Edition 125: An extra kick from the Earth's spin

Hey. I’m Anjali Ramachandran, and this is where I write about creativity and tech-related news from emerging markets.

What’s Up

Image credit: Murugiah on Instagram

The world continues to burn and scream and the anger isn’t going to go easily. I’ve been bookmarking resources which I hope will be of interest to many of you.

For the US, a list of Black-owned businesses you can support. For the design-led amongst you, a list of inclusion resources from Design Can. If you’re trying to become a better ally, a Google Doc of actions you can do every single day for the month of June. For everyone, but especially South Asians in the UK: a list of things to read/listen/watch to understand white supremacy and engage in anti-racist work to actively disinvest in anti-Blackness. A practical list of ways to support Black Lives Matter in the UK. More people and organisations you can support and things you can do, especially if you’re in the US, including donating to a fund for mothers of colour impacted by COVID-19 and helping Black female entrepreneurs raise money through iFundWomen.

If you are in the UK and want to focus on changing the curriculum in schools to help ensure future generations actually learn about race in school: look at the Impact of Omission website, a petition to update GCSE reading lists with two great books on race, and a GoFundMe to equip primary schools with a list of books about race.

For those interested in critical analysis of what’s going on in the world right now with the global protests, “an in-progress bibliography of work by historians and other social scientists that contextualizes and historicizes the multi-city protests and extralegal and state violence of late May and early June 2020” by Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History, University of Washington. This also looks excellent if you have Saturdays free: a free online course about modernity and coloniality by Ahmed Ansari, which just started over the weekend.

It’s important to support Black communities at this time, but I also found myself trying to make sense of what’s going on in my home country, India, with regard to caste discrimination, which has been ongoing for centuries. There has been heated discussion in social media about the appropriateness of supporting one when the other has been happening in one’s own backyard for ages. I wrote this blog post to try and make sense of it.

Links

The legendary hip-hop label Def Jam has formally launched in Africa, under the wings of parent company Universal Music Group.

“She's grown up with pictures like this, sometimes the faces in the news have been people she’s met, but her parents have to be sheltered with filters: She and Rono must protect them from the psy-op epidemic of confusion and rage that still threatens to engulf the whole country, hoping all the while that the Residents' Association's guards keep the street outside their balcony free of blood.” Fascinating excerpt from author Samit Basu’s latest sci-fi book, a picture of what the life of an ‘ordinary’ Delhi girl might look like in 2030.

The coronavirus has made many people very lonely. An unusual cohort are teenagers in Kyrgyzstan, who find solace in talking to strangers online, whether internet chatbots or volunteers.

In the FT, a look at how digital healthcare is giving millions of impoverished Latin Americans access to better care. But it’s not all good - private healthcare isn’t connected with government provided healthcare, which means it’s hard to scale solutions. Urban areas have access to broadband for digital consultations, but rural areas have poor connectivity, which excludes them. And data sets used to train AI algorithms can be biased, and have unintended consequences - in Chile, a diagnostic tool used by the government to identify cases of diabetic retinopathy was successful but was not trained to look for other issues, leading to bigger problems.

A Twitter thread on how the Chinese government controls WeChat accounts, which are used by millions inside China, even if your account is US-registered. No insulting the Communist Party allowed, ever (of course). As this Axios journalist said: “It's another way of creating & enforcing an environment of total self-censorship, so that you learn to flag every CCP-unfriendly thought before it finds external expression. So you can keep on being able to hail a cab with your phone, or run your e-commerce small business.”

In Japan, Seven-Eleven is going to be a sales point for life insurance via multi-function machines in their stores, including cancer insurance from June 16th. This rollout gives staff of MS&AD Insurance Group the ability to get new customers without their staff having to be in close contact with customers given Covid-19.

New Delhi’s 1 million state school children take part in a ‘happiness class’ which includes meditation and yoga and is helping them deal with stress. It has its critics, but Bangladesh, Afghanistan, the UAE and Colombia are amongst the countries that have reached out to the Delhi government, led by the Aam Aadmi Party, and its partner nonprofit Dream A Dream to help implement it in their regions.

Designer Ini Archibong has launched a crowdfunder to create a temporary structure, the Pavilion of the Diaspora, to represent displaced Africans at the London Design Biennale, which will now happen in June 2021 instead of September 2020. "I realised that I have a kinship with all of us that are children of the diaspora, whether it's from the slave trade or through immigration," said the designer, who was born in America to Nigerian parents and now lives in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

A number of things Uber Africa is doing to ride out the next few years in a pandemic-affected world: they’re launching Uber Cash, a digital wallet, in partnership with tech startup Flutterwave, which means they will be able to accept money from many remittance partners active on Flutterwave. They also transport medical supplies through a partnership with the Gates Foundation, have Uber Eats (as in many other markets) and they’re looking at expanding into electric vehicles.

We all know TikTok, but here’s some news: parent company ByteDance is in discussions with Singapore’s influential Lee business family on obtaining a banking license, which would be in many ways a smart business extension.

Jobs and opportunities

TikTok is looking for an APAC Agency Development Lead based in Singapore.

Netflix is looking for a Partner Marketing Creative Manager based in Seoul, South Korea.

From the community

Giles Rhys-Jones from what3words wrote in to let me know that a new partnership with Vodacom in South Africa will enable millions of residents to find their precise three-word location in an emergency. How it works is simple; as they say on their site: When dealing with callers who are struggling to describe their location, call handlers can send an SMS to the caller’s phone with a link to the what3words FindMe website. This opens a simple web page displaying three words: the what3words address for the caller’s current location. The caller reads the three words to the call handler, enabling the emergency control room to identify exactly where the caller is and to dispatch help straight to the location.

The title of this newsletter

…is from this article about how Gilmour Space Technologies in Queensland, Australia hope to launch their own space mission, inspired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. They’ve picked Far North Queensland as a launch site because of its proximity to the equator, which means rockets get that extra kick from the Earth’s spin.

Endnote

That’s it for this edition! As always, I’m happy to hear about projects you’re working on that are of relevance to this audience - send me a note. Sharing this newsletter would also be cool :)

See you next time,

Anjali