Edition 132: Activists are forced to become tech experts

...to avoid being monitored

Hello again.

I’m Anjali Ramachandran, a Director at Storythings. Welcome to this week’s The Other Valleys.

Illustration by Neema Iyer from (In)Visible, a report by Mardiya Siba Yahaya and Neema Iyer. More below.

Links

A good investigative piece by WIRED: security flaws in Diksha, an app run by India’s Education Ministry that was used by millions during the pandemic, and exposed students’ and teachers data for over a year.

One for the researchers out there: Mardiya Saba Yahaya and Neema Iyer reflect on issues they faced conducting research with Muslim women human rights defenders in the Horn of Africa during Covid: “A not-so-surprising finding was how many of the activists avoided using social media because they believed it increased their threats which they could not address since they rarely had any digital creation skills. Others also worked in topologies and locations that had bad connectivity, expensive data, and with communities who were not usually online. Some activists also had to balance their offline safety, state and community threats because they worked at the intersection of gender and religion.” The report itself was published in May 2022.  

In Ozy’s newsletter (yes, the infamous media brand now trying to get a new lease of life), a nostalgic look at Tiretta Bazaar, Kolkata’s Chinatown. As the piece informs us, “In 2022, the New York-based nonprofit World Monuments Fund (WMF) included Tiretta Bazaar among heritage locations and neighborhoods where it would support restoration and revival efforts” - I didn’t know this myself and learnt a lot about the area from reading it.

One of the more creative bits of work I’ve seen coming out of the World Economic Forum: “The Colour of Resilience is the first project in history to have teams of Refugee Teaching Artists painting canvas murals in four different refugee camps and displaced communities across four continents. The individual canvas murals were created in the Azraq Syrian Refugee Camp in Jordan, the Bidi Bidi South Sudanese Settlement in Uganda, Venezuelan refugee and internally displaced communities in Colombia and Rohingya Refugee Camps in Bangladesh.” Spend some time clicking through the murals and exploring the video content.

I remember featuring Thinkerbell Labs founder Sanskriti Dawle in the Other Valleys in 2016, so it was nice to read about the progress of Annie, their Braille device (Polly, the US variant, was named one of TIME’s best inventions of 2022), and how they’ve grown from India to the US - even getting on Shark Tank India in the process.

How a newspaper and a museum collaborated to create a project on the Dutch colonial past. A quick summary: “The project Ons Koloniale Verladen In Vijftig Voorwerpen [Our colonial past In fifty objects] was launched in July 2022, following a close collaboration with the Netherlands’ world famous Rijksmuseum, and in particular with Valika Smeulders, the museum’s head of history. Every week until next June, the newspaper is releasing an essay about an object, starting in the pre-colonial era and ending in the present day. Each week, the essay is printed both in the print edition of the paper and online; for now, the project is purely a print and visual product, but a book compiling the essays is expected to eventually be released.” Storythings loves formats - and this project has many of them. Also made me think of our podcast with the Science Museum in London last year, A Brief History of Stuff.

Read and go along for a trip in Karachi’s Pink People’s Bus Service, inaugurated last week 🚌🎀😊.

Douyin, the Chinese version and forerunner of TikTok, launched a supermarket business on January 28th in China, but stayed away from fresh produce and what they call the 3C’s (computers, communications and consumer electronics - apart from iPhones). This is noteworthy because they’re trying to compete with Amazon - seemingly impossible, but they have the youth audience captured fairly well. If you don’t try…

People never learn. Lyka, a social network in the Philippines that launched in 2021 by ‘paying’ users for posts (using their in-app currency), spiralled to popularity and then crashed, is looking to make a comeback after alienating the government (rightly so). It allegedly has 60 employees across Singapore, Mumbai and Hong Kong.

Jobs and opportunities

The Open Society University Network has opened applications for its Afghan Challenge Fund Initiative, which offers fellowships for newly arrived Afghans in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom whose research, teaching, and public work have placed them in critical danger and whose continued activity is valuable for the future of their country and society. Deadline: March 15th.

Suno India and Digital Identities have opened applications for a Virtual Media Fellowship, open to journalists reporting in English, Hindi and Telugu. Deadline: February 15th.

TANK Magazine is looking for a Managing Editor for a new independent project launch who is well versed in the contemporary literary and cultural landscape globally, with a focus on the politics and culture of the Global South. They can be based in London or remotely anywhere in the world. Deadline: February 9th (today).

The #VaccineDataCoLab was established to convene local & global multi-sector stakeholders to build a common vision on hyperlocal vaccine data for decision making. They have opened grant applications for Nigeria and Uganda. If you know of anyone working on solutions to help vaccine uptake in these countries, do share. Deadline: February 28th.

