Catching up on a few updates at once here, you can read about Day 2 of our trip here.

It’s 6am in Lusaka, Zambia as I write this. The last two days have been a blur as we covered over 1,700 kilometers from Dodoma to Lusaka in what can only be considered as marathon sessions from sunup to just after sundown. Fortunately, both Tanzania and Zambia have some of the best roads we’ve seen, and the motorcycles and car all behaved well with only one slow puncture the whole way. We took small breaks every 100-200km in order to rest and move around a bit, but we’re still quite sore and ready for this day to do no travel.

Parking lot mechanics in Dodoma, Tanzania

Mark, Juliana and Joel setting up the GoPro

A dawn stop on the way out of Dodoma to Iringa, Tanzania

Grabbing lunch somewhere in southern Tanzania

The border crossing from Tanzania into Zambia at Dunduma left a little something to be desired. What felt like it should have taken about 1.5 hours at most, ended up taking 3+ hours, which meant our last 50km into a campsite were done in the dark on the only section of bad road we’ve seen. People did warn us of this, so it wasn’t unexpected. However, the reason wasn’t because of long lines of trucks slowing us down, it was due to inefficiency in the process itself at both immigration and customs.

From here, our days get a little more sane, with a run down through Victoria Falls into Botswana and then finally Johannesburg. As an aside, it turns out that half-way between Nairobi and Jo’burg is almost exactly at a small town called Serenje, Zambia – 2,200km from each.

Time at Bongohive

We pushed so hard to get to Lusaka by now so that we would be here in time for the events at Bongohive, Lusaka’s tech hub, which were all scheduled for today.

1pm – Demo of BRCK (Philip Walton and Reg Orton of the BRCK team)
3pm – Meeting with Startups (Mark Kamauof the iHub UX Lab) – HCD, UX, DT
4:30pm – Meeting with Startups (Erik) – Investment readiness, experiences with Savannah Fund, getting into new markets etc
6pm – Keynote at Startup Weekend Lusaka (Erik and Juliana Rotich)

Lukongo Lindunda is the co-founder of the space, and we’ve known each other for years, since before they got it started back in 2011. I’ve been looking forward to seeing everyone here in the tech space for a while, and I’m interested in hearing what’s brewing in the startup scene.

Some of the startups that I’ve heard about from Zambia include:

• ShopZed.com
• Bantu Babel
• Venivi
• DotCom Zambia, BusTickets
• TeleDoctor
• SCND Genesis

If you’re part of the tech community in Zambia, I hope you can swing by, and we’re all looking forward to seeing you as well.

Lessons From the Trip

Since we’ve started this trip I’ve been thinking a lot about communications, as one would expect with a BRCK expedition, and especially mobile comms. We outfitted the truck with a omni-directional Poynting antenna on the front bumper, hooked up into the car, where we can also connect it to an amplifier if needed. As we drive down the road, we have a pretty good mobile WiFi hotspot, as long as we’re in range of a tower.

The mobile phone kiosk, a mainstay of rural Africa

The last few years have seen a number of countries implement a registration process to buy SIM cards (ostensibly this is for security though it’s not been proven to be useful for anything more than big brother activities by governments). Even buying a SIM card is then a process of identification (usually passport or drivers license), so you have to budget for that 30-60 minutes to get that done, since it’s usually filling out a form by hand.

Registering an MTN SIM card in Zambia

You then purchase credit for the SIM card and load it up – this is the easiest part.

Now you get into the “mystery meat” part of the process, which is how do you turn that airtime you just bought into internet credit? Each network in each country has a different way of doing this, some combination of USSD or SMS to get it going.

A couple things come to mind now when we look at the BRCK.

First, we need a terminal screen in the BRCK interface for us to do all of this from the device itself. Right now we find ourselves popping out the SIM card and using a phone (Mozilla’s 3-SIM phone is amazing for this purpose), and then inserting it back into the BRCK when done.

