Oh noooo… you’ve never heard of Karim Sy, Cyriac Gbogou & Florent Youzan?
Karim is the father of Jokkolabs, a “coworking space and action tank”, launched in 2010. A self-funded independent nonprofit organization, it is an “innovation ecosystem and a virtual cluster for social transformation” with offices in Dakar, St Louis, Ouagadougou, Bamako, Nanterre and Abidjan very soon. Jeune Afrique best describes it, as the “must go” place for all developers”. Influenced by the global open source movement, they are building a community based on knowledge sharing.
Cyriac (blog) known as “chef du village” in the Ivorian tech community, currently happens to be the Kumusha takes wiki‘s representative in Ivory Coast. Florent (blog) is the founder of Afriworker, the first African web platform of telecommuting, coworking & online capacity building. Both are involved in way too many projects to state them all here. However, their latest stint is rather interesting – they, with other people, co-founded Ovillage a collective intelligence and social innovation co-working space in Abidjan. Created in May 2014, it allows freelancers, startups and even aviation specialists to mingle and work in a space where the keyword is “sharing”.
I first met Karim at a talk he gave, on the other side of the world – he was honest, direct, results oriented…Flash forward, 9 months later, I’m working from Ovillage while Karim announces that he will be speaking at an event in Abidjan – “Espaces de co-working en Afrique: lieux de vie!” where not only is Cyriac speaking, but also Florent, Donatien Kangah from E-voir … and maybe even Pauline Mujawamariya, the Program Director of the Innovation Prize for Africa, from the African Innovation Foundation (which by the way, is launching on August 1st)!
Needless to say that I am going!
Why should you? Besides having the chance to meet the overly involved human beings stated above? Well… you will meet other other incredible people, It’s free & open to everyone.
What are you waiting for to click “attend” on the Facebook page?
And remember…we cannot complain about what they think of us until we start telling them about us.
A bientôt,
– Sarah C.
sarahclavel.com 