"Finish your dinner - there are people starving in Africa, you know."

That's something many of us heard around the dinner table as children, and the response to that often is "Well, if I could give my leftovers to the starving people you're talking about I certainly would." That's not a possibility with food, but at least it is with soap. Derreck Kayongo from Uganda has launched a project called the Global Soap Project, which takes used soap from locations such as hotels, melts them down, sterilizes them and turns them into new bars of soap which are then shipped to countries that need them.

Since he first had the idea to recycle soap after spending a night in a hotel and noticing that the soap had been replaced the next day, perhaps he has plans to recycle other objects as well? Other disposable items in hotels include toothbrushes and razors, and though the idea of using someone else's toothbrush might seem a little odd it should be no problem if properly sterilized, and hotel toothbrushes are only used for a single day anyway so I doubt anyone otherwise toothbrushless would complain about being given one for free that had been used once and then sterilized.

Other not so glamorous but very effective and necessary projects include iodized salt, and mosquito nets. Iodized salt costs just pennies per ton, and mosquito nets are something like $10, a small price to pay for a significant reduction in malaria.

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New undersea cable to South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique brings high-speed internet to Eastern Africa

Finally, it's done! This has been a long time coming; I remember writing about the cables under construction back in February. For most websites dialup just doesn't cut it anymore, and high-speed internet is just about the difference between having access and no access at all. Simply playing a video on YouTube for example requires a fairly fast connection that Eastern Africa just didn't have until now.



According to the article, companies such as Tanesco (electricity), TTCL (communications), Tanzania Railways and Universities of Dar es Salaam and Dodoma are already benefiting from the new connection.

A part of the article also mentions that though prices have gone down for businesses from $3000 a month to $600 a month, ISPs are not lowering prices for average consumers but are instead offering increased bandwidth. Whether they can keep this up for long is hard to say, because the idea of lowering prices to average consumers as well may just be too tempting to one and this would cause the others to follow suit. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks/months.

The comments below the article are particularly interesting so be sure to take a look at them. Many have already begun to see an improvement in service, but certainly not all.

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