Second, there needs to be a database of this “airtime to internet data” information that we can all use. I’m not sure how best to get this going, but I know it would be immensely useful when you drop into a new country to have this at your fingertips.

We’re already working on the first issue, of USSD/SMS interface, but it’s complicated, so it’s taking longer than we’d like. This trip is about learning, and we’re already finding a lot of things to do better. Look for more posts on the BRCK blog from the others as well.

(By Erik)

I’m writing this blog post using my Mac, connected to a BRCK which is connected to a satellite internet connection using an Inmarsat iSavi device, somewhere about 100km from Arusha towards Dodoma. Inmarsat gave us this test device, a small unit, made for global travelers, so we could test out what worked and give them feedback on their tools. It also helps us figure out what connecting to the internet looks like when you’re beyond the edge of the mobile phone signal in Africa.

Here’s Reg, using his phone to do the same at our campground this evening:

Reg using the BRCK and iSavi in Tanzania

The Journey

We left at 5:30am from Nairobi to beat the traffic out of the city. With the beautiful new roads, we were at the Namanga border by 8am and cleared by 10am. Before you go on one of these trips, make it easy for yourself and get the following:

• Carnet de Passage for each vehicle (get this via AA)
• COMESA insurance (get via your insurance company, or buy at the border)
• International driver’s license (get via AA)
• Yellow fever card
• Passport

By noon we were in Arusha, and took a chance to see the cafe that Pete Owiti (of Pete’s Coffee in Nairobi) set up with some Tanzanians, called Africafe. If you ever find yourself in Arusha, this is the first place you should go. Great food, good coffee, right in the middle of everything.

Knowing we were only going about 100km more today, we set off around 1pm. We got to a roundabout, and I knew which direction the main road was, so even though Philip mentioned we should go right, I went left to the main road. 45 minutes later we realized my mistake when Philip checked his GPS and realized we were further away than we were supposed to be.

Lesson learned: always listen to your cofounders (especially the one with the GPS).

With many sighs, we turned around and went back to Arusha, where Reg had been smart enough to stay with the Land Rover when he realized we went the wrong way. We quickly split off in the correct direction, aiming to get to the camping spot by 4pm latest.

As we were sitting in traffic in Arusha, Joel says, “Erik, your bike is smoking.” I replied that it was likely just the car I was parked next to. Nope. Sure enough, I was leaking oil… For those of you who don’t ride motorcycles, this is the last thing you want to hear when on the front end of a 4,400km trip. I ride a 2007 Suzuki DR650 – they have some of the most bullet-proof engines, and are perfect for Africa’s roads.

Working on the DR650 in Arusha

Fortune smiled upon us, and we were pointed towards Arusha Art Limited, which turned out to be an amazing garage (the best I’ve ever seen in Africa). Their director, Hemal Sachdev helped us out by helping to troubleshoot what could be wrong, and even fabricating a high-pressure oil hose, with compression fittings on the spot. There was oil everywhere, so we washed it off and kept going.

Lesson learned: there are a lot of people willing to help you in your journey, especially if you ask nicely.

5 km down the road, I was still smoking… Thanks to Hemal’s help, we knew what the problem wasn’t. It was now that we chanced to notice that the problem seemed to be coming from the timing chain setting hole. We realized this could be filled by a normal M5 screw, so got trucking to the campground where we could let the engine cool down and screw it in.

Now, I sit here in Wild Palms Camp, some place we saw on the side of the road near the Tarangiri game reserve. For 10,000 Tanzania Shillings ($6) each, you get a patch of ground to put a tent, there is a banda with table/chairs, and there are even some showers and toilets. Not real camping, but definitely nice after a day on the bike!

The BRCK team is back in Nairobi! We’ve just spent six days testing BRCKs in the wild and learning from those who use our products to solve problems they face everyday. We’ve been a bit remiss in providing regular updates as we go. It turns out Jinja, Uganda, is an exciting place, and we were running from sunup ‘til sundown to fit everything in, leaving little time for blogging. We’ve now got hours of footage and records of conversations to go through, and we’ll be filling you in over the next week or two.