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PLUG: Storythings has released the results of a research project on how people’s attention and media behaviours are changing since the advent of the pandemic. Available in full here from today. Also subscribe to the

Attention Matters

newsletter for an ongoing examination of audience behaviours.

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3 Questions with…Ope Bukola

Ope Bukola is the CEO of Kibo School, a new online university that offers a BSc in computer science to learners in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Previously, she led the Product team for Google Classroom, was a product manager at Amplify Education, and managed partnerships at CK-12 Foundation.

Ope Bukola, CEO, Kibo School

Kibo offers a brilliant Computer Science degree online - but tell us about the interdisciplinary aspect of it, as this is something that more and more people are going to need to be educated on and to my mind is a real differentiating factor in degrees nowadays. How do you see the Human Skills Matrix interfacing with technical skills to build the best technologists out there - why are they needed now more than ever?

We spent a lot of time thoroughly designing our degree program, both the technical curriculum and the core. To succeed in a global world, the so-called “soft skills” (I prefer the term “human skills”) are more critical than ever. Last weekend, I read an article that suggested that, in the age of UI, university students should “major in being human.”  This is so on point!  Strong technical skills alone no longer cut it. We need people who can ask the right questions, formulate strong problem statements, then generate original solutions. Remote work will continue to grow, and this is a huge opportunity for young people in Africa and other emerging markets. But, if they are to become world-class technologists, they must learn how to communicate and collaborate effectively across geographic and cultural boundaries. 

Please give us a sense of how big the Kibo community currently is, and what you think the best thing about it is.

We have about 60 learners in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya in the bachelor’s degree program. But, our student community is much bigger. We offer free introductory programming courses and have about 1K learners in that community. Plus, we run a virtual math and logic competition, which attracted 80 African secondary schools and 200 students last year. These are just our students – we also have an activity community of professional volunteers who support our work. The best thing about the Kibo community is our commitment to doing hard things. One of our core values is “rise to the challenge,” and when I consider what it takes to succeed as an online learner in our under-resourced region, I am really inspired by how hard our learners, team, and supporters are working to bring this to life. 

What book are you reading right now and why?

Walkable City by Jeff Speck. The main reason I’m reading it right now is because my hold arrived from the library. I read a lot and try to support our local library, so I often end up reading whichever hold comes next. But this book ended up on my list because I love cities. I split my time between New York and Lagos. I just got to Lagos a week ago. As much potential as the city has, its lack of walkability is a real deterrent to its being truly liveable. Africa is urbanizing rapidly, so another problem we will need to solve is how to build comfortable, safe, and affordable cities for everyone.

The title of this newsletter

…is from this story on China’s spy balloon news, and more importantly how platforms like Telegram are being used by the police to find protesters.

Endnote

That’s it for now. Send me notes, recommendations for people to interview for 3 Questions, links to feature: fill in this form, or leave me a comment on Substack. You can also find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. And do ask friends to subscribe or share this post, thank you!

Till next time,

Anjali

Edition 131: The war is lost, the economy is destroyed

...and the authorities need to show people what they have risked their lives for

Hi everyone, it’s been great to hear people say nice things about appearing in your inboxes again. A quick thing: if you are or know anyone with an interest in space or astronomy (doesn’t matter where you’re based), please fill in this form and my colleagues would love to chat.

I’m Anjali Ramachandran, a Director at Storythings. Welcome to the Other Valleys.

Woman, Life, Freedom by Mohi Beykzand

Links

Iran is doubling down on forcing women to wear the hijab, with the increased use of face recognition: “Iranian traffic officials started using it in 2020 to issue fines and send women warnings by SMS text about wearing a hijab when inside a vehicle. Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, the head of the country’s parliamentary legal and judicial committee, spoke last year in support of “exclusion from social services and financial fines'' for hijab violations. “The use of face recording cameras can systematically implement this task and reduce the presence of the police, as a result of which there will be no more clashes between the police and citizens,” he told Iranian news outlet Enghelabe Eslami.”

Meet Hug, Paro, Pepper and Robear: some of the robots in Japan that are (or were) engaged in elder care. It’s not a technological utopia though: in most cases the robots created more work for staff than they should have, and there’s always the problem of e-waste, “potentially toxic and exploitative processes of resource extraction, dumping of e-waste in the Global South, and other negative environmental impacts that massively scaling up robotic care would entail.”

How India’s caste system limits diversity in science, a really good investigation by Nature magazine with data. Read multiple interviewees talk about how the playing field is not level at any stage, and how privileged castes dominate elite institutions (unsurprisingly).

