Digital technologies can help to counter challenges with innovative solutions; Photo credit: re:publica/Gregor Fischer (CC BY 2.0)
Tech for Good
We live in a connected world in which digital technologies accelerate our communication, make information more accessible and production processes more transparent. At least this is what we hope for. However, only half of the world's population has access to the internet and humanity is still facing major challenges at the beginning of the 21st century: Poverty, hunger, inadequate access to education or health, conflicts and corruption are still a daily occurrence for many people.
Digital technologies can contribute innovative solutions to master such global challenges. To achieve this, shaping the digital future together with partners from Africa, Asia and Latin America is key.
With a growing young population, Africa is a continent of opportunity - young inventors and entrepreneurs are developing innovative digital applications – ranging from mobile payment systems such as M-Pesa to 3D printers made of electronic waste.
The Topic "Tech for Good" looks for inspiring contributions and asks: Does digitization provide access to education for all? Are start-ups able to save the world? Will smart sensors and apps increase the efficiency in agriculture? How can for example big data, blockchain or open source software solutions contribute to greater efficiency, transparency and equality worldwide?
The sessions can provide examples of solutions and success stories, but also discuss the challenges and risks associated with digital change. We would like to provide a stage amongst others to visionaries, techies, makers, developers, experts, innovators and creative minds from the African continent for an open dialog on the digital transformation at the re:publica Accra and include insights from across the globe. Be part and shape the global digital future!
As the main partner German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) supports re:publica Accra and the Topic ‘Tech for Good’. BMZ also supports sessions in the Topics “Female” and “Data”: HerStory - Insights from Female Leaders and Tackling Financial Crime: Open and Big Data for Investigative Journalism.
- Science & TechnologyTech for Good-Computer vision is becoming one of the focus areas in artificial intelligence (AI) to enable computers to see and perceive like humans.
In a collaboration with the Royal Holloway University, we applied deep learning to locate small scale mines in Ghana using satellite imagery, scaled training using Kubernetes and investigated their impact on surrounding populations & environment. - Politics & SocietyTech for GoodCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)-Almost half of the world’s population are online by now. But online experiences differ greatly, depending on income, geography and gender. In fragile contexts, internet usage is often constrained by power outages, high costs and a lack of digital skills. The session discusses how civil society organizations in South Sudan, Lebanon and Pakistan use digital skills training to teach women and girls how to navigate the internet safely and take full advantage of its opportunities.
- Politics & SocietyTech for Good-Once freed of the tyranny of the Twitter timeline, how we would look to ourselves? How a custom made data visualization could raise awareness on our echo chambers and the ones in our public institutions and in our elected officials? In this data clinic, the participants will be able to export/scrap and visualize in original ways, their own public Twitter data (or the one of public institutions and elected officials) to answer such questions and they also will raise and share new ones and tentative answers.
- Politics & SocietyTech for GoodCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)-Video games have become more accessible to more people, now more than ever. It's now the primary medium where people voluntarily spend time and engage other people even without materialistic motives. In 2013, Spil Games reported that 1.2 billion people are now playing games worldwide, with 700 million of those online. That number has since increased, dramatically.
In the last couple of years, the world saw the rise of social impact games such as Mini Metro, Papers Please, Democracy, This War of Mine. These games have had critically acclaim and are commercially successful without compromising their chosen advocacies.
Given the positive impact it could generate worldwide, juxtaposed with the world as we know it today, there is a an urgent need to develop more and more social impact games to serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational initiatives. - Politics & SocietyTech for GoodCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)-2 billion people worldwide are without a passport. Your identity acts as enabler to accessing education, jobs, financial inclusion, and many other governmental and business services. But how far can the individual decide what happens with their data?
India's centralized identity solution Aadhaar has shown great merits, but its centralized architecture poses risks of data leaks.
This session discusses blockchain-based solutions for self-sovereign identity, looks at their potential decentralizing personal data management from the perspective of German and European principles of privacy and informational self-determination, and contextualizese their potential use for vulnerable populations in developing economies and refugees.