Our last update concerned a school on Lingira island in Lake Victoria. Despite having only a small village on the island, the school’s 12 teachers serve over 250 students from neighboring islands, too.

One of the head teachers, Frederick, showed us around – his passion for chemistry was apparent in the way he described the school’s water filtration system (using electrolytic chlorination to disinfect the water) and the solar power system that runs it. He was extremely gracious in sharing his hopes for delivering more practical, hands-on content from the web (he has his physics students building rheostats from scratch, determined to help them build an understanding of technology, even if it’s not readily available locally).

We tested a number of different types of antennas on Lingira and got the school connected. With the help of Hackers for Charity, over the next few weeks the “Living Hope” Secondary School will be building new content from the web into their curriculum, and inspiring their students to ever greater heights of achievement.

Context is Everything

We’ve been working with educators and content providers here in Kenya over the last six months to understand how technology can make their lives easier instead of harder. Why would we need to go all the way to Uganda to do the same, some might ask? Despite being only a 15-hour drive apart, (give or take a couple hours at the border) Jinja and Nairobi offer very different contexts for deploying edtech solutions.

Much of Kenya is very dry, with dust and heat being a major concern for electronics, both things the BRCK is designed to handle. In Uganda, with an average annual rainfall of over 150cm in the highlands (compared to Kenya’s average of 100cm, mostly concentrated near the border), water and humidity are greater concerns. The BRCK performed admirably in these conditions, with no noticeable moisture buildup in the case despite 30°C heat, 96% humidity, boat spray, and even being dropped in the floor of the raft.

(Note – the BRCK is NOT waterproof. Do NOT submerge your BRCK, leave it out in the rain, or expose it to overly wet conditions for long periods of time.)

In addition to different environmental conditions, the teachers we met in Uganda have unique goals and face different constraints. Not being educators ourselves, we built the BRCK as a platform for delivering any kind of content. While our partners at eLimu are working to deliver a custom package that conforms to the Kenyan curriculum via tablets, and Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” TED prize wish is seeking to provide access to the entirety of the web, Johnny at Hackers for Charity introduced us to Luom and David from Karamoja.org, working in northern Uganda near the border with South Sudan. Because even a 3G connection is difficult to achieve where they work, they are interested in blending online and offline content through the RACHEL platform that delivers offline versions of Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and other content packages.

We didn’t originally think of the BRCK as an offline solution, but the Karamoja.org team are excited enough about the ability to store content on the BRCK and periodically sync it with updates via WiFi from a drone or regular visits from staff to areas with a stronger signal, they made the 10-hour journey from Karamoja to Jinja to tell us what they want the BRCK to do. It was deeply humbling to see their dedication to bringing the same opportunities for learning to the children of rural Uganda that much of the rest of the world take for granted, and it’s these sorts of innovative ideas – that come from locals with years of experience working in their own communities – that drive us to design in Africa, for Africa, and to get the engineering and design team out of the office as much as possible.

Teachers Just Want to Teach

One of the primary reasons Johnny Long founded Hackers for Charity was the realization that technology offered boundless opportunities for learning, but only if teachers know how to use it. The schools in Uganda tend not to have IT departments, so he rallied the hacker community to provide their skill sets to help teachers focus on teaching, and leave the tech to the geeks. He now has a global volunteer network of programmers and hackers working to make technology simpler and easier to use.

One of the educators he introduced us to, Lisa Coggin – who helps run a number of schools north of Jinja – emphasized the need for a push-button solution to online content delivery. Teachers don’t have the time to sort out IP addresses and subnet masks, and even terms such as “dashboard” are not automatically intuitive to those working outside the tech sector. We’ve been pushing hard at BRCK to redesign the way people connect to the internet, and Lisa’s feedback on her experience with the BRCK was invaluable in steering us towards ways to further simplify our interface.

