having only 4 minutes meant that I really needed to get to the point, and that was difficult, as I felt there were a lot of areas I had to carve out that were really good stories.

Also, what’s your insider perspective on the TEDFellows program?

The TEDFellows program. It’s full of an eclectic mix of polymaths, who are incredibly intelligent, open and the relationships created from that are amazing.

There was a distinct focus on communication at TED this year, as the main show for the afternoon session was Eric Albertson of Duarte Design and Slide:ology. They are the masters of the stage, presentation geniuses who are famous for putting together some of the best talks you have ever seen.

Since this happens the day before the TED conference begins, the anticipation continues to build throughout the day. You strike new friendships and make connections that hadn’t existed before. And, because they draw from such an eclectic mix of “doers”, your new best friend might be a mangaka artist, teacher or a scientist. That’s good though, because the next day you are thrust into the maelstrom and you now have small islands of friendship to keep you grounded over the next four days.

The TEDFellows staff are also there to support you through the conference. More importantly, they are connectors, making sure that you are being introduced to the right people and having the right conversations to make your time as a Fellow a success. As one Fellow famously said, “Tom Rielly knew all 40 of our elevator pitches better than we did, and he gave them flawlessly to each person he introduced us to.”

More AIMS Student Talks: Be inspired by the stories of current and former AIMS students — young Africans whose lives have been changed through access to a top-notch scientific education at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Every two weeks, the TED Prize team uploads three talks from the May 12 launch party for the NextEinstein initiative in South Africa (part of the TED Prize wish of physicist Neil Turok). This week we’ve posted talks from two students, Daphne and Viani, as well as a musical performance by Vusi Mahlasela, who dedicates a song to the students of AIMS.

Watch Daphne’s talk below, and see many more amazing talks and performances on the NextEinstein YouTube Channel.

Get frequent updates on the TED Prize wishes via the TED Prize blog RSS feed.