mweshi

There comes a time in your life when you experience some of the really wonderful things life has to offer and non of those moments can be as fulfilling and rewarding as attending a TED conference especially one concentrating on helping Africa to move forward. This is a very exciting time on the continent and it couldn’t be more evident than what I have experienced in this, my very first TED conference.

Where else can one have the wonderful opportunity of meeting so many champions of innovative solutions to many problems that plague the developing world and more importantly Africa? As part of the TED pre-conference tours, we began with a visit to a farm that grows Artemisia annua, a shrub used to extract Artemisenin, a drug used in the treatment of multi-drug resistant strains of malaria. Now, for someone who’s taken the fall to malaria on the continent this was a really worth-while visit as it showed me what sort of plants where used in treating me when I had to bout the disease. As the tour was drawing to a close, we got quite a pleasant surprise from someone really championing the fight to alleviate some of Africa’s malaise when Bono showed up, yes!

The farm was only the first part of our half-a-day long trip. Following the farm visit, we saw how debt relief has helped to bring about improved health care and education in a clinic that provides ante-natal and post-natal services to mothers and would-be mothers as well as two schools located on the outskirts of Arusha. The morning trip was all organized as a package sponsored by DATA (debt AIDS trade africa) and the ONE campaign. Had a very good conversation with Jamie Drummond the Executive Director of DATA on the way to the farm about ways in which Africans can help to bridge the trade imbalance.

Here are a few pictures from the trips, will try to post most of them on flickr once I have enough time.

To cap it all off, the talks in the first day of the conference were amazing these included talks from the likes of Carol Pineau , director of the Africa: Open for Business documentary and a true inspiration to those of us doing business on the continent because she’s given us tools to use when looking for ways in which to develop the continent with real life examples! What followed at the end of sessions one and two was a performance by Rokia Traore, one of Africa’s true musical gems. Her performance was breathtaking and it was evident that she truly touched and moved the audience. It was a dream come true to listen to her live in concert and talk to her after the performance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 5th June 2007 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Africa, Art, Business, Design, Film, Life, Music, Photography, tedglobal2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.