Partners in Connectivity

Ultimately, our trip to Jinja was a resounding success. Our hosts at Hackers for Charity were phenomenally generous, and we can’t thank those who took the time to share their experiences, thoughts, and hopes with us enough. We also took some time to have fun testing a couple other uses of the BRCK involving sensors and remotely operated vehicles, which we’ll get into in our next posts, but more than anything, we’re thrilled to see how excited everyone we met is about the BRCK, and to see the promise of BRCK+ED making a real difference in the future of learning in Africa.

Those of you that have been following our blog for a while know that a number of our partners work in the education technology sphere. Today, we went back to a school in Kawangware that we first visited in April with eLimu, a Kenyan edtech startup that introduced a tablet program to help primary school students prepare for their exams.

(Read the original post at: http://brck.com/2014/04/our-problem-is-internet-on-brcks-in-schools/#.VBbj3UtGzwI)

When asked how the tablets were working back in April, the school’s headmaster Peter told us, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet.” The school had a WiFi router/modem installed in the office, where a reasonably high-speed cable connection was available, but they were unable to get the signal in the classrooms. To use the tablets, students had to gather outside near the small office to get a strong enough connection. When the weather was bad or the sun was too bright, the tablets couldn’t be used.

Several days ago, Peter’s school got a BRCK. By running an Ethernet cable from their modem to the BRCK, they now have internet access in three classrooms. They can use the tablets when it is raining, when the sun is hot and bright, or even when the power goes out thanks to the BRCK’s battery and 3G failover. Today, the students were watching a video about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s.

In Africa, it often seems that relatively small things derail big plans. Tablets can’t be used due to the sun’s glare, routers are rendered useless by voltage spikes and power outages. By addressing some of these small issues, we hope the BRCK can play a part in bringing bigger plans to fruition. We’ll bring you further updates from Peter’s school as they continue to try out new ways of learning from the worldwide web.

— — —

Want to get involved? BRCK and eLimu are looking to scale up by connecting 50 schools to the internet and providing them with tablets for learning. We also want to develop a caching system on the BRCK that could cut the cost of providing the same content to multiple tablets from ~$3 per student to less than $0.10.

We’re looking for someone who can help fund this project, so if that’s you, let us know!

This weekend Reg, Philip and I took off for the Nguruman Escarpment, which is about a four hour drive outside of Nairobi. Our goal was to field test a BRCK with some friends of ours, Philip and Katy Leakey, who live in a tented camp at the top of the Ngurman escarpment, which is on the edge of the network.

Nairobi to Nguruman route, with elevation. Some areas at 31% grades.

The town of Ngurumani sits at the base of the escarpment, and you rise 3,000 feet on a rough dirt road in order to get to their camp. The Leakeys use solar and generator power, and the only way they can get internet is using either spotty 3g dongles, or very expensive (and slow) VSAT services. It’s not ideal, and for a couple who run some amazing businesses with global reach, that grow wealth in their Masai community, it’s a real problem to not be connected to the internet consistently.

The Journey

Early Sunday morning, we set out. I had done this drive in a car before, but wanted to see if I could do it on the motorcycle too, so both Philip and I rode out on bikes while Reg followed in the Land Rover. It’s an incredibly scenic trip, as you go through the dry, Masai country, over the sodium flats of Lake Magadi with their pink and white ponds, and into the back country. The views from the escarpment are majestic, and the air is clean and crisp, unlike Nairobi.

Coming down a steep and rocky hill overlooking Lake Magadi

Reg in the Land Rover at Lake Magadi

Philip crossing a stream

The good news was that we did the ride with no meaningful problems.

The bad news was that I was unprepared for just how difficult the climb up to the top of the escarpment is. In a car it’s tough, but 4 wheels give you some balance, as well as much needed traction when you get to the really steep grades that have a lot of sand beneath you. As if courting disaster, I also had forgotten to change my tires on my motorcycle to knobbies until too late, so was stuck going up in city tires. Not a good idea. There’s a part of the road that gets to 31 percent grade, with S-curves and if you slow down, you’re in trouble.

