Speak at Tech4Africa

Since Tech4Africa started, we’ve reached people in over 180 countries, and over 3,000 places.

Tech4Africa curates yearly content with the aim of providing the best, most thought provoking tech content in Africa. To better serve the tech community in Africa, we’re opening up speaking proposals to the community, which will be voted on by the community. Final decision making for the schedule will be driven as follows: 30% Tech4Africa Staff, 40% from the community, and 30% our informal Advisory board.

We hope that opening up submissions will help us connect with the thousands of practitioners which make up the Tech4Africa community around the world. Not only will it help generate fresh ideas and content, it also gives the community a direct outlet to share what is most exciting, and relevant to them.

Find out more…

Tech4Africa Speaker Submissions

This form consists of 4 steps. Complete each, then click "Submit". Leaving out information will jeopardise your chances of having the proposal submitted for voting, or indeed of people voting for it.

  • Title & Info

    Give your idea a title and some meta data.
  • Where do you want to speak?
  • Clever titles are fun, but more descriptive titles draw the most attention. (50 character limit)
  • Is this going to be presented alone or with a crowd?
  • The difficulty level you select should be appropriate to you idea.
  • Each of these tracks could be a micro-event...
  • How does your session help Tech4Africa to stay on track?
  • These tags help with meta and search-ability. Add three. Use hashtags (#).
  • Who will this session speak to? Who is it best suited for?

  • Description and Questions

    A short description of your session, and the questions it will answer.
  • Summarise your presentation here. Be as brief and succint as possible.
  • What questions will your session answer for the people attending? What value will they get? What do you hope tyo leave them with?

  • The Organiser

    Tell us more about the organiser.
  • Who is the Organiser of this session?
  • We need an email address to get in touch.
  • We need a phone number / mobile number, to call and discuss if needs be. Pls use international dialling codes for your country.
  • How do we reach you on Twitter? Pls use your @symbol, like so: @joebloggs, and we'll do the rest.
  • Who does the organiser work for?
  • What is the organiser job title or position, if any?
  • Is there a website which may be relevant?
  • Is there any other material online, which may be relevant for this presentation? Examples are Slideshare decks, YouTube or Vimeo videos, infographics, LinkedIn profiles, etc etc. Add them all here pls.
  • Why are you qualified to talk about this topic?

  • Speakers

    Who are the speakers in this session. The maximum for any session is 4, including the leader / moderator / organiser.
  • Pls add speaker name, organisation, and twitter handle, like so: Joe Bloggs, International Corp., @joebloggs
  • Pls add speaker name, organisation, and twitter handle, like so: Joe Bloggs, International Corp., @joebloggs
  • Pls add speaker name, organisation, and twitter handle, like so: Joe Bloggs, International Corp., @joebloggs
  • Pls add speaker name, organisation, and twitter handle, like so: Joe Bloggs, International Corp., @joebloggs

  • More info for us

    Tell us more about yourself.
    Have you experienced a Tech4Africa before?
  • What was the best talk / session you went to?
    Have you experienced speaking before, or is this your first time?
    Obviously we'd like to make sure you can actually be there!
  • If you have, which events have you been to? Pls list them here.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

For speaking ideas, this is typical subject matter we’re looking for:



  • Paywalls: good for readers, advertisers, editors.
  • Survival through innovation:Powertime to PayGenius
  • Growth Hacking on App Stores
  • Strategies for building successful products
  • How localisation can help you speak African
  • How to Contribute to Mozilla Localization
  • Is PHP the slums of the programming world?
  • Doing something new in an old company
  • Building a RESTful API using WordPress
  • Cloud Based Software – Is it really the future?
  • Creating HTML games for Windows 8 using Construct
  • Cross-platform apps in Html5: Our case study
  • e-Commerce: Obstacle or Opportunity?
  • From the field: Helping teams become lean & agile
  • Geolocation with MongoDB in 3 easy steps
  • How customers want to interact with businesses & technology
  • How pet projects can enhance your career
  • Location Services – maps, routes, traffic, search
  • Open platform the key to mobile transacting & mark
  • The Rise of e-commerce in East Africa
  • TOP12WINES, the first 360° Wine experience
  • WEBRTC – Open a hailing channel Mr Sulu
  • What is a graph database and how can it help me?
  • Why improving accessibility can drive revenue