Nastia Podorożnia is a journalist from Ukraine working in Poland. She created a free Telegram bot called Martynka “that will accompany girls and women on their way from Ukraine to safety”. It’s proving to be a really useful resource, particularly for those who’ve been through trauma.

An interesting interview about newsletter growth with Tyler Denk of beehiiv, the platform that grew Morning Brew to millions of subscribers. We work on newsletters a lot at Storythings so this one gave me pause for thought.

Inside the controversy of how OpenAI underpaid over 200 Kenyans to ‘perfect ChatGPT - then sacked them.’ Amidst everyone raving over ChatGPT in the Global North, these stories - including how data was sourced by Meta and a Time investigation into SamaSource, their ethical outsourcing partner (who have now stopped doing work for Meta), not everyone remembers the debt that humans have to pay.

A Chinese writer who moved from China to the US reflects on their e-commerce shopping sprees buying things they don’t really need, from Taobao to what replaced it in the US: the much reviled Shein. None of us need 10 phone cases, or similar!

Amazon has launched Amazon Air, its freight service, in India, in partnership with Bengaluru-based cargo airline Quikjet. It will initially deliver goods in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

On a much more serious note, India is today evoking emergency laws to ban a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The film has been discussed violently on social media the last week. Here, Salman Zafar writes about the increasing leaning of Bollywood to the right, alienating Pakistan.

Opportunities

WaterAid is looking for a Global Head of Campaigns who can be based in the UK, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa. Deadline January 29.

I’m a trustee of Chayn and they’re looking for an Administrator (remote). Deadline January 29.

Thejesh GN, based in India, offers an INR 1 lakh/$1400 grant for anything meaningful, preferably (but not necessarily) Creative Commons work. Anyone from anywhere can apply. Here’s the very simple application form. Deadline March 15.

UNICEF Venture Fund is looking to make up to US$100K in equity-free investments to provide early-stage (seed) funding to for-profit technology start-ups developing software solutions using frontier technologies for climate action. Deadline: TODAY, January 23.

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PLUG: Storythings is releasing the results of a research project on how people’s attention and media behaviours are changing since the advent of the pandemic. In Part 4 of Attention Matters, Say No Faux, we talk about how the authentic trumps the polished in our hybrid social media-filled working world. Subscribe.

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3 Questions With…Sara Wahedi

Sara Wahedi, CEO and Founder, Ehtesab

Sara Wahedi is the CEO and Founder of Ehtesab, Afghanistan’s first civic technology startup. Ehtesab has been providing near real-time security and city service alerts through the Ehtesab App (search for it on the App Store or Google Play) to Kabul residents since June 2020, and is expanding to three major cities across the country by the end of this year. Earlier this year, she was named as one of TIME Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders, MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35 and the BBC's Top 100 Women for her work in democratizing access to information for Afghans. Sara previously worked at the Office of the President of Afghanistan, responsible for supporting social development policy and projects across the country. She is also currently completing her studies in Urban Studies and Data Science at Columbia University.

1. Ehtesab launched in 2020 to help citizens get real-time alerts to crises in Kabul, like roadblocks, accidents and so on (which may or may not be caused by the political situation). How have things changed since you launched, particularly with the Taliban gaining power again in Afghanistan in 2021?

The brain-drain has been crippling for us. It’s difficult to keep team members, understandably, who wish to leave the country at any cost. There are many who are ardent and have remained with us for over three years, but due to the sensitive nature of the team, it takes us a few months to screen every candidate and ensure the team’s safety and that of our data and platform. Also, there has been a significant decrease in the interest of supporting Afghan-led initiatives. There was a significant wave of support immediately following the Taliban takeover in 2021, but keeping the app running, especially following the Ukraine invasion, has felt impossible. The entire team also has to work from home, due to security concerns, as the Taliban raided our office on the first day of the invasion, which has meant that the team has been working from home for almost two years. With the worsening electricity, keeping computers and mobile phones on is difficult, especially when we need to be active 24/7 to monitor reports. We also have to be extremely strategic about the wording of our reports and alerts, so as to ensure that we do not become a target of Talib censorship. 

2. What one thing do you wish could happen for you to make Ehtesab even more impactful than it is currently?

Even if we have double the budget we have now (which is 20,000 USD), we could reach half a million Afghans through our alerts. It has been incredibly difficult to find funding for Ehtesab, so if we were able to increase our funding, it would have an unbelievably large impact in our ability to expand the service across the country. 

3. What are you reading at the moment and why?

I am currently reading Wonders of Spiritual Unfoldment by John Butler. I stumbled on a few excerpts of his book on social media. The book is a sort of travelogue of Butler’s spiritual journey, discussing the importance of quiet and solace, of connecting with nature, and becoming more cognizant of our surroundings and a better understanding of the ’self’ - it is an incredibly fascinating book and I would recommend it to anyone. 

