2008 P!T Fellow Erik Hersman on scarcity, abundance in Africa

Author: Michelle Riggen-Ransom
Posted: October 1st, 2008 @ 10:20am
Info: bio / all posts
Tags: 2008 Fellows, africa

I’ve been following Erik Hersman’s (known on Twitter as @whiteafrican) work for a while. Erik is the co-founder of Ushadihi, a company that’s developing a platform for crowdsourcing crisis information in Africa via SMS. He also runs two excellent blogs about technology and enterpreneurship in Africa: afrigadget.com and whiteafrican.com. I was excited to learn that Erik had been selected as one of Pop!Tech’s 2008 Social Innovation Fellows.

Erik was kind enough to send us his thoughts on this year’s Pop!Tech theme of “Scarcity and Abundance.” Here’s what he had to say:

“I’ve been fortunate in my life to do things that I love. I get to marry the best parts of my past (growing up in East Africa) with my current passion for technology and change - showcased on my blogs at AfriGadget and WhiteAfrican. This means that I get to hear about, talk to and visit with innovators throughout Africa who are working on interesting projects. It means I get to see just how much creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurism there really is on the continent.

One of the lessons I’ve learned is that everyone wants more. The truth is that scarcity of resources tends to breed an abundance of creativity.

In Africa, that is seen almost every day. Whether it’s a young programmer fighting to find ways to get his mobile phone app to market, or metal fabricators repurposing waste to make new products - the one thing you realize is that creativity is everywhere. I’m always amazed to see how challenges are overcome in ingenious ways when the ‘normal’ resources are not readily at hand.

This idea that scarcity makes you more creative isn’t new, especially in the startup and bootstrapping of organizations. Recently, I got back into that startup life with a project called Ushahidi, which was born in Kenya during the post-election violence earlier this year. Ushahidi was a quick mashup that we slapped together that allowed people to send in reports of violence that they saw via SMS, email or the web. Now, we’re busy translating that into a free and open source platform that will allow anyone to have do what we did, without having to start from scratch like we did.”

Thanks, Erik, can’t wait to hear more. We look forward to meeting Erik and all of the Fellows in just a few short weeks.