Speaker at the ASME 2015

ASME2015 Kajsa-Hallberg-AduI have been invited to speak at the Vodafone African SME Summit 2015. The summit takes place 5-7 November, 2015 and has the theme; “Dreaming Africa”.

 

I will be speaking from the BloggingGhana/Social Media perspective in the panel called “Changing the conversation on Africa’s media front” on Thursday 5 Nov, 2.05-2.45pm  My co-panelists are Bernard Avle, CitiFm and Teophilus Yartey, Graphic Business.

Other speakers are Emmanuel Gamor of Impact Accra Hub, Nana Akosua Hanson of YFM, and Frederick Deegbe, Heel The World Shoes and many more!

I will share my slides here after my presentation.

Hope to see you there!

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Reference on Dumsor

My colleague Steve (by the way he has a blog with beautiful photos) informed me my blog post from a few weeks back was a reference in the Wikipedia article on Dumsor!

Here is the evidence!

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Interview for Social Media Week Lagos

Screenshot 2015-01-27 11.31.23Today I am interviewed for Social Media Week Lagos on how BloggingGhana started , what has happened since and my view on social media in Ghana. 

Q: Against other major countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya where a majority of its youth are using digital and social media to grow, strengthen their businesses, and to move the country forward. Where does Ghana square up? 

A: Yeah, the same thing is happening in Ghana. I think the development is best described as revolutionary; now you can run a successful business from home powered by Instagram, through applications such as Google Maps you can find things you could not find before, by using Facebook and Twitter young people in Ghana are increasing their political engagement. Maybe a difference to the African countries you mentioned, Ghana is much smaller. It has several advantages, one is the tech scene is like a family. We all know each other.

I am happy to see that social media communities are really taking root on the continent, there is a SMW for Copenhagen, London and LA and many other places as well, and in Ghana, we have our BlogCamp that launched last week Friday.

See all of my answers here.

 

 

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My Blogging Year 2014

It has been a sad year in many ways. A year of death, disease and loss for me and many others. I have also worked hard on my four careers – social media, research, teaching and family life!

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Sad moments
The year started on a sad note for me, my blog had gone missing. I learned to do more regular backups.

End of the Word?

Then people died. People that were amazing, successful and well-known or I just knew well. Komla Dumor died in January, Shirley Temple (who had a surprising link to Ghana I found out) in February, in April my favourite author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in August Emmanuel Okyere, in November my dear Godmother who had been sick for some time passed away. In December, I lost fellow obruni blogger Mad in Ghana. Ebola hit some countries in West Africa but affected us all.


Blog scoops
Getting to debate on Twitter with a sitting minister of state was amazing, although I was smashed pretty hard over the head by Hanna Tetteh, Ghana’s minister of Foreign Affairs in a debate about the tourism policy. Another citizen journalism highlight was when I broke the news on the hole in the Accra-Tema motorway on my blog.


Plenty Politics
Current debates in Ghana covered on my blog included if a government university should be allowed to charge a toll to enter its campus, the State of the Nation address, race, women in electoral politics, inflation, the world cup, power problems and corruption. Many times we laughed and cried at the same time at our issues…


I worked hard!
My work was covered on my blog as well. For instance, my writing process and a one month stay at the Nordic Africa institute, teaching social theory at Ashesi University College. I wrote an article about Nigerian political protests and tweeted in English from Almedalen in Sweden. I also attended a conference, seminars and a workshop.


BloggingGhana stuff
We had a fast year! We were mentioned in The Guardian, got our own office or hub, organised BlogCamp and BlogAwards…


Personal
I also branched out into Instagram and Pinterest and had the most active year ever on Twitter.
But most importantly, I became the mother of another girl! 


Thank you for reading my blog in 2014! I will be back in 2015 with much more…


See earlier yearly summaries: 2012, 2011
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Ghana-Time and Clifford Owusu

The other day I wrote a tweet about how Ghana-time is not always coming late…

I think it has been one of my most retweeted tweets ever. However, not at all as popular as Ghanaian YouTube comedian Clifford Owusu’s latest clip – which has been watched 250 000 times. I can understand why …

 

If you want to know more about Clifford Owusu, OkayAfrica recently did a nice interview with him. He talked about his motivation:

– Honestly, I really do enjoy just making people happy—that’s really it, no other motive. That’s what inspires me. I like to see people smile. Do you know how powerful a person is that can people smile? They can get whatever they want.

Happy holidays!

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For Fellow Lovers of Wax Print: KajsaHA on Pinterest

I adore Ghanaian clothes, modern Africa style, and have collected my fav models and brands on Pinterest* (Board: Modern Africa), follow me there if you also love colors, sharp cuts and wax print!

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Except for clothes, I also pin playgroundsgarden ideas and food porn!

*Pinterest is a superb tol for visual folks who like to look at inspirational photos and how-to-articles before embarking on a new project (new haircut, planting an avocado, baking a chocolate cake, getting married). I use Pinterest instead of buying expensive magazines!