The title of this newsletter

…is from this article about Russia clamping down on their LGBT population.

Endnote

That’s it for now. Send me notes, recommendations for people to interview for 3 Questions, links to feature: fill in this form, email me or leave me a comment on Substack. If you ask friends to subscribe or share this post, that will be appreciated. You can also find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Till next time,

Anjali

Edition 130: Storytelling is relational

It places storytellers in a relationship with a community of listeners

Hi. It’s Anjali. If you don’t remember who I am after all this time, I don’t blame you - but you signed up to this newsletter to read about interesting non-Global North news in the creative and tech industries. I’m a Director at Storythings. Thanks for being here.

Cover design for Parables of AI in/from the Majority World

Links

One of my favourite projects from 2022: Toolkit for Counterparts is an interdisciplinary cross-country collaboration between artists from the Philippines and the UK. They look at disability justice and disinformation, amongst other issues, in the form of games, videos, maps and archives.

Late in 2021, I was part of an online workshop held by Data & Society looking at storytelling about AI from the Global South. The output from that workshop was published in December 2022, curated and edited by Ranjit Singh, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, and Patrick Davison. I encourage you to give it a read - I worked with Vasundhra Dahiya from IIT Jodhpur in India on developing her story, but all the pieces are very thought-provoking, as is the whole book: Parables of AI In/From The Global South: An Anthology. Also, if you’d like to dig deeper, there are some fantastic resources in A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World, a useful accompaniment to the anthology.

An exciting new podcast is out. Bad Money: Big Spender is the story of gangster Cheung Tze-keung, Hong Kong’s most notorious gangster, that also introduces us to some of the very first geopolitical issues between China and Hong Kong. Big Spender started out with prison breaks and scams but finally committed a crime so big that China noticed.

EY have opened an Asia-Pacific Innovation Lab in Shenzhen, China focussing on rapid prototyping and product development.

Inside the world’s biggest tech bazaars - a collection of essays and photos from Hong Kong, Jakarta, Lagos, Bengaluru, São Paulo, Taipei, Tokyo, and Mexico City.

View a gorgeous collection of art from Africa in Colours of Africa, an online exhibition curated by Design Indaba for Google Arts & Culture. Take the time to explore the wheel by colour - it’s fascinating.

Manchester City Football Club has entered into a partnership with Reliance Jio in India, through which fans in the country will be able to access multiple experiences through their digital platforms. Interesting, shall we say - and probably the first of many such sports partnerships with Jio.

Opportunities

The Mozilla Foundation is seeking a Content Creator for their Privacy Not Included initiative (remote with a preference for UK, US, Germany, Canada).

Stears Business is looking for a Technical Recruiter (remote/Nigeria).

Brink are looking for Innovation Executives and Innovation Managers (remote/worldwide).

From the community

Agustin Cruz in Santiago, Chile, is building an open-source 3D metal and ceramic printer so that it becomes affordable for small institutions, hospitals and makers across the world, particularly in emerging and low-income countries. He’s running this project on his own - you can learn more and support him via Patreon.

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PLUG: Storythings has just started to release the results of a research project on how people’s attention and media behaviours are changing since the advent of the pandemic. Scroll Stoppers: Six Ways Hybrid Working Is Changing Our Attention will be released in parts via a regular newsletter, Attention Matters - watch out for further media-related research there in future.

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3 Questions With…Divya Kamerkar

Divya Kamerkar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pinky Promise, a start-up that provides instant and high quality reproductive healthcare for every woman. Divya has a decade of experience in gender and healthcare. During her time as a Senior Consultant for the Delhi Government's Commission for Women, Divya worked on expanding access to women's health and wellbeing, combatting human trafficking, and reforms to the judicial and police system to make Delhi better for women. Divya also worked for the Bridgespan Group where she helped several governments, philanthropists and non-profits achieve greater strategic clarity and increase their impact in nutrition, healthcare and early childhood development. Divya has a B.S in Biology from Yale University, is one of Yale's Global Health Fellows, and holds an MBA from Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. She is also a published author in medical and scientific journals. In her free time, Divya enjoys going on long runs, scuba diving and hiking.

Pinky Promise wants to make healthcare in India judgement-free and accessible through your app. Tell us a bit about your journey - what made you realise there was a market for what you wanted to do - traditionally gynaecologists in India and good old Google have probably been the solution for most people!

Pinky Promise provides instant and high quality healthcare to women, using our proprietary technology. Traditional gynaecologists in India are actually inaccessible to most women who need their care and googling symptoms seems to cause more panic than good, according to what we have seen from surveys of women.