I ended up stalling out on this one particularly steep portion, and was exhausted trying to keep it upright, and push the bike forward as it dug itself deeper into the sand and gravel. Finally, Reg caught up with me and was able to help push as I got it going again, and we were able to get to the top without any more issues. The way back down was just a controlled slide, as the brakes helped, but you couldn’t actually stop yourself from progressing downwards. One particular S-curve remains engraved in my memory, since that’s where a cobra dropped from a bush next to me. Fortunately it was small, and wanted to get away from me as much as I did from it, so we parted amicably.

The Field Test

We carried with us an assortment of large and small antennas, and we were particularly keen to try out the new ones from Poynting Antenna in South Africa. We also brought the normal BRCK, Sandstorm case and our Wilson antenna amp (booster). Beyond that, we carried our standard medical kit, tools, SIM cards and water.

Using a Yagi from Poynting Antenna

The main antenna we used was the large, 1 meter-long, cast aluminium Yagi antenna by Poynting. It’s big, tough and not easy to pack around with you, but it gets the best gain. We were easily able to reach out and grab the signals from the mobile phone towers about 4-5 kilometers away, and we got 90% or 54dBi.

It turns out that you can get three mobile phone connections from the Leakey’s. Safaricom has a decent signal, but the tower that serves the people in that community has no internet connection, to that was a dud. Orange also has a tower, and supposedly the internet data connection does work on it, but it wasn’t a strong signal and we didn’t have any luck with it. Airtel, on the other hand, had a good signal and had a data connection.

Philip and Reg getting the BRCK working at the Leakey’s camp

Lessons Learned

While we had strong signal, we had two issues that we needed to solve, and only an hour to do it before we had to head back down the hill to make it back to Nairobi before dark.

First, we mainly use Orange and Safaricom internally, and didn’t have an Airtel SIM card with us. Fortunately Katy had one, so we were able to use it. This was an oversight on our part, and we’ll stock a couple of these Airtel SIMs in the future.

Second, the Airtel SIM had no credit on it. Since all of us carry phones that hold micro- or nano-SIMs, we had no way of topping it up either. An easy solution is that we’ll carry a simple phone with us that we can do this with in the future, but we also want to explore how we can enable this same top-up activity using the local (non-cloud) dashboard of the BRCK.

Third, that not all towers work, some give bad information. Just because you get a signal does not mean that you are connected to the internet, even if it says “Edge” or “3G” on your phone.

All-in-all, it was a good excursion, a chance to eat our own dogfood outside the comfort of Nairobi and the iHub. It was a reminder to be more prepared (in both the journey and the field test), and also a great opportunity to see some less well-traveled parts of Kenya.

The BRCKs view of the valley

BRCK’s founding team has a long history of making an impact – from Ushahidi to the iHub.  BRCK is of the same ethos as these other ventures, but a different business model.  BRCK is a for-profit company.  The founding team might not have realized it at the outset – but they’re not the only Kenyans who feel confident that the BRCK’s for-profit model will make them money.

The Usalama Bridge Youth Reform group, based in Kibera, is banking on the BRCK to help them generate funds to open a cyber café through a collaboration with the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI).

KDI is a non-profit organization that works with underserved communities by collaborating with residents to design and transform public spaces.  At each site, KDI partners with community groups who propose concepts for the buildings.

At one of KDI’s recent project sites, the Usalama youth group proposed building a cyber café.  Their pitch was accepted, and the final project will feature space for a cyber café in addition to a sanitation block, a small playground and a daycare center.

The cyber café business model will be tested through a partnership with BRCK.  KDI and the Usalama youth group will receive a BRCK on loan for six months to see if they can make money by selling internet services in Kibera.

The project is also backed by the youth themselves.  The Usalama group started a savings and loan group in August of 2013, and has collected over 42,000 shillings, some of which will be used to launch the business.

