I’m in Lilongwe for the week to run Freedom Fone training. We’re based in Area 6, a suburb popular with hotels, b&b’s and NGOs. The reason for this clustering is because Malawi’s demand for power has outstripped it’s power generation capacity, so businesses try to locate themselves on grids with minimum power disruptions. Nearby is Maula Prison, an institution that is deemed to have a priority for electricity supply. No surprise if you want to limit opportunities for prison breaks I guess. Unexpected was the Welcome to Maula Prison sign!

Welcome to Maula Prison!

The short walk between my hotel and the training venue provided a number of other delightful photo opportunities.

Mr MaDogs

A vendor's table of wares

Jill Roberts represented Kubatana at the recent SHARE Beirut event.

SHARE Beirut is a weekend-long public, free and non-commercial hybrid event blending an Internet culture and technology related daytime conference with dynamic cutting-edge music festival by night. It will bring together hundreds of passionate people, forward-thinkers, cultural creatives, activists and artists from Lebanon as all around the world for talks and parties in 72 hours of powerful gathering to share ideas, knowledge and creativity.

The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on State Enterprises and Parastatal Management public hearings revealed how frustrated Zimbabweans are with the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA), reports The Herald today.

This will come as no surprise to the many Zimbabweans who phoned into our Freedom Fone test (thank you!) and left their voice mails about ZESA meter reading, load shedding, high bills and poor service.

Listen to some of this feedback here

Recently Kubatana’s sister project Freedom Fone won the Index on Censorship Innovation Award. Freedom Fone facilitates the sharing of pre-recorded audio information over mobiles phones. We are consistently trying to improve the Freedom Fone software and . . . we would like you to actively help us do this.

We’ve read something published by the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) on load-shedding which raises a Lot of concerns. And if we’re concerned, we’re sure you will be too.

Listen to what they say is Fact and let us know if you think it’s Fiction. Your opinion counts!

Here’s what we need . . .

To find out more, request a free callback from Kubatana’s toll free service by following these instructions:

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To avoid calling you late at night, we have set a daily cut off time for processing callbacks at 8:00pm. We have also instructed the system not to phone anyone on Sunday. If you do not receive your callback the same day you request it, we will try calling you again the next day that the system is making calls.

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Sorry!

Thanks a lot from the Kubatana Team

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