Village Diary Blog :: Taking On Poverty At Its Roots (FOSS)

Photo Post: Project Launch Event

by Editor Thu 18 Jun 2009

June 16th marked the public launching of the Village Diary project in Buea. The date was chosen to recognize our team’s work reaching the first major milestone of our project, and to observe the International Day of the African Child. The event was held at the Cameroon Cultural Centre and presided over by the Governor of the South West region. Also in attendance were the Regional Delegate of Social Affairs, representatives from the U.S. Embassy, directors of partner organizations, the local press, honored guests and the Village Diary team members.

Following the ceremony, the team gathered together with our partners for a round table discussion and planning session at the Alliance Francophone Camerounaise, located just opposite the venue. This marked the first time we’ve had all our partners together at one table, representing the Fako, Ndian, Kupe Manengouba and Manyu divisions of the SW region. We reviewed the project goals and discussed issues such as the cultural impact of our work in the community, informed consent in fieldwork, confidentiality, sensitization programs and how Village Diary will be used to link existing partner institutions to women experiencing different forms of abuses.

Our group covered a lot of ground during our discussion and wrapped up with a draft strategy for the second phase of our project, which Village Diary founder Roland Musi will take to Yaounde this week.

See all the photos of the Village Diary Launch on flickr.

Financial Award Disclosure

by Editor Thu 18 Jun 2009

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Nonprofit organizations such as ours have an ethical obligation to our constituents, donors, partners and beneficiaries to conduct ourselves with transparency and accountability. We began this project blog with the intent of keeping the public informed about our activities, accomplishments, decisions and so on. This is in keeping with our desire to build external transparency, public understanding and trust in our organization.

Village Diary is an initiative of the LINK-UP Charity Foundation, an NGO registered in the SW region of the Republic of Cameroon. We’re accountable to the government of Cameroon, but lack 501(c)3 tax exemption status in the United States and thus are not required to file IRS 990 tax returns. These reports are public information for those that know how to find them (on websites such as guidestar.org, for example). To make them more accessible, a best practice for nonprofits is to post them publicly on their blog, along with accounting audits, board activities, annual reports and related information.

As a foreign NGO lacking this special status, we’ve decided to take the lead among Cameroonian recipients of U.S. Embassy funding by making a full public disclosure of the recent financial assistance award granted to Village Diary. This includes the U.S. Department of State financial assistance award form, specifics of the award, correspondence between AfroVisioN Group and LINK-UP with the U.S. Embassy in Yaoundé, and a detailed costing of how the funds will be used for the project.

The amount of this award is US $10,503.39, and was granted for the purpose of providing seed money to launch Village Diary; specifically development of the IT platform, hardware to be used for fieldwork and web server hosting for one year. Details and conditions of the award are contained in the PDF document (below).

It should also be noted that our fundraising efforts were conducted entirely by volunteer staff. 100% of the funds granted in this award will go toward implementation of the Village Diary project, as detailed in our budget allocation.

Every nonprofit is a public trust working to produce something of benefit to the public, and the public is, in a very real sense, the ultimate shareholders of our organization—even more so than our board members, partners or staff.

We’re making these documents available as a single PDF download: federal-assistance-docs.pdf (1.37 MB). We feel it’s a positive step toward increasing transparency and accountability for our organization.

Questions, comments or other feedback are greatly appreciated.

I Love the Kohana PHP Framework

by Editor Tue 9 Jun 2009

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post from Mambe Churchill Nanje, the lead developer of the Village Diary project. The original posting may be found on his blog. Kohana is the PHP framework used to build the Village Diary IT platform.

Kohana PHP Kohana is not only my new found love when building applications with PHP, it’s also rock solid MVC (Model View Controller) Object Oriented Framework for PHP developers. Just like the .NET Framework and Java SDK, Kohana can be referred to as some sort of SDK for PHP developers. It brings a lot of order into PHP code which has been referred to as spaghetti code for years.

With Kohana PHP or other PHP frameworks like Codeigniter, you can build your application with objects just like in Java and any other developer who knows how to use the framework will easily follow your code without asking you questions. If you ever wanted to use PHP in a team environment, I will ask you to consider Kohana due to the following reasons:

True Object Oriented
Everything in Kohana SDK is an object; the helpers are objects with static methods, the libraries are all objects and you can create your own classes/objects, the Views are objects (which is strange but programming-wise very interesting), and of course the Controllers and Models are all objects.