Through research and hustle, the Usalama youth have gathered insights about the current cyber cafés in their neighborhood and their potential business strategy.  According to Usalama:

• No one is using a modem or a fiber connection in Kibera.
• Most cyber cafes spend 3,000 to 5,000 shillings a month for data, but Usalama is weighing the risk of buying a 10,000 shilling bundle to get the cost per-MB at a less expensive price.
• Cyber cafes also typically forbid downloading movies and music. Usalama knows that these types of downloads, while requiring a lot of data, can help start other businesses by copying and reselling the movie and music files on DVDs.

While the dream of the Usalama members is brick and mortar cyber café, the start-up costs of acquiring computers and desks are quite high.  “We need to start somewhere,” says Pascal, one of the leaders of the Usalama. To test their idea, Usalama is going to experiment with buying data and selling internet access through the BRCK where groups already gather – like schools, restaurants and sporting matches.  They are also interested in planning their own events and providing internet access to attendees.   “We cannot wait for the customers to come,” Pascal says.

*KDI is assisting with interior design of the cyber café, helping get cost evaluations for the build and acquiring laptops and desks through fundraising and partnerships. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch with KDI directly at [email protected].

 Meghan Lazier is a summer UX fellow with BRCK.  She is currently a graduate student at School of Visual Arts in the MFA Design for Social Innovation program.

What does it take to launch an e-learning initiative in remote schools in Kenya?  Last week I packed my bags and drove four hours northwest of Nairobi to Isiolo to find out.  BRCK was invited on this exploratory trip as a potential technology partner by eLimu, an ed-tech company based in Nairobi that is bringing innovative curriculum to schools.

The eLimu application runs on tablet devices is designed to help supplement classroom teaching in all six-subject areas tested by the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE).  With animated characters guiding students through the lessons, children are kept engaged by singing songs, taking quizzes and watching animated explanations about challenging concepts.  It also comes with additional curriculum on peace building, agriculture, civics and human rights.

Each November, Kenyan students take a four-day exam in order to receive their KCPE and receive a high school placement.  When results are announced each year, Isiolo is consistently near the bottom of the rankings, and local politicians started to look at possible solutions.  During their research, they found eLimu.  During beta testing phase, eLimu has seen KCPE test results dramatically increase, and this is exactly why eLimu was invited to Isiolo on behalf of the Deputy Governor of Isiolo County.

I spent two days in Isiolo with eLimu and another technology provider, offering satellite and TV white space Internet solutions, to figure out how to implement a pilot test of eLimu in Isiolo.

So after two days, what did I discover?  BRCK has some major benefits as a technology provider for ed-tech initiatives:

Low start-up costs.  Pilot projects tend to be lean.  To launch a pilot test in three Isiolo schools reaching just over 1,200 students – without considering the cost of data – the start-up cost is just over $4,000 for the BRCKs, antennas and solar chargers.  While it’s extreme, compare that to the approximately $300 million it costs to build, launch and maintain a satellite Internet connection.

Data solutions.  BRCK has secured inexpensive data plans and bundles that are easy to purchase.  Since the tablet content will likely be viewed multiple times, the BRCK can cache the pages through its internal storage features, which requiring less data.

Coordinated monitoring and evaluation.  By registering all of the pilot BRCK devices to the project, a government official could easily log-in to the online BRCK dashboard to see which BRCKs are connected, how long they have been online and if more data needs to be purchased.  Both eLimu and the local government can see real-time information and intervene if needed.

Simplicity.  eLimu cannot introduce technology solutions into schools that are complicated.  Simplicity and ease-of-use are key. Period.

While there are multiple technology solutions to choose from, BRCK has the potential to bring connectivity to projects that can strengthen the future of Kenya’s education system.

 Meghan Lazier is a summer UX fellow with BRCK.  She is currently a graduate student at School of Visual Arts in the MFA Design for Social Innovation program.

I had a meeting yesterday with some people who had just come to Nairobi from Lagos, Nigeria. They kept mentioning the problem with power outages and how this happened multiple times each day. We’re no strangers to power outages in Nairobi either, so I commiserated with them and then went on to discuss the differences in power outages between these two large African cities.