  • Girls & women in tech
  • Gotcha’s
  • How we built our product XYZ
  • Building environments for fast development / DevOps stuff, Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, etc
  • Working with Subversion, Git, open sourcing code, finding collaborators etc
  • Content specific to common stack (Php, RoR, Python, .Net, Java, Node.js) problems
  • Mobile stack, feature phone development, Android development
  • BigData, Virtualisation, infrastructure, cost effectiveness
  • Using API’s, grabbing content & data to make life easier
  • Responsive design, User Experience on mobile, HTML 5, App design, product development
  • Using the cloud
  • Country / market specific problems and solutions
  • Agile development, continuous development, High Availability, Project Management, toolkits for all
  • Mapping, GeoLocation, services which help create user context
  • Tooling, emerging tech, WTF!?
  • Any common codebases which the audience is likely to deal with – WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Node.js, jQuery, BootStrap etc etc

  • Do a product demo of your product (make sure it’s good first!)
  • Identifying and getting into markets
  • Building teams, scaling teams
  • Building products that stick
  • Generating revenue from small and large scale, freemium models, revenue models with telco’s
  • Revenue models for mobile, desktop & campaigns
  • Marketing in Africa, Word of Mouth
  • Marketing to noisy markets
  • Developing passionate customers
  • Success stories (corporates, startups, lone rangers)
  • Failure stories (corporates, startups, lone rangers)
  • Developing passionate customers
  • eCommerce models that work; eCommerce models that suck
  • Content distribution in Africa / the role & future of media in Africa
  • Finding service providers, managing service providers
  • Being awesome

  • Leveraging platforms (eg Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Digg, YouTube etc) for success
  • Social platforms that work in Africa
  • Building social value that doesn’t suck
  • Meaningful engagement in Africa
  • How-to’s, for any platform / toolset / codebase
  • Gotcha’s, what to do / what not to do / what to avoid
  • Generating revenue, value, brand, word of mouth, from social

  • Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, anywhere in Africa
  • Hotspots, hubs, innovation
  • Success stories that inspire, people that inspire, projects that inspire
  • Failure stories that inspire, failed projects that create better context
  • Solving Africa specific problems, solving locality specific problems
  • Innovation that makes a civic difference
  • Technology for democracy, information sharing, news aggregation
  • Engaging young people to leverage technology in Africa
  • Apps that help tackle problems like malaria, polio, water scarcity, food scarcity, travel problems, job searching etc
  • Technology for democracy, information sharing, news aggregation


If there is something you’d really like to talk about, which is not covered above, please shout, there are no hard and fast rules, just the seeking of great content!

Speaking deadlines

If you want to speak in 2013, these are the deadlines for submissions ;-)

May
17th: Jhb DevDay
31st: CPT DevDay

June
27th: Nairobi
30th: Tech4Africa

What are the benefits to speaking at Tech4Africa?

  1. All speakers receive a free ticket to Tech4Africa, and exclusive access to the speakers lounge
  2. Grow your technical or product audience
  3. Make new friends, learn new things from the other speakers
  4. Enhance your professional profile & reputation
  5. Encourage the audience to network with you and your product

Notes on speaking:

  1. Submissions are open to anyone, and will be considered as long as there is a technology or African context to the content.
  2. Be bold, be brave, be courageous, be controversial, be interesting, and most of all, have an opinion.
  3. We want to encourage vigorous discussion, debate and discourse, so content which polarises opinion will grab more attention than content which doesn’t.
  4. We’re interested in what works, and indeed what doesn’t work in Africa. We believe in success stories, but also recognise that failure is an important tool in learning. Don’t be afraid to talk about failures.