MEMBERS & VISITORS
Wake Up Young Africans and Transform The Continent
Twende Hub is a social innovation center, with the believe of collaborating with students and community members in Tanzania to identify their challenges and design & create their own solutions to their problems will contribute to a world with improved access to technologies that improve people’s lives, a stronger local economy, and a nation of innovators and problem-solvers.
Twende is a social enterprise dedicated to empowering local community members to improve their quality of life through the innovation and implementation of low-cost technologies. As an innovation center of Tanzanian students and instructors, Twende aims to merge local experience and technical knowledge into affordable innovations. Technologies built at Twende are affordable, comprised of locally available materials, and address a specific social need. Through school and community workshops, Twende supports aspiring entrepreneurs in the creation of their own solutions to community problems. Led by Tanzanian inventor Bernard Kiwia, Twende aims to be a beacon of social innovation and technological empowerment in Arusha, Tanzania and around the globe.
Very few technologies currently address the needs of rural Tanzanian communities. And those that do, often fail to substantially improve quality of life in villages for following reasons.
1. Rural technologies often are designed and manufactured abroad, leaving Tanzanian villagers unable to repair their devices, especially when materials are not locally available.
2. These technologies are not developed with a rich understanding of local needs and resources, often making them irrelevant or impractical. For example, technologies that require electricity are useless for most Tanzanian villagers who do not have access to or cannot afford electricity.
3. Most rural technologies are too expensive for the average villager.
These problems have left an estimated 30 million villagers without access to technology to charge phones, see at night, and harvest their crops. Not only would these villagers stand to benefit from more productive technologies, but so would the Tanzanian economy as a whole.
Twende technologies address the aforementioned problems through the development of intermediate technologies that
1. utilize locally available materials,
2. are designed WITH rather than FOR village communities,
3. derive out of village needs and imperative,
4. are inexpensive and affordable for villagers,
5. are able to be repaired locally.
Twende is able to develop these technologies by engaging communities through community workshops and providing vital technical support and tools through its innovation center platform.
Following the teachings of Amy Smith and her colleagues at MIT’s D-Lab, Twende has adopted a new model of community-based innovation called creative capacity building (CCB). Through technology workshops, Twende engages students and villagers in creating their own technologies to improve health and safety, save labor and time, and increase their incomes. Through an interactive, hands-on curriculum, people of all education levels are able to become active creators of technology, not just passive recipients.
A key component of the follow-up to the CCB training is a space where people can come together, apply what they have learned to design, and build technologies that can positively affect their lives. The Twende workshop ideally serves as this nexus of creativity, where aspiring inventors can learn about new technologies, develop their mechanics and design skills, prototype their ideas, create technology products, incubate micro-enterprises and obtain guidance on how to market the technologies that they create. Workshop tools are available to all participating community members and maintained through a small fee.
Prof. Oku Singer, Mechanical/Solar Engineer
INVENTION SCHOOL’S SIGNATURE SERIES
The technological progress of Africa and its diasporans was dramatically broken beginning with slavery and later through its colonization by European powers. With the arrival of the 21st century, a new era of an awakened Africa has dawned. In the graphic novel series “Invention School”, curious young African students explore their creative potential for solving everyday problems through a subset of engineering skills under the watchful and loving guidance of an expatriate African American engineering professor. Watch this uplifting graphic novel series. If you find the series and its content useful, please share widely.
GORGING YOUR LEARNING APPETITE
Powerful media giants continue feeding us steady diets of stories, games, music, and images of exploitation, mayhem, helplessness, victimization, sexism, murder, adultery, preposterous wealth, torture, drugs, deceit, vampires, zombies, thuggery, glorified gangsterism, demonic spirits, horror, war, despair, brutality, crime, vengeance, sex, addiction, psychic disorders, occultism, savagery, lust, hate, prejudicial beauty/virtue standards, and stale mind-numbing escapism. Never underestimate the power of the subliminal messaging in this media content to accustom your subconscious to your further takeover and control. The groundwork is being laid and we are being deliberately manipulated for easier subjugation. The “collusion” between Hollywood and complicit agencies like the CIA is clear. Hollywood has played a little known role as a propaganda machine for the US national security apparatus for many years. Carefully look at the proportion (you’ll be shocked) of currently available movie fare that embodies these themes rather than embodying themes that uplift, transform, and inspire. “Just coincidence”, you say? After a steady diet of this psychic fare (garbage in, garbage out), what normal person would ever be in a position or mindset to connect and collaboratively formulate creative solutions and healing to man-made problems that beset humanity, earth lifeforms, and Mother Earth herself? These incapacitating but profitable offerings by these media giants stifle any visions of progress and action we might otherwise take to deliver ourselves out of the quagmires our modern societies have created that affect the entire world. Why do these companies market and sell so much of this awful, depraved content?? Could it be:
- Predictive Programming is aimed at creating “world culture” and has been assigned to Hollywood to carry out. “Predictive Programming” refers to the use of entertainment and other cultural artifacts to introduce us to planned societal changes. As we come to see these potential changes as familiar, we also have an easier time imagining them to be normal, acceptable, and inevitable, no matter how heinous.
- Social engineering by an elite few? (neutralization and control)
- Prophecy?
- Conspiratorial takeover and mind-control through strategically embedded thought police?
- Greed? (whatever sells)
- Cultivated apathy?
- Cloaked suppression of liberating technologies through powerful diversions?
- Rampaging decadence?
- Modern “ divide and conquer” algorithms for fun and profit?
- Conditioned acceptance of streams of manufactured crises?
- Non-disruption of the current order (disorder)?
- Karma?
- Improperly tuned/authored “New World Order”?
- Stupidity?????
BUILD A BETTER DREAM
- Speak your truth or somebody will speak it for you.
- Vote with your feet and/or pocketbook
- Contribute your uplifting stories and discoveries to the global pool
- Never believe that mainstream media corporations will deliver the full truth to you as they have their own agendas
- As a free enlightened agent, regain control/understanding of the narratives affecting your well-being
- Spread awareness (articles, blogs, email, texts, advertisements, social media, art forms, workshops)
- Activist collaborations
- Dump or carefully scrutinize cable/satellite television’s agenda-packed (often subliminal) content
- Values-ladened family time stories and sharing
- Notify content creators & distributors saying what you DO want. Money is sharper than a sword.
- Dinner table/classroom discussions and viewing vetted movies like this one above.
Enjoy!
Prof. Oku Singer, Mechanical/Solar Engineer
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