In other frameworks, I had never wanted to create controllers and extend them, but in Kohana I realized that sometimes I have to build some Abstract Controllers (I feel I’m back in Java), and then extends these controllers in the various sections of my website. For instance there is a Template Controller that helps developers using Kohana easily create master templates for their pages.

Best ORM in PHP
ORM or object relational mapping is a technology where in you can map your database tables and their relationships in objects (Models) and then instantiate those models and call functions to get the data without writing SQL. In Kohana, I find ORM very easy to use and fun. Before ORM in Kohana, I tried ORM in CakePHP and Codeigniter but they all proved to be buggy or were too difficult to comprehend.

Templating made easy
Templating is something most web developers in Africa will have to consider, it makes your life easy as a developer and makes the life of designers you work with super easy. In Kohana you create a single template.php file which can constitute the site’s logo, navigation, sidebar and footer. Then fit in some variables that will change from control function to control function. This way my web apps all have one master template and just small view files that I set as variables. It makes my life easy to edit and also to change the design of the whole site in minutes. Check out the templating in Kohana at http://www.kohanaphp.com and you will be amazed.

I18n aka Internationalization
Before Kohana I had to figure out how to hack Codeigniter to do internationalization, but with Kohana everything that appears on the screen as text you can use the i18n folder found in application/i18n and make sure you have text in every language possible. Coming from Cameroon, just like Canada we have French and English as official languages which means most of my apps have to be internationalized from day one.

PHPDOC and Code Hints, Code Completion
In Kohana, since everything is an object, it simply means using phpdoc very well and a good IDE like Netbeans 6.5, you will get code hints and completion for both in-built Kohana libraries, helpers, other classes and your own built classes. I use Netbeans 6.5 and when I code, I get a lot of speed reading the code hints and getting code completion for the functions in every helper or object I want to use. It makes my life easy and I just feel I am coding using .NET, C# or Java. But other than Visual Studio, and like Eclipse, Netbeans is free and it’s lightweight (in terms of memory consumption) and easy to install and configure to coding with PHP.

Those are some of the reasons I think I will go with Kohana.

Another question is: Why use PHP at all?

Well, PHP is cheap for me and the server I have bought runs only PHP and most of my clients don’t care which technology we use so we go with PHP. Hey, with PHP I get to train and employ talents in the space of 6months, something I cant do with .NET or Java.

What do you think about Kohana PHP?

An Ethical Approach to Serving Others

by Editor Tue 21 Apr 2009

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“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” -John F. Kennedy

“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.” –Seneca

Viola Allo, a Cameroonian-born ethnographer and writer based in California, joined our team to help us design a project sensitive to the needs of our beneficiaries. In doing so, she draws on her training in cultural anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork she performed in Nigeria and Cameroon. Much of her research and personal interest lies in issues faced by rural African women, so her contributions are invaluable to our effort.

As the Village Diary operations manual began to take shape, Viola suggested that we needed a section devoted to ethical considerations for the project. We decided from the start that our project would be guided by the highest standards of ethics in our conduct within the community. Few would disagree with such a sentiment. However, for a project such as ours—or any humanitarian or development effort, for that matter—what does this mean, practically?

To address this question, we began with an overview of International Development Ethics and studied the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Convention on the Rights of the Child and related documents. Viola added the American Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics (PDF) and provided a sample consent form used in her fieldwork. These sources helped us frame the needs for an ethical approach in our work, but we still lacked a practical how-to guide.

Many hours and revisions later, Viola has crafted just such a guide. From her opening section on Ethics & Values:

“Our ethical standards reveal the conscience of our project and our efforts. Over time, the values we uphold for the project should become a part of our team’s moral code—a list of things we see as true, a core of philosophies and practices we will commit to, and a set of principles we will not compromise. These things will guide the decisions we make.”

She goes on to outline a code of ethics that includes key elements such as transparency, openness, privacy, confidentiality, context and respect. Viola outlines her concept of a “People First” approach:

“We will put the wellbeing of clients first. Project goals and progress are important but secondary. Our personal ambitions, too, are secondary. Our primary concern is the wellbeing of those we serve… We must strive, as best we can, to see those we serve as people we can learn from. They are the experts on their lives and worlds, and as such, they are our teachers.”

Using this as a foundation, Viola expands on ethical considerations for services offered to vulnerable individuals including women, children and victims of abuse. She then tackles the thorny issue of collecting information from these individuals, with a focus on informed consent, data collection methods and the roles of fieldworkers and custodians.

