Meet BRCK, Internet access built for Africa

Tech communities are booming all over Africa, says Nairobi-based Juliana Rotich, cofounder of the open-source software Ushahidi. But it remains challenging to get and stay connected in a region with frequent blackouts and spotty Internet hookups. So Rotich and friends developed BRCK, offering resilient connectivity for the developing world.

Living in Africa is to be on the edge,

metaphorically, and quite literally

when you think about connectivity before 2008.

Though many human intellectual and technological leaps

had happened in Europe and the rest of the world,

but Africa was sort of cut off.

And that changed, first with ships

when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution

and also the Industrial Revolution.

And now we've got the digital revolution.

These revolutions have not been evenly distributed

across continents and nations.

Never have been.

Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables

that connect Africa to the rest of the world.

What I find amazing is that Africa

is transcending its geography problem.

Africa is connecting to the rest of the world

and within itself.

The connectivity situation has improved greatly,

but some barriers remain.

It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be.

In 2008, one of the problems that we faced

was lack of information flow.

There was a media blackout in 2008,

when there was post-election violence in Kenya.

It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.

So we came together and we created software

called Ushahidi.

And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.

I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators.

This is David and Erik.

I call them brothers from another mother.

Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.

And we worked together first with building

and growing Ushahidi.

And the idea of the software was to gather information

from SMS, email and web, and put a map

so that you could see what was happening where,

and you could visualize that data.

And after that initial prototype,

we set out to make free and open-source software

so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.

All the while, we also wanted to give back

to the local tech community that helped us

grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days.

And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi,

an actual physical space

where we could collaborate,

and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.

We did that with the support of different organizations

like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.

And we were able to grow this software footprint,

and a few years later it became

very useful software,

and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti

where citizens could indicate where they are

and what their needs were,

and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis

and the tsunami in Japan.

Now, this year the Internet turns 20,

and Ushahidi turned five.

Ushahidi is not only the software that we made.

It is the team, and it's also the community

that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee.

We did not imagine that there would be this many maps

around the world.

There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps,

and even environmental monitoring crowd maps.

We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya

and that it has some use to people around the world

trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with.

There is more that we're doing to explore this idea

of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen,

if I share the information with whatever device that I have,

could inform you about what is going on,

and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture

of what's going on.

I moved back to Kenya in 2011.

Erik moved in 2010.

Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago

where there was abundant Internet access.

I had never had to deal with a blackout.

And in Kenya, it's a very different reality,

and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress

and the digital revolution is the electricity problem.

The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this

can be, let's just say very annoying.

Blackouts are not fun.

Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden

the power goes out,

your Internet connection goes down with it,

so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem,

how do I switch back?

And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again.

Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now,

and other parts of Africa.

The other problem that we're facing

is that communication costs are also still a challenge.

It costs me five Kenyan shillings,

or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China.

Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?

Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost

to connect within Africa.

And also, when traveling within Africa,

you've got different settings for different mobile providers.

This is the reality that we deal with.

So we've got a joke in Ushahidi

where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."

[Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.]

What if we could overcome the problem

of unreliable Internet and electricity

and reduce the cost of connection?

Could we leverage the cloud?

We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi.

Could we leverage these technologies

to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?

So we looked at the modem,

an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet,

and asked ourselves why

the modems that we are using right now

are built for a different context, where you've got

ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity,

yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury.

We wanted to redesign the modem

for the developing world, for our context,

and for our reality.

What if we could have connectivity with less friction?

This is the BRCK.

It acts as a backup to the Internet

so that, when the power goes out,

it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network.

Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive.

It's actually everywhere.

Most towns at least have a 3G connection.

So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this.

The other reason that we built this

is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours

of battery left, so you can continue working,

you can continue being productive,

and let's just say you are less stressed.

And for rural areas, it can be

the primary means of connection.

The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play

when we wondered how can we use the cloud

to be more intelligent so that

you can analyze the different networks,

and whenever you switch on the backup,

you pick on the fastest network,

so we'll have multi-SIM capability

so that you can put multiple SIMs,

and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on,

and if the up time on that is not very good,

then you hop onto the next one.

The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere.

With load balancing, this can be possible.

The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors --

is this idea that you could have an on-ramp

for the Internet of things.

Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this.

It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach

a satellite module so that you could have

Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.

Out of adversity can come innovation,

and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers

in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure?

And for us, we begin with solving the problem

in our own backyard in Kenya.

It is not without challenge.

Our team has basically been mules carrying components

from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations

with customs border agents.

"What are you carrying?"

And the local financing is not

part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects.

So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that,

through the support of many people,

not only here but online,

the BRCK has been Kickstarted,

and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.

I will close by saying that, if we solve this

for the local market, it could be impactful

not only for the coders in Nairobi

but also for small business owners

who need reliable connectivity,

and it can reduce the cost of connecting,

and hopefully collaboration within African countries.

The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy

are connectivity and entrepreneurship.

The BRCK is our part

to keep Africans connected,

and to help them drive the global digital revolution.

Thank you.

(Applause)