Past, Present, Future: A Welcome Address by the Executive Board of the Global Innovation Gathering

Past, Present, Future: A Welcome Address by the Executive Board of the Global Innovation Gathering

By Ann Joshua Comment Closed
The History of Global Innovation Gathering  Ten years ago, Global Innovation Gathering was driven by different points of inspiration, leading it to what it is today. Physical spaces designed to facilitate local innovation emerged as a prominent and rapidly growing trend. As such, these spaces served as points of inspiration, allowing innovative minds to collaborate and work together on technological advancements. However, the vast number of worldwide individuals who remained unaware of one another and lacked the means to connect was a significant challenge. Emphasizing a "strength in numbers" mentality, the vision was to unite these creatives and diverse communities to achieve more significant goals and overall collective impact. The solution involved bringing together these innovators and diverse spaces from different parts of the world to a central location like re:publica, a festival for the digital society and the largest conference of its kind in Berlin, Europe. re:publica provided a global stage and an international audience, enabling innovators from all around the...
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Building Innovation in Nepal: Impact Hub Kathmandu

Building Innovation in Nepal: Impact Hub Kathmandu

By Mugethi Gitau Comment Closed
photo courtesy of Impact Hub Kathmandu Impact Hub Kathmandu is an open, inclusive and collaborative space designed to give social innovators, entrepreneurs and change-makers somewhere to meet, work, network and learn. They provide a friendly open space that welcomes people from all across Kathmandu, and beyond! They are part of a global network of 105+ Impact Hubs in over 60 countries, working across disciplines, acting across sectors, with amazing people putting ideas into action.  Impact Hub KTM provides business support to Nepali entrepreneurs and businesses with a social purpose. They connect, inspire and support impact entrepreneurs to scale up their projects and enterprises to address some of Nepal’s challenges,  convening changemakers to convert their passion and commitments into meaningful projects. They also have FabLab Nepal, a digital fabrication laboratory to learn, play, create, mentor, invent, and innovate. They provide access to the environment, the skills, the materials, and the advanced technology to allow anyone to make (almost) anything. Since establishment, they have worked...
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Gosanitize! Go Girls ICT (South Sudan)’s response to Covid 19

Gosanitize! Go Girls ICT (South Sudan)’s response to Covid 19

By Mugethi Gitau Comment Closed
South Sudan is a country that depends entirely on imports from its neighboring countries and during the pandemic, products such as hand sanitizers became more expensive as their demand was high and not affordable to the common person in the community. GoGirls inspiration to research and come up with a hand sanitizer called Gosanitize from locally sourced resources within South Sudan was because of the above challenges. About Go Girls ICTGoGirls ICT Initiative is a Juba, South Sudan based non-profit initiative founded by a group of dedicated young women in the fields of Computer Science, Information Systems, ICT4D Innovation, hacktivism and peace-building. Ten female local brewers were trained to make highly concentrated alcohol (Ethanol) for use in the hand sanitizer. To achieve this, GoGirls ICT Initiative team together with chemistry experts, had a peer-to-peer virtual mentorship exchange with Bibliothèque-MboaLab, Cameroon. But alas! A hurdle. To enable this project to succeed, they needed to overcome a major hurdle: religious beliefs and the extent...
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Labmobile: on the road in Northern Uganda

Labmobile: on the road in Northern Uganda

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Young people between the ages of 18 and 30 in Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement and surrounding communities in northern Uganda face many problems, two of which GIG and Platform Africa proposed a project that seeks to address: Youth unemployment and lack of media literacy. With a youth unemployment rate of almost 70% and a high percentage of people who could not complete their school education but were traumatized by war and flight as schoolchildren, misinformation often leads to outbreaks of violence. Tensions have increased over the past year, particularly following the Ugandan government's restrictive measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and the World Food Program's (WFP) simultaneous 30% cut in food rations for refugees. Platform Africa foundation was in 2017 in Uganda by South Sudanese refugees. It is a non-profit organization that supports young people of all nationalities, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations through capacity-building programs (SDG 4). It focuses on media skills development, entrepreneurship, social-technological innovation, and establishing an open, peaceful...
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Re:publica ’21 Sessions GIG – DDMP

Re:publica ’21 Sessions GIG – DDMP

By Mugethi GitauNo Comments
Re:publica Sessions GIG - DDMP We are excited to announce that this year the Global Innovation Gathering will be hosting a pre-publica programme on May 20th together with the Distributed Design Europe Network. The programme is going to feature makers and innovators from around the world showcasing their work and discussion current topics  Whether virtual or in person - re:publica is the space where different communities convene and exchange including the international network of innovators that is the Global Innovation Gathering and the the Distributed Design network that brings together makers across Europe. This year we can’t welcome you at our pop-up Makerspace but we can invite you to join the sessions on May 20th as well as the other re:publica days to meet the GIG and DDMP communities and learn how the maker movement is working in times of the pandemic to support local communities with PPE, fight climate change and design a fair and equitable future!  Speakers will include Reem Talhouk...
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Olabi launches a project to empower and engage seniors through technology.

Olabi launches a project to empower and engage seniors through technology.

By Mugethi GitauNo Comments
In May of this year, Olabi held the second edition of "Aprenda com uma avó". The project was created in 2020 to be exclusively face-to-face, but its activities were adapted to a 100% digital environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a proposal for people over 60 to offer classes on varied knowledge to a wide audience. The idea is to build a space that connects older people who want to transmit knowledge through digital tools in online classes, promoting a meeting of different generations, valuing the knowledge accumulated in our society, and bringing a reflection about the aging of the population. In the process of assembling their content, the seniors learn more about new technologies, expanding their digital literacy. To deal with this matter, the project was divided into two stages: the first is digital training for the elderly, which provides classes on several digital tools, such as Zoom, presentation techniques, narrative and social networks, taught by selected monitors in a...
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