Since the Village Diary IT platform is designed to collect, store and disseminate information related to our beneficiaries, Viola’s guide also addresses ethics in computer and Internet data storage, transparency and sharing data with donors, guardians, sponsors, and beneficiaries.

Viola’s work on this topic provides both a core philosophy and a practical guide to ethics in service to others. Perhaps its greatest value is that it is applicable not only to our project; it may be used to inform an ethical approach for any organization engaged in humanitarian, aid or development work. In the spirit of transparency and collaboration, we’re offering Viola’s complete ethics guide in PDF format.

Download Ethics, Values and Serving Others (PDF) by Viola Allo.

As a working document, Viola and the Village Diary team value any and all feedback on it. If you find it useful, have comments or additions to it, feel free to post your thoughts below.

Pilot Funding Secured from the U.S. Embassy

by Editor Thu 16 Apr 2009

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US Embassy Cameroon Seal Last week team members Bill Zimmerman and Fon Christopher Achobang met with staff from the U.S. Embassy, Yaoundé. The meeting took place at a hotel in Limbe during Ambassador Janet Garvey’s visit to the area. Richard Johannsen, First Secretary of the Public Affairs section, originally committed to one hour. Their discussion ran for more than two and half hours, with the bulk of it devoted to Village Diary. While they chatted American and Spanish sailors and marines, on shore leave from a U.S. Navy vessel anchored in the bay, circulated through the hotel.

Richard and his assistant engaged Bill and Christopher in a frank, open discussion that probed all the details of the Village Diary project. They asked tough questions and posed hypothetical scenarios to test the practicalities of our idea. After two hours of a rigorous Q&A session, Richard turned to the pilot phase budget estimate in the proposal. He zeroed-in on the IT platform costing which includes Churchill’s software development and hardware for two fieldwork toolkits. He told our team members that the Embassy would allocate funds in two phases to cover a portion of the IT platform costs. They worked out the details of the grant application process and sealed the agreement with a handshake.

The following Monday, Bill received a call from Richard who’d returned to his office in Yaoundé. He’d had time during the drive from Limbe to review our 50 page proposal, he said, and opted to fully fund the IT platform in a single phase. It’s rare to have such an enthusiastic response from a donor, rarer still for them to pledge more funds after the fact. Needless to say, we couldn’t be happier.

If all goes well we should have the funds in hand by the first week of May. This will not only provide a much-needed jolt for our project, but it lends legitimacy to our effort and should make it easier to attract other sources of funds before our June 16th launch.

Some of the Women We Celebrate

by Viola Allo Tue 10 Mar 2009

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March 8, 2009 dawns a clear day in Bamenda, my hometown in the North West Province of Cameroon. I am not there to witness the day, but I hear that the women were celebrating. I was not there, but I hear the women.

The women wake up to a rain-swept city. It rained in Bamenda on Saturday. I hear the patter of the raindrops on corrugated iron roofs and see the steam rise from the hot hoods of battered cars. This is the first of the rains to wash the Harmattan dust off the weary, thirsty, wrinkled, dry season face of Bamenda. The rain comes to clean things for the feet of the women. Rain. Rain. Rain. Nature rolls out her red carpet. Just for the women. And just in time for International Women’s Day.

Since events have fallen on a day of worship, some women catch the early Sunday mass or service at the cathedrals and churches on the hills that dot the uneven, valley landscape of the city. Perhaps, they skip church for the day and head out early to Commercial Avenue, the broad and often taxi-filled, pedestrian-trampled thoroughfare of Bamenda, where the parade takes place. The night before, some women make extra meals for their families. And some women leave their husbands and children to fend for themselves. Today, the women celebrate life away from home and out in the town and in their gowns custom-made for this special day.

I can feel the slide of purse straps the women slip over their arms, as they head out the door. I feel the glide of their hips, hear the stiff swish of new cotton print fabric that has yet to be broken from washing and wear. The sun will fade this fabric, burn it like the backs of women toiling among their stalks of corn. But, for now, the cloth is still new. I feel the rustle of soft-haired wigs placed on heads and covered with new head-ties. I feel the warm gold of earrings and necklaces, the caress of jewelry dangling on cheek and chest.