Women in India face both physical as well as social barriers when it comes to their gynaecological care. In India, according to the National Family Health Survey, there are 360 million women of reproductive age. Only about 8% of these women live in the big cities of India (Census 2011). As the same time, according to the FOGSI, which is India’s federation for gynaecologists, there are around 70,000 gynaecologists practicing in India. But almost 80% of these gynaecologists are concentrated in the big cities of India because they want to be close to the affluent clients and multi-speciality hospitals. As a result, more than 80% women who need reproductive healthcare are cut off from it. Additionally, it is not usual practice in India for people to freely discuss issues pertaining to their menstrual cycles, vaginal discharge and so on - even with one’s own mother! As a result, when women do have a reproductive health issue, they hesitate to take a decision about solving it. Also, since premarital sex is a big taboo in India, they are scared to seek gynaecological care for fear that someone known to them may find out about their sexual lives. 

I woke up to this reality during my first ever job out of college in the state of Bihar. I was in a town called Muzaffarpur which has some medical facilities and is rapidly growing into a large urban locality. Here, a 20-year old woman, Pooja (name changed) was unable to seek timely care for a case of abnormal uterine bleeding (her periods were carrying on for more than 10 days) since there was no female doctor in the entire area and she had hesitated to mention this to the one female doctor who used to visit the area’s hospital once a week. She had to be rushed to the state capital, Patna, and her family had to incur heavy hospitalisation charges for something that could technically be stopped with one pill. Pooja was on Instagram and Facebook through a low cost smartphone. 

As a result of these barriers - both physical and social - in order to find answers, we realised that women were just googling their symptoms. In fact, we found that in any given month in India, in English alone, reproductive health keywords are searched nearly 100 million times. This has been made possible by the very low costs of 4G internet as well as by the penetration of cheap smartphones in the Indian market. 

However, “good old Google” does not solve these issues. This is because of the overwhelming amount of differing and technical information that exists on Google. There is a huge risk of incorrect self medication, a risk of a lot of panic being created, and of incomplete and incorrect information being passed on to women. In fact on our app, we have been able to help women who have incorrectly self-medicated for yeast infections and made it worse, or who kept drinking cranberry juice to cure a UTI and it got worse and so on. 

At Pinky Promise, our app has a free symptom checker built by a gynaecologist (and advised by several leading gynaecologists in India) which uses evidence-based medical protocols to help women make sense of their symptoms. They can then choose to consult instantly with a gynaecologist for just Rs 50 (0.8 cents). Our software assists gynaecologists who use a dashboard built by us, to consider a wide range of applicable information, evaluate it against standard medical protocols, and diagnose precisely and accurately. We have chatrooms where women can anonymously ask and get support from the community, and a period tracker where women can continue to stay proactive about their health. We have therefore built a holistic platform for women with the ability to help us eventually predict and cure issues better.

Tell us a couple of impact stories that make you proud of what you do. What has happened only because of Pinky Promise and might not have happened otherwise?

Just last week, we had a person come to us from the state of Jammu & Kashmir, with a yeast infection. She found out about us on Instagram and after a consultation, realised that her symptoms were quite easily curable. She wrote to us telling us that there was no gynaecologist in her town and she had been spending several sleepless and difficult nights due to the panic she had felt after searching for her symptoms on the internet. She said that were it not for us, she would have engaged in several home remedies and worked herself up into a frenzy!

Komal (name changed) from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, was unable to find the right birth control methods that suited her. She already had two kids and was not mentally or physically capable of supporting another. Negotiating condom use with her husband had proven difficult. On our app, she was able to identify that birth control pills may be a good and discreet option for her. Due to a history of heavy and painful periods, the Copper-T may not have been suitable and she didn’t live close to a gynaecologist who could insert the IUS (Mirena coil). Komal called us a month later telling us that she no longer suffers for days on end with heavy periods, and she is no longer burdened by not having her birth control plan figured out!

What book is on your bedside table (or Kindle etc.) right now?

I am reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

The title of this newsletter

…is an excerpt from the description of Parables of AI.

Endnote

That’s it for today. If you’d like to let me know about interesting news or companies from the Global South that should be featured here, let me know by replying to this email or fill in this form. And do ask friends to subscribe or share this post. You can also find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Till next time,

Anjali

Edition 129: Will we ever miss screens?

Hello. It’s been a while, for various reasons, but it’s good to be back. I hope you’ve all stayed as safe as possible through the pandemic era we’re living in.