In Nairobi, when we lose power it’s usually for a few hours, but that can extend to a day or two. My own experience in Lagos was that we lost power many times during the day, but for shorter periods of time.

A power transformer blows up along Juja road in Nairobi

We live in a world of poor infrastructure, with massive growing demand, which means that the cities we live in won’t be able to keep up. This problem is sometimes exacerbated in Africa, in particular, when you move beyond the cities as the distribution is not condensed, making it more expensive to extend our traditional lines of power. (As an aside, thank goodness for micro- and village-level power programs that are starting to pop up, as they can meet this distributed problem with a distributed product).

The power just doesn’t go off and on either, it’s not black and white, there are shades of brown here. Sometimes there is one phase on (brownouts), which means that we’re getting a small trickle of power that some bulbs can give you a nice yellowish glow from, but nothing else will work. Other times we have power spikes, which fry our electronics.

Case in point:
Last year in August, all of the power in Kenya went off, the whole country. Apparently, you have to spool up energy from the different generators to the country at intervals, which slowly ramps up the power to what is needed. Some genius at KPLC (our power supplier) decided to grab the big switch and crank it on for the whole country at once, at which point we had 400v of electricity coursing through our lines for 3-5 minutes.

Zuku, the largest terrestrial, consumer ISP in Nairobi lost 3,000 routers that day.

It was on that day we realized we needed to make sure that the BRCK power could handle 400v.

This is why we design and engineer the BRCK in Kenya. We had been building the power system to be smart enough to handle almost everything thrown at us, including those brownouts and the continual on/off switching of the power line, but we hadn’t considered that crazy of a power spike for that duration.

Reliable internet is directly related to having reliable power

So, the problems of crazy fluctuations of power is one thing, but it isn’t the only issue you have to think about as you build for reliable internet connectivity in a device in Africa. For us, we also have to think of how you charge it and what you charge it from.

When we went up to Norther Kenya on our expedition for the eclipse over Lake Turkana, we had to charge the BRCK off of anything we could find. This included the car cigarette lighter, connection via alligator clips to the car battery directly and solar panels.

Powering the BRCK in Kenya’s northern desert

The BRCK power specification are the following:

• 4-18V power input
• 8,000 mAh LiPo Battery
• MicroUSB and GPIO expander power inputs
BCS 1.2 Compliant Charging input
• Reverse voltage and over voltage surge protection
• Solar input compatible with cell saturation protection

Whether you use the BRCK as your access point in an office, or the BRCK serves as your internet connectivity device for syncing tablets at schools, or you use it as a journalist traveling to out of the way parts of the world, or you use it to send back data from a water pump in a village, we’ve thought of your problem.

Your internet connectivity is not just a matter of finding a signal, it’s also about finding power.

Yesterday we spent the morning taking a few new pictures of the BRCK, since there had been some cosmetic changes to the design (we moved the light on the top, and put the power button on the side). One of the first places we stopped was a school in Kawangware, one of the lower income areas of Nairobi.

Over the past few months, more and more people who deal with schools and education have been reaching out to us. There is a growing demand for connected devices, for administrators, teachers and students.

We intend to see BRCK coupled with tablets and Raspberry Pi solutions in Africa’s classrooms.

Making Digital Education More Efficient

Nivi Mukherjee runs eLimu, a Kenyan organization that designs a tablet-based Android app which helps prepare primary school students to pass their standardized exam to get into secondary school. They’ve been doing fantastic work for the past 3 years, and their program is really getting off the ground.

One issue that Nivi has with the system is that each of the tablets in the school has to have its own SIM card to download the most recent content (daily/weekly). You can imagine how expensive this gets with 50 devices at a time.