Once the women get to the assigned places where they assemble in their groups and associations, I can hear the chatter of their voices and the excitement in their words. Friends see friends, relatives see relatives, and they hug each other and say, Good morning, Sister. Good morning, Mother. If I pay attention, I can hear the annoyance in their tones as they question any delays. Some are serious, they have things weighing on their minds, things to get done. Tomorrow is Monday, and there are preparations to be made for the long week ahead. But, for today, most of the women are smiling, and if they are not smiling, they are at least feeling a sense of pride in who they are.

The women are saying, This is our day. And as they say this, they beam like the sun, as only African women can beam, when they know they are on display and the cameras of visitors and spectators are snapping away. In all the beautiful, tailored dresses of myriad bright hues, greens and browns and turquoise blues, the women sparkle. They shine and glow like full-spectrum light bulbs. They are such a sight to behold. And soon Commercial Avenue is not a street anymore but a rainbow piercing the brown heart of Bamenda after a storm.

I can hear the women. They are warning each other to get in line and march straight, just the way they rehearsed. I can hear the silence, the hush over the crowd and the world, as they concentrate on the task at hand. I can hear the hush interrupted by the uniform click of the women’s heels on the cool tarmac. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right. Their feet tap so, marking time in one spot, left and right, left and right, and then someone calls out, Forward march! and off they go. Off they go, as they march and march side by side, together, and march and march side by side, into the future.

Rural Internet Access: Lessons from Radio & FidoNet

by Bill Zimmerman Mon 2 Mar 2009

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I’ve been mulling over this topic in my head for quite awhile. Yesterday, Dibussi provided the inspiration I needed when he tweeted a story about the impact a community radio station has had on a remote village in Cameroon’s North West province. London-based social enterprise RadioActive worked with the local council to build the radio station, Donga Mantung Community Radio 105.0 FM, which reaches more than 600,000 listeners. “For as little as a £1,000, you can set up a station that reaches people up to 25 miles away in every direction,” says Max Graef, RadioActive’s founder. “In places where there are no roads, no electricity, no phones and low literacy rates, radio is the cheapest and easiest way to reach people.”

Community radio is an enormously powerful ICT4D tool for the developing world. The BBC World Service Trust has worked with NGOs on a range of these projects, from emergency response following disasters such as Cyclone Nargis in Burma last year, to post-conflict zones like Sierra Leone, promoting government transparency in Nigeria, training reporters, and improving women’s rights in Afghanistan. It’s often a two-way exchange—engaged listeners call in with news and opinions and some host their own programs.

Staying connected to the outside world
One of the best case studies of a community radio project enhanced with Internet was recently revisited by Matt Berg (born in Cameroon, incidentally), who helped build Radio Beeray with Geekcorps Mali. He describes how their project leveraged Internet with radio with a weekly connection to the outside world. Using a Desert PC coupled with an R-BGAN Satellite Modem, the station was able to periodically connect to the Internet to collect local and regional news of interest to their audience. Says Matt, “Using a lot of clever engineering, we were able to limit the radio’s bandwidth consumption to about 200K/day or $6 (1MB) a week, which the Radio Director was able to use to connect his community to the outside world—certainly a lot of ‘bang for the byte’.”

This “bang for the byte” is the key to sustainability, and one of the principal reasons satellite-based connections fall short for rural connectivity projects. VSAT stations can be potentially transformative in bridging the digital divide. There was a recent inspiring account of bringing Internet to a remote Kenyan village, but this was an experiment backed by Google, who covered the equipment costs and monthly subscription fees.

The costs of a dish and related hardware (minus the solar equipment used in the Google experiment) can be upwards of $10,000 with monthly fees starting at $700 for a 128 kbps connection. Google itself is uncertain whether VSAT stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given these prohibitive costs. Communities may surely benefit from the connection, but at these rates affordability is out of the question.

Surely mobile is the future, but until cheap iPhone knockoffs and WiFi penetration arrive in remote villages, something is needed to fill the gap. One promising cost-effective alternative for rural areas involves asynchronous Internet access.

Good dog, Fido
I’m probably exposing my age here (waiting for the comments), but back in the day before Internet there was FidoNet. For die-hard BBS users in the 1980’s like yours truly, FidoNet did something extraordinary; it enabled the exchange of emails & attachments between bulletin boards. This was achieved by using a point-to-point, store-and-forward WAN that used dial-up modems and plain old telephone (POT) lines. Later on, FidoNet was connected to the Internet, typically with the UUCP protocol. Interestingly, FidoNet and UUCP became popular for bridging the digital divide that once existed in remote parts of the United States and Europe.


