NTV has done a small feature on the Rural Internet Kiosk.

http://www.ntv.co.ke/News/-/471778/875910/-/view/DEFAULT/-/13v7ogwz/-/in...

Although they did not get the fact straight, it was nice to have media attention. Here are the basic facts: The Rural Internet Kiosk is the "brainchild" of Intersat Africa, an African internet service provider. Jawahar Patani is the creator of the RIK. To ensure implementation success, Intersat Africa has partnered with Voices of Africa for Sustainable Development to provide the programming and manage the project implementations. This implementation is being run by the local community based organization, Voices of Diani, a group completely comprised of local youth. Negotiations are underway with the Youth Enterprise Development Fund for a wider scale implementation as they seek to empower the youth by making the access to finance available for these small businesses.

Hey Everyone!

I am a recently graduated Masters student from Stanford University (USA). Our group of Oxford University and Stanford University students have come together to create a nonprofit startup that plans to use telemedicine to allow individuals in rural Kenya to manage their own healthcare. We are finalists for a $10,000 prize from Advanta Corp. Winning this competition will give us the money we need to do the initial fieldwork and set up the pilot project. Please help us get this money by voting for our idea on the competition website: http://www.ideablob.com/ideas/5535-Telemedicine-for-Rural-Kenya

Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages

ENTASOPIA, Kenya — The road from Nairobi winds 100 miles to this town deep in Masai country. The asphalt gives way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing over broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.

Muhammad Yunus’s vistion is the total eradication of poverty from the world. 'Grameen', he claims, 'is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long'. This work is a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The World Bank recently acknowledged that 'this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity'.

An African Kamba woman, with seven children (5 of them below the age of 18) in her late thirties or early fourties passed away on Wednesday 1st October 2008. She had been unwell for a long time before she got seriously ill from May this year. She was admitted to Machakos District hospital(in Eastern Province, Kenya) before she was transferred to St. Mary's Mission Hospital, Langata (Nairobi), where she died. She was HIV+!

Before she died, she was the family bread winner! Her husband passed away three years ago due to liver failure or a related desease; he was an alchoholic (changaa -a local brew- drinker)! The family relied on subsistence farming on their very small piece of land.