What’s Up

For the majority of this year, I’ve been working on commissioning and launching a series of sci-fi stories set in 2031 to celebrate Storythings’ 10th anniversary. The stories are set across the world, written by talent in those countries. Along with the stories, we published thoughts from experts in the areas the stories are about, from digital identity and climate change to machine learning and healthcare. The writers include researchers, university professors, entrepreneurs, journalists and authors and they’re all brilliant minds to learn from. I couldn’t quite pick my favourite story - maybe it’s the one about a poetic robot set in Latin America (which the author adapted for us from an in-progress novel being released next year), or the one about coffee and augmented reality in India (I had a great Zoom chat with Malavika Raghavan and Emrys Schoemaker related to it), the one about family relationships in a commune in the US, or the one about healthcare in the UK. Have a read and let me know what you think. This tweet about sci-fi beautifully describes why we briefed the writers as we did:

phoenix perry @phoenixperry

I ask my students write sci-if because creating technology is world building. It shapes the stories of our landscapes and understanding that gives them power start to change it.

Links

How Pakistan’s biometric ID scheme is stripping citizenship from thousands of people - particularly relevant given Storythings’ work on identities.

Read ‘Robot Poet’ above, and then read this piece on Delphi, a programme at the University of Washington in Seattle which aims to teach AI bots about human values.

Budapest, Hungary-based Vizzu is a free, open-source Javascript/C++ library using a generic dataviz engine that generates many types of charts and seamlessly animates between them. One for the data journalists!

A BBC Sounds audio piece on women entrepreneurs in Kochi, India.

From L’Atelier BNP Paribas, the second part of a digital report on social mobility in the digital age, that chronicles the history of technology growth and summarises a number of the technology-related phenomena we’re grappling with today, from surveillance capitalism to the gig economy to ride-sharing and more. See Part 1 here.

China’s social scoring system is now reasonably well-known; the system where the government tracks your data and then ranks your credit worthiness, with ‘punishments’ ranging from slower internet speeds to bans from flying. Apparently this week, China signed off on a UNESCO pledge to get governments to stop using AI for pervasive mass surveillance. Of course, signing declares intent but not action, and we can debate till the cows come home whether the Communist Party will actually act on this.

Having just finished watching Squid Game on Netflix, this piece on the importance of accurate culture-specific translations in AI and ML hit home for me. I didn’t know this, from the piece, which viewers of Squid Game will also resonate with: “For example, the English title of the first episode of “Squid Game” is “Red Light, Green Light.” This refers to the name of the children’s game played in the first episode. The original Korean title is “무궁화 꽃이 피던 날” (“Mugunghwa Kkoch-I Pideon Nal”), which directly translates as “The Day the Mugunghwa Bloomed,” which has nothing to do with the game they’re playing. In Korean culture, the title symbolizes new beginnings, which is the game’s protagonists’ promise to the winner. “Red Light, Green Light” is related to the episode, but it misses the broader cultural reference of a promised fresh start for people down on their luck — a significant theme of the series. Some may believe that naming the episode after the game played because the cultural metaphor of the original title is unknown to the translators may not be a big deal, but it is.” Yes, it is. 🦑

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Linx is a low-code platform for developers which follows a programming paradigm that makes it easy for developers and IT professionals to pick up.

Another open-source platform but from India, Appsmith is one of the platforms that has gained traction in the country recently, following other similar platforms like Postman and Hasura. Appsmith is an open source platform for building internal tools that connects to multiple data sources.

Japan’s Financial Services Agency is hiring more women graduates than men for the first time, as part of the government’s efforts to improve the gender balance in policy making. 👏👏

Linked to that, female participation in the gig economy is low in India - only 1,000 of about 220,000 workers at food delivery company Swiggy are women, and competitor Zomato has only 0.5 percent women in their workforce. They want to improve this to 10% by the end of the year, an ambitious goal.

From the community

Peter Dujan spent 2 years working on building his VPN company with a friend. Oeck provides “automatic channel unblocking, highly customisable DNS filtering, advanced port forwarding and extremely high privacy”. The company is headquartered in Hong Kong for now and may move to Singapore, though the team is Australia-based. The entity isn’t Australia-based because of Australia’s privacy laws not being up to scratch. Peter did a Reddit AMA earlier this year, if you’d like to take a look. Long story short, if you use VPNs, maybe give Oeck a look.

3 Questions With…

Roshan Paul and Ilaina Rabbat, co-founders of Amani Institute, a global social enterprise for entrepreneurs who want to make a difference, have their first book out: The New Reason To Work. I’ve known Roshan for years, and have been watching Amani Institute grow from afar since its inception in 2011. Amani Institute has offices in Brazil, Kenya and India. The book itself is a very hands-on project, which includes worksheets to help those of us who want to try their well-tested advice. It’s about what they’ve learned - over nearly two decades each - about making social change.