                   __
                  /  \
                 /|oo \
                (_|  /_)
                 _`@/_ \    _
                |     | \   \\
                | (*) |  \   ))
   ______       |__U__| /  \//
  / FIDO \       _//|| _\   /
 (________)     (_/(_|(____/

Original FidoNet ASCII logo.

FidoNet solved the “last mile” problem of Internet access for BBS users in rural communities. Today, this store-and-forward concept has been modernized and adapted for the developing world. The pioneer in this space is United Villages, who has commercialized their “drive-by WiFi” service. The service uses what they term cached WiFi intelligence, which relies on couriers who act as digital postmen by carrying queued data (emails, web searches, downloads, etc.) between rural telecenters and access points. Motorbikes equipped with a mobile storage device serve as a mechanical backhaul alternative to miles of cables or a costly VSAT connection. It’s an elegant and cost-effective solution.

Not online, but still connected
Asynchronous Internet may not be instantaneous, but it’s capable of moving gigabytes of data to rural communities at a fraction of the cost of an always-on connection. What’s most interesting, in my view, is how communities have responded to the service. Katherine Nightingale reported on an innovative use of United Villages’ service in rural India.

Rather than use the service for sending emails and surfing the web, villagers “prefer to email their questions to someone who will do the surfing for them and return the answers in a pdf (portable document format) file.” This is not unlike how Question Box is used, which also had its origins in India.

Implications for Village Diary
As we prepare for our work in the community, I anticipate that we’ll leverage a combination of asynchronous Internet, SMS, community radio and citizen journalism to help bring stories from the village to a global audience. Our primary focus remains on empowering women by recording cases of abuse and providing access to social, legal and health services. At the same time, we hope to help provide a window into cultures, communities and individual stories from the village that might otherwise go unnoticed.

We’re actively looking for partners, so if you or your organization is interested feel free to drop us a note. You can also grab a button for your blog or website.

In the meantime, comments are welcome.

Empowerment: A Starting Point

by Viola Allo Thu 26 Feb 2009

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Dahomey women warriors These are my very first words here, on the Village Diary Blog. I am excited to lend my voice to this project and its cause—so excited, I confess, that I’d begun to get romantic about my role. A few days ago, I thought of myself as an amazon for the Village Diary Project, not unlike one of the amazons of the famous West African kingdom of Dahomey. I wondered, Could I be a female warrior or guard for the Village Diary? Could I be a woman of high status whose insightful opinions are coveted by kings? And what if I were more than a servant of kings? I am the first woman to join the Village Diary team, so I started to think of myself as a great matriarch, an African queen of sorts. Would I be expected to bring blessings to this project, perhaps just like the Queen of Lobedu in South Africa is expected to bring the blessing of rain to her people? Could I make the other team members comb the streets of Cameroon’s South West Province and return to me with tributes like gold nuggets of roasted yellow corn, hot and fresh from the busy mines of Cameroonian women’s hillside farms and roadside fires?

With a mischievous grin, I considered the possibilities of these roles, but very quickly, I came to see the responsibility of it all. Yes, I am a fighter of a woman, but I am not a warrior. I can’t say for sure that I know how to protect and defend anyone, or whether I even have the courage to do so. And though I was born and raised in Cameroon, I live so far from home that any blessings I might be able to impart to this project will have to make the long, almost interminable journey from California to Cameroon, and they’ll have to do so with no guarantee of safe arrival and delivery.

It was with these humbling realizations that I returned to earth and began to think about the beneficiaries of this project: they are women and children, widows and orphans living in communities served by the Buea-based NGO, Link-Up Development Group. The Village Diary, a
project of this NGO, will seek to assist these women and children with the hard work that they, as individuals, are doing to meet their needs. I see the Village Diary as a resource to these individuals and their communities. However, it is not the only resource these women might have access to. In my opinion, the Village Diary is best viewed as a supplement to the other resources widows and orphans have at their disposal, however limited these resources may be.

I frame our mission in this way because I feel this view not only empowers the women and children we will be of service to but also gives these individuals and their communities credit for the hard work they have done in the absence of our services. While these widows and orphans often face various insurmountable difficulties, I resist any discourse that violates their individual agency or fails to acknowledge their resourcefulness and that of their communities.

A goal I envision for the ethnographic component of the Village Diary Project is the goal of learning from these women and children about the forms of support they have at their disposal and the forms of support they are in need of. From this, we will be able to gather what we can offer to them that would enhance the types of support they already receive from their families, friends, communities and any other social networks they belong to. They will tell us how our services can fit into or augment the networks of support they rely on. In this manner, our services will be grounded in our knowledge and understanding of the contexts—familial, social or other—of the lives of widows and orphans in the South West Province of Cameroon.

