AO: Maker space entrepreneurs desire their hardwares to be “Made in Africa, for Africa”
AO: Coban argues that tech developers and start-ups constantly negotiate between liberating feelings about new work possibilities and restrictive requirements of international funders and investors who still pursue exoticized imaginations of lives in a generalized “Africa.”
AO: Coban notes that daily lives of tech developers in Nairobi are still defined in relation to the cliches about superiority of knowledge and tech from global North. Making movement is therefore “revolutionary” in positioning the global South as the knowledge maker.
“Made in Africa, for Africa” as a claim for expertise and having expert knowledge about what is best for one’s own context and building for it. This echoes Crane (2010; 2013). Contextualization of context vs “global standards.”