 

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25 Questions on Entrepreneurship

Screen Shot 2013-05-24 at 10.55.17 PMMy blogging friend Kobbie has started a project asking people in Ghana tech / entrepreneurial / life questions such as What does the internet mean to you? (Q2),  What’s the biggest thing you struggle with as an entrepreneur? (Q 11) and What does seeing the world mean to you? (Q 15).

You can read my 25 answers here, however here is a preview:

12.  What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done as an entrepreneur?  Bought 200 bananas.”

Edward, Ato and Rodney are other participants.

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Accra the Alphabetic Journey: Video Poetry

Someone who left Ghana just sent me this video on Facebook and reported “feeling blue” after watching the two minutes and forty-two seconds of imagery from Accra and hearing a voice over matter-of-factedly reading out what we see: “Kelewele”, “Osu” and “Woodin” over a faint classical music piece in the background.

I rather felt happy that someone took the time to in video poetry (isn’t that the best description?) chronicle the Accra of today (except for an pre 2007 Cedi bill) and put it together for all of us to realize we are sharing something, maybe at times kind of flawed, dusty and oily, but it is ours!

What did you think of the video?

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Blogger of the Week : Kajsa HA!

This week, I am featured as BloggingGhana‘s Blogger of the Week, BOW for short. So what does being BOW entail?

Well, first of all, it is a highly prestigeous nomination! I am only the third blogger in Ghana to be granted this honor! Earlier BOWs are Nana Darkoa/Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women and Ato/Mighty African. It involves the group highlighting my blog on their Facebook page and on Twitter (@BloggingGhana), sharing selected blog posts (so far, they have picked up on when I saw Obama and a very special love story). I will also contribute with a post on why I blog and on Friday, there is a live “Twitterview” where questions people have posted on Facebook or Twitter will be put to me!

What would you like to ask me?

 

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New Semester, New Look, New Gravatar

Here I am again (after a splendid summer, but that is another post).  As I am returning to this space, I decided to renew the look slightly on the blog. How I did it?

1. I opened Pixlr Express.

2.Played around with the photo I took of my recent passport photos.

3. To match the new look on my blog, I also changed my gravatar.

Now it is left with the small avatar called favicon that sits on the URL line, I just can’t remember how I got it there!

I guess that means I really have relaxed my brain during the summer…

 

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Links of this week: On Learning

Constantly overwhelmed by impressions, links, articles, books and “interesting stuff”, I have tried to organize myself in many ways.

I tried keeping my web influences or links all open at once in different “tabs” in Firefox (“why is my Internet so slow? Oh, no it crashed again!”, I tried Delicious (“Log in again? Oh, what was my password, now?  If I save this link, will the whole world be able to see it?”), I tried Google Reader (“Today: 450 unread interesting blog posts”) and frankly none of these methods really worked for me.

Maybe I should just imitate pro-bloggers I admire (now talking about Ethan Zuckerman and Chris Blattman) and post a list of links when the links get to many. Then I have a record of stuff for myself, and I have shared the links I liked with you.

Lets try: THIS WEEK’s LINKS (focus on learning)

Intelligent Life – the Economist spin off magazine I always buy when I travel is very much present online. This issue has an poignant piece on digital Africa.

“I asked my Somali companion what the boys were up to. He wound down the window and summoned his gunmen to go and ask. The answer came back. “They’re updating their Facebook profiles.”

Migration researcher Hein de Haas started his own blog recently. He has written very well on the migration and development discourse and I believe he came to Accra for a conference a few years back. Anyways, I believe it will be interesting  to follow his more contemporary day-by-day thoughts.

“The idea is that up to 1.5 million African migrants are waiting in Libya for the first occasion to migrate to Europe. This idea is based on a number of common misunderstandings about North African and Libyan migration.
The most fundamental and persistent misunderstanding is that Libya is a so-called “transit country” – or the assumption that most or all migrants in Libya would be “on their way” to Europe. This totally ignores the basic fact that over the past 40 years, Libya has been as destination country in its own right.”

The Illustrated Professor. A fun and thoughtful blog. Visual rocks. This post from last week that I really liked was called The Learning Embrace.

embrace

“I must remember that learning doesn’t necessarily follow from teaching.  Or from schools.  Or that teachers and schools even control all the learning young people embrace.   Learning is owned by humanity not by schools or by states.   Learning happens when a person decides to learn.   It even happens when a person isn’t aware it’s happening.   Nevertheless, I am responsible for my students’ learning–again, learning over which I don’t always have control.   How can I promote the kind of “learning embrace” that has the best chance of success?”

Ok, that worked pretty well for me. I also added all of these to my links to the right.

How was it for you?

PS. Also came across Open Study. Not really sure what it is, but it looks like an online study group tool. Isn’t that neat? Wow, there really are a lot of cool things out there…I am overwhelmed again…

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