This is where Nivi and I sat down to discuss where the BRCK can fit in. We’re trying to see if having a single BRCK in a school like this can help reduce costs. The BRCK can download the data/information (and upload too, if needed), each day at midnight. The next morning, instead of each child with a tablet updating to the local tower, instead they would just connect over WiFi to the BRCK and get the latest content sync.

That’s just one way we think it could be useful, not to mention what can be done by the administrators during the day to get more reliable email and internet connectivity using the device. In fact, as we were leaving the school we asked Peter the headmaster how his tablet education program was going. His response was, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet“.

Customize an Ed-Tech Solution

Recently another education-tech focused individual got in touch with us, this time from Uganda, by the name of Johnny Long. He’s trying to figure out a solution that takes hardware like Raspberry Pi, Chromebooks, Arduino and solar, and then mixes them with software from RACHEL, Khan Academy (via Ka-Lite) and GCFLearnFree for schools that have poor infrastructure. It’s a hard problem, made harder by internet connectivity issues.

Because of his incredible depth of knowledge on software development and firmware, we’re ensuring he too gets an early BRCK as well.

The power of the BRCK isn’t just in the redundancy and ruggedness of the device, it’s in the fact that you can customize it to your needs. What’s needed in semi-rural Uganda is not the same as what’s needed in urban Ghana, nor are the needs the same between public and private schools.

For this reason we created the BRCK Cloud with an API so that software developers can customize their own software for the BRCKs that they run. We also provide a GPIO port which allows people to customize with other hardware, like solar, additional ports, more hard drive space and especially items like Raspberry Pi. We know we can’t come up with all of the ways to use and customize the BRCK on our own, and it’s in this industry where we feel a lot of great new ideas will flourish.

Whether you’re doing something for one school or you’re running a massive program such as OneBillion in Malawi and beyond, the custom software and hardware connectivity needs can be met with a BRCK.

I’m looking forward to shipping the first BRCK devices out to people who run these programs in the next few weeks, as they represent something we cherish about deeply about the BRCK. You see, our vision is a world connected, where the last-mile of internet connectivity is as seamless for someone living in Africa as it is in Europe or the US. There’s no where more in need of this than schools.

My business partner for many years, Juliana Rotich, gave a great talk at TED last year in which she talked about the unequal distribution of information globally during the communications revolution that we’re currently all a part of. Africa has started to overcome the infrastructure barriers to be a part of this digital revolution with undersea cables, smarter mobile phones, and a wireless ecosystem that is sometimes better than it’s Western counterparts.

There are still challenges however, and Juliana points out the fact that it costs 6x more to call from Kenya to our neighbors in Uganda than it does to call from Kenya to the US or UK.

Today Juliana sent me a link to Thingful.net, made by Umbrellium out of the UK. It’s “a discoverability engine for The Public Internet of Things (IOT), providing a geographical index of where things are, who owns them, and how and why they are used.”

Thingful.net – mapping the internet of things

Here we see a very visual example of this “unequal distribution” as there are millions more devices and things sending data around the world from the US and EU than there is in Africa.

This doesn’t need to be this way, and we think that devices like BRCK will help people get more sensors, machines and other devices connected. It’s not just about connectivity, it’s also about power and sensors and devices made hardy enough for the environment in which they reside.

From Juliana:

When I saw http://thingful.net (link provided by Bruce Sterling) I could not help but remember that major human intellectual and technological leaps; from classical antiquity, renaissance, scientific revolution, industrial revolution, analytic revolution, digital revolution, and now what others term the next industrial revolution of the Internet of Things; these revolutions have not evenly distributed across continents and nations. It is still the case today.

A quick look at the distribution of the IOT on Thingful.net, and you can see why what we do with BRCK could one day help to fill in the dots of the IOT universe in Africa and other developing countries.

The role of the BRCK and other champions of connectivity in Africa is to change the status quo and extend connectivity to the edges. It is a hard problem to tackle but one that we must tackle, I believe that Africa can be part and parcel of this industrial revolution, in a unique way that helps to bring together data from sensors, instrument complex systems and at the end of the day… engineer for real world problems.