Photostories:

• The Monrovia Hub

  iLab

  

  Constantly busy and enthusiastic, iLab offers training, hosts tech events and serves as a meet-up space for tech enthusiasts.

• Liberian Power

  Electrify yourself

  

  Only 0.58 per cent of Liberians are on-grid, expensively, at $0.43 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Many rely on diesel generators.

• Submarine Cable Station

  Wet and Dry

  

  On the corner of Broad and Lynch streets, downtown Monrovia, a small team watches over Liberia’s main link to the global internet.

• Cellular infrastructure

  Towers everywhere

  

  Roughly 73 percent of Africa’s land has cell phone coverage – that still leaves vast tracts of rural Africa without network access. Africa has 170,000 mobile towers now, with another 60,000 planned, according to tower company IHS Group. At an average of $200,000 each means an outlay of $12 billion.

• Computer Retail

  New or refurbished?

  

  At Next Gen Computer, Kampala, Esther demos the latest laptops, airfreighted from Dubai; meanshile, at House Party Computers, Accra, a technician tests refurbished PCs shipped from auction in the US.

• Rural IT Skills

  A walk in the tea

  

  South rift valley, Kenya is tea growing area. Kibugat village is the home of a IT skills for rural Kenya project that teaches youngsters essential IT skills at a refurbished tea plantation building.

• Rural Netcafés

  Surfing by the hour

  

  The Afrikobs internet cafe, Kabale. Six computers share a single slow wireless modem connection. A mixture of internet and general business services show that rather than a place of relaxation, the net cafe is the office for many small town Ugandans.

• First day with a PC

  Kisoro

  

  In the shadow of the Virungas volcanoes, Kisoro, in the southwest of Uganda, close to Rwanda and DR Congo, is a the gateway to Mgahinga National park, home to mountain gorillas,

• Life off the grid

  Busanza

  

  Perhaps only 23% of Ugandan homes are connected to the power grid, but mobile phones have permeated even the most rural areas.

• Digital design education

  Nairobits

  

  Mark Kamau, training coordinator at NairoBits: “We teach youth from informal settlements, about computers, from the basics all the way to multimedia design with a focus-so far- on web design. They learn Photoshop, Dreamweaver, illustrator as well as some code, in order to able to build websites.”

• Grameen Applab

  Banana Wilt Disease

  

  Near Mbarara, Uganda, Gideon finds answers for small farmers.

• Teledensity explosion

  A mobile for everyone

  

  Nokia’s ‘only connect’ handshake animation hand painted in a street advert, Mbarara, Uganda. In 2012 there were 16,356,387 mobile subscriptions in Uganda. Handset and airtime retailers are ubiquitous and

• iCow

  A diary for my cow

  

  On the outskirts of Nairobi, Su Kahumbu plans a productive future for Kenya’s small dairy farmers.

• Vodafone Ghana

  The Main Mast

  

  Umbelically joined to the engineering building, grows the centre of Vodafone Ghana’s network.

• Nairobi iHub

  Coffee and code

  

  “Eveyone comes to iHub”, says iTosh. The undisputed centre of hacker culture in Nairobi; hard to believe it’s only two years old.