April 24 - Virtual Africa Launch - Second Life Africa

VIRTUAL AFRICA / SECOND LIFE AFRICA

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OPENING DAY EVENT - April 24
Please come and join us on Thursday 24 April for an exiting programme on the first annual Africa Day in Second Life, hosted by Uthango with support of Orange from their island. ‘Virtual Africa’ and the adjacent ‘Robben Island’ with its African Rain (club) will be launched on the same day!

The popular DJ Doubledown will conclude the day at 16:30 SLT with a party for our guests at the new, spectacular African Rain, a club for Virtual Africa, designed partly pro-bono by Eshi Otawara.

this is the SL Africa club slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Robben%20Island/120/161/635

Virtual Africa is an initiative of Uthango Social Investments, a registered NGO based in Cape Town, South Africa. You are welcome to check CIPRO the offical SA Registrar of Companies for our details or contact us via our company's Co-Founder and Director in-world, Alanagh Recreant.

Virtual Africa is currently in development and will become a unique Orientation Gateway that may add value to the SL experience for old and new residents in the metaverse. Uthango drives the project together with a small team of volunteers and (soon) professional developers, and welcomes you to collaborate and discuss possibilities. We were delighted to hear Philip Rosedale, CEO of LL, speaking about the importance of these gateways and look forward to bring you a special african immersive environment.

Together with Virtual Africa, we plan the Bottom-of-the-Pyramic Innovation Centre that will showcase ingenuity in Africa and for Africa - specifically in relation to the strategies of companies and social entrepreneurs to make the world a better place. This is one of our main reasons for being in SL - to connect with creative, lateral-thinking people that could solve complex problems - like the ones we face daily in our first world. In this context, we are also busy with the pototype of the Uthango African Roundtable aimed at educational institutions that would like to spend time researching the views of people in Africa. Hopefully, we will soon be able to bring in the voices of african residents as well, as SL is currently a bit skew in its global diversity :)

You are welcome to join our group: Second Life Africa to keep track of our developments, or the following blog: http://slafrica.wordpress.com/

Uthango has been extremely fortunate to be in the media the past few months, which has hightened the SL profile in Africa and globally: Here are a few links:

UGOTRADE: http://www.ugotrade.com/2007/06/25/uthango-social-investments-leads-the-way-to-virtual-africa/

SLNN: http://www.slnn.com/article/africa-second-life/

WEEKEND ARGUS: http://www.slnn.com/article/africa-second-life/

AFRICA NEWS: http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/10271

Your financial support is appreciated, but more than this, we really treasure the interest in our work and your own social network. Please feel free to tell others about our projects and visit our website: http://uthango.org/

We can only be here with integrity if we find specific ways to harness the power of virtual worlds for Africa and our 18 461 real life clients that are NOT here today... Please assist us in doing so! We need all the help we can get...

Thank you very much!
See you soon!
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Personal note from Eshi Otawara:
"That week I have learned of some of the very difficult (as well as some shocking) issues South African people live with every day and I got a completely different perspective on what Uthango's efforts are. I have also spent some time with Alanagh Recreant and got to know her beyond the 'social networker' that she is. I have always admired her drive to keep Uthango's presence in SL and doing so very successfully for a much longer time then most companies do with plenty of resources- so getting to know what made Alanagh to commit her life to this kind of work was inspiring to me.
IT was one of those strange moments when you feel the person next to you might have just seen the same image in their head, but you cannot talk about it much because verbalizing it only waters down the experience. We both agreed Africa needs 'rain', and African Rain was born.
It was intended to be a 'vision in a brief moment in time' - something dreamlike yet achievable - more then a 'building' for people to come and inhabit. I used huge prims to separate the vision from the rest of the 'world' or even to protect it, and tried to best translate the image and emotion I experienced upon learning more about the Uthango project." --Eshi Otawara