This is what I will keep in mind, as I begin to talk with our team about the ways in which the ethnographic component of the Village Diary might be designed and implemented. Even as I write this, I am creating a list of things that I see as essential to any ethnographic inquiry—things that are very relevant to a project that deals with individuals who find themselves in vulnerable positions in their families and communities. I am open to suggestions, recommended readings, and questions. Please do not hesitate to contact our team and share your thoughts with us.

Now, back to the subject of roasted corn…can I have some?

Viola Allo Joins Our Team

by Editor Mon 16 Feb 2009

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The Village Diary took a giant leap forward this week with the addition of ethnographer, writer and native-born Cameroonian Viola Allo to our team. Her involvement on the project is significant on many levels. For starters, she brings some much-needed gender balance to our group as the first woman to come on board. While the rest of the team is working here in Cameroon, Viola is based in California, making her the first Cameroonian abroad to get involved with the project. She’s also a professional ethnographer who will advise us on best practices prior to conducting field trials with the Village Diary. Viola is an authority on many of the complex issues faced by women and children in Cameroon and Africa, generally. As a tool with a special emphasis on cultural context, the Village Diary stands to benefit tremendously from her training in anthropology. With this expertise, she’ll help shape the project into a highly focused, effective tool for addressing their needs.

Viola has a BA in psychology from the University of California and an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan. She’s performed ethnographic fieldwork in Ibadan, Nigeria and Buea, Cameroon. She’s currently working on a collection of essays that celebrates her passion for Africa and storytelling.

Drawing on her background in Africanist anthropology, she’ll assist with our project’s use of ethnographic methods that are sensitive to the needs of women and children in Cameroon. She’s a prolific, opinioned writer with much to say on the issues faced by women in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa. She’ll be a contributing writer to this blog, so watch for her posts in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can follow Viola’s updates on Twitter.

Please join me in extending a big welcome to Viola as she joins our effort. African women ethnographers are a rare find, particularly those from our region of Cameroon. We’re extremely fortunate to have her advising us, and can’t think of a better qualified person to fill this role.

We’re still looking for a few good technical people who can assist with software components of the Village Diary. Visit our how to help page or see the developer’s wiki for more details.

Fufu Corn Theme Released

by Editor Thu 12 Feb 2009

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We’re pleased to release our custom WordPress theme “fufu corn” for free download under the GNU Public License today. What is fufu corn, you ask? In this case, it’s two things:

A lightweight, 3-column, variable width, customizable, widget-aware theme designed specifically for low-bandwidth connections.
A traditional dish with origins in Cameroon’s northwest province made from “turning” ground maize. Usually eaten with fingers and accompanied by dishes such as njama njama, okra, bitter leaf soup or kati kati.

Some of the Village Diary’s team members hail from the northwest province of Cameroon where this dish is especially popular. After our designer Michael Beveridge (his real name, and the answer is: yes—although spelled differently than “beverage” he’s been known to receive free drinks from bartenders when settling his tab) came up with the template, we decided that the color palette evoked the subtle yellow hues of this traditional dish. Thus did the name fufu corn stick, much as it does to our ribs after lunch.

Our theme was designed from the start to be as lightweight as possible without excluding images completely, as with so-called “pure CSS” designs. This requirement allows it to load quickly over connections that run the gamut from fair to glacial, tending toward the latter much of the time. The last time we checked, the total page weight (excluding images embedded in posts) came in at a featherweight 50 KB.

Empirical testing with Fufu Corn in Cameroon has shown that it does, indeed, load fast, even in overcrowded cyber cafés with a shared connection not much better than dial-up. Cameroon Compliant? Check. If it works under these conditions, chances are it will perform well anywhere.

Notes on customization are included in the readme. If you use it or encounter any problems, please post a comment or drop us a note. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Enjoy a taste of Cameroon and download the Village Diary Fufu Corn WordPress theme (70 KB).

Photo Post: Project Launch Event

Financial Award Disclosure

I Love the Kohana PHP Framework

An Ethical Approach to Serving Others

Pilot Funding Secured from the U.S. Embassy

Some of the Women We Celebrate

Rural Internet Access: Lessons from Radio & FidoNet

Empowerment: A Starting Point

Viola Allo Joins Our Team

Fufu Corn Theme Released

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