Roshan was kind enough to be the pilot respondent to my ‘3 Questions With…’ segment here in the newsletter. Let’s go:

What's been the most inspiring part of writing the book? There is probably a lot, given the 10+ years of running Amani Institute! - but if you had to pick one, what would it be?

The challenge to reflect on the last 20 years and try and distill everything we'd learned about careers in impact into an easy-to-read and engaging narrative for others. It was super interesting to do this, and also to do it as a team.

Who surprised you the most when you were researching the book, in terms of the interviews you've done for it?

It was when Celia Cruz, a Brazilian social impact leader, said that one of her biggest strengths was being able to see opportunities that others didn't. That was like an a-ha moment and it partly led to us adding an extra "key to unlock your impact career" in the conclusion that we hadn't talked about before. 

What book is on your bedside table (or Kindle etc.) right now?

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Thanks Roshan! You can buy A New Reason To Work here.

Opportunities

Antler India is inviting applications to their Fellowship for student founders: $20,000 x 16 weeks for 10 people. Deadline 12th December.

Endnote

That’s it for now. If you know any interesting entrepreneurs who might want to answer 3 questions for me, as long as they’re doing work that’s relevant to emerging markets, and particularly if they’re women, send them my way! And sharing this newsletter is always appreciated.

Till next time,

Anjali

Satellites are not the solution to everything

Edition 128

Hi! I’m Anjali Ramachandran, Director at Storythings and co-founder of Ada’s List.

What’s Up

Agustina at work in Pampa Chica, Piura, Peru. Image: Lizeth Yarlequé

A few things first: at Storythings we’ve just released the latest two video stories in our series on financial inclusion and identity for Experian, Identities of the World. Learn about the Shipibo-Conibo indigenous community in rural Peru and how they’d like to protect their forests through experiential tourism, and how access to financial knowledge might change the lives of women who weave to make money and preserve their culture. Also, if you’re into collecting objects of any kind and have an iPhone, we’d love it if you could test this Augmented Reality app we’re working on for a pilot project with Discovery Channel.

I’m a trustee of Chayn, an open-source feminist technology non-profit, and they’re hiring a Movement Builder, and two Tech Leads, as well as looking for an investigative journalist to work on a podcast about gender-based violence. Remote candidates who can work to a UK time zone are fine - please share if you know any suitable folks! If you also know of any organisations based in the Global South who might want to work with Chayn on a funding proposal for Bloom - remote trauma support - to implement it in their region, please give me a shout.

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Links

For fans of Star Wars and the Mandalorian (or even if you’re not!), you’ll chuckle at this: Baby Yoda has become a Latin American LGBTQ+ icon because of one Mexico City restaurant replacing the traditional Baby Jesus with Baby Yoda in the traditional Rosca de Reyes cake!

Quite hard-hitting: a long read about how one woman returned to China to sign some papers after 10 years in France, and was imprisoned in a re-education camp for Uiyghurs for two years. She got out.

The media maelstrom around WhatsApp’s privacy concerns have hit India hard, and how. This Reddit user gamed a number of Indians into downloading Signal as an alternative, by circulating the fake news that Signal was built by a ‘poor villager’s son’ to inspire them to download it as an act of patriotism!

How Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon intends to go about business, according to Tatyana Bakalchuk, one of its owners and Russia’s richest woman: “… she sees no need for investors, who would require more detail. Instead, Wildberries is opting for breakneck growth and, increasingly, cultivating relationships with top Russian officials.”

The best way to fight misinformation on a platform is to use it against itself: enter WhatsCrap Africa on WhatsApp, a podcast with information can be shared as an audio file within WhatsApp by subscribers on the continent who want to debunk any claims.

Last week, I wrote about Indonesia’s alternative approach to COVID-19 vaccinations by giving them to the younger, working-age population first. This time: as part of the government’s communications strategy, social media influencers are part of the first group to get the vaccine. Not particularly well thought-through: one influencer was seen partying hours after getting his first shot. 🤷‍♀️

Fascinating long read on one of the newer emojis introduced by the Unicode Consortium: the one representing a Hindu temple, because of the Hindu fundamentalist-tendencies it depicts in the process: “The red swallow-tailed pennant that flies from the top of the temple emoji is also quintessentially Hindu-supremacist. It isn’t necessarily the case that most temples have flags, and the temples that do have flags rarely have a flag of this kind. The pennant in the emoji, however, looks exactly like the bhagwa dhwaj, the banner of the RSS.” 🛕

Ride-sharing app Ola has partnered with Siemens on the construction of a factory in Tamilnadu, India, that will build electric scooters. The factory is expected to generate almost 10,000 jobs and will cater to its customers in India (its main market) as well as those in Latin America, ANZ, UK and EU.

Interesting Twitter thread by Jaap Grolleman with observations on life in Shanghai, China. To those in Asia, probably not so surprising, but worth reading nevertheless.

