I spent a few hours creating this vector illustration piece. I find art brings a catharsis and serenity when I’m exhausted or stressed, so every once in a while, I’ll churn out a piece.
I’m giving this away free for use as computer wallpaper/backgrounds, phone backgrounds, profile images, etc. Note: Free to use for personal wallpaper use, not for resale or re-distribution or printing. Credit information must remain intact.
Thank you!
Download High Quality Sunfire Wallpaper
Download the high quality files for desktop and mobile free of charge using the links below.
A few thoughts on why, even though “all lives matter” is a valid statement, we should be mindful and empathetic and not use it to hijack #BlackLivesMatter, which is a movement literally begging for people to pay attention to the social inequalities facing black people.
I want to use a practical, very specific example that may help provide better context outside the seemingly controversial race issue.
I started @FundiBots in 2010, using robotics as a fun and practical way for Ugandan students to experience the magic of science.
As the years went on, our team and regional reach expanded and the number of students we trained grew exponentially (10,000+ to date). But something started to show in our data: we had far fewer girls in our robotics classes than boys. For every 10 boys, we had about 3 girls.
And this was in urban government schools, so that was troubling, even though the ratios in international/private schools were much better.
But, as we got deeper into the villages, that number became smaller, with some classes that were filled almost exclusively with boys.
We needed to get more girls engaged in science early, because, and this is the important part:
Fewer girls were getting into STEM classes and even fewer were finishing those STEM classes. This meant fewer were doing STEM at university level and so STEM careers had fewer women.
So we started @FundiGirls with the sole aim of providing EQUITABLE support to get more girls