Sara Menker started Gro Intelligence in Kenya in 2014, an agricultural data startup which builds predictive data models for the food industry. She has just raised $85 million in Series B funding.

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Female Founder Spotlight

Lucy Lloyd, Co-Founder, Mentorloop

A long time ago I used to highlight female entrepreneurs from across the world in this newsletter. Despite being popular, that section tapered off for various reasons, but I’m pleased to bring it back! Without further ado, meet Lucy Lloyd, Co-Founder, Mentorloop.

Q: When did you launch Mentorloop?

Lucy: Mentorloop is a platform that helps people find life-changing connections - a dating site for mentoring if you will. We've been working on it for years, but we launched as a company in mid-2016.

What motivated to you start it? What problem were you trying to solve?

My co-founder Heidi and I have known each other forever, and over a wine one night 6 or 7 years ago we were discussing our quite different careers and the choices we were making. We wondered aloud why there wasn’t a dating site for mentoring relationships, a way to find and connect with that future version of yourself to help you navigate the next steps.

Mentoring captured our imagination, and it fit in with the working trends we could see all around us - people feeling isolated, people being more likely to switch careers, and the rise of automation removing the human connection from people's daily lives. So we worked on it as a "side hustle" for a while, and then just over 4 years ago - after we'd had really promising responses from our earliest customers - we bit the bullet and went full time.

The companies that are going to win the next couple of decades are the ones who will put their people first - Mentorloop helps these companies build a mentoring culture for better productivity, engagement and retention.

What geographies do you operate in?

Because we're an online platform we're global - we have clients in Asia Pacific, Asia, Europe, and North & South America

How many people do you currently employ?

12, but we're always hiring.

What did you do before Mentorloop?

I kind of fell into digital project management, and software product management - and my last "real" job, working for someone else, was digital director of an advertising agency. I helped brands use digital strategies and cloud-based tools to build better business processes, access and win new markets, and connect more closely with their customers. 

What are some of Mentorloop's biggest achievements?

When we started Mentorloop we based it on our own recognised need, but as time's gone on we've realised that by virtue of doing what we do - connecting people in more meaningful ways for personal and professional development - we always work with fantastic clients, who truly put their people first. It's a happy side-effect of the nature of our work, and I'm always very proud of the relationships we build with people leaders.

For me personally, I'm most proud of my relationship with my co-founder, Heidi. As time has gone on it's become clear that our trust and mutual respect is a superpower for our business.

What's next for Mentorloop?

More considered and active international expansion - e.g. setting up our UK-based office, and getting more involved in markets beyond our doorstep here in Australia. From a product perspective, it's continuing to build an experience that allows fabulous, organic mentoring connections to flourish.

What do you wish more people knew about when it comes to what you do?

That mentoring - connecting people in meaningful, outcomes-based, mutually-beneficial relationships - is the most powerful (and cheapest!) thing a company can do to supercharge their engagement, retention and productivity.

Thanks, Lucy!

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Jobs and opportunities

Sporjo, which aims to grow sports as a profession in India, is looking for a recruiter to be based in Mumbai.

Cranfield University, in partnership with the British Council, is offering six fully funded scholarships for female students from the Americas’ region (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru or Venezuela), for Masters degrees in various STEM courses, to start this September.

Snap is looking for a Head of Japan Market Development, based in Tokyo.

The First Annual Conference of a Platform Governance Research Network has announced a Call for Proposals for a three-day online conference in late March 2021, seeking to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers who produce work on platform governance across a variety of fields. Deadline: February 15th.

The Walt Disney Company is looking for a Publishing Manager, based in Mumbai, India.

DFS Lab, hosted by the Central Bank of Egypt and working with the Financial Regulation Authority and FSD Africa are inviting applications for a COVID-19 Innovation Sprint to develop fintech solutions that address the pandemic in Egypt.

The Centre for Internet and Society in India have a role for a three-month project for a researcher on online caste-based hate speech, law and content moderation. Deadline: 31st January.

Octagon is hiring a Creative Director in Singapore.

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The title of this newsletter

…is from this BBC piece that looks at the various projects looking to provide broadband to communities around the world. Many are failed projects, like Facebook’s Project Aquila and Google’s recently shuttered Project Loon, but are precursors to satellite-based projects that continue, like Elon Musk’s Starlink, and its competitor OneWeb, funded by India’s Bharti Airtel and the UK government.

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Endnote

As always, if you’d like to share this newsletter with friends, please do!

And if you know any female founders in the Global South who might like to be featured here, please email me, and feel free to fill this in if you know of any news or projects that could feature in future editions.

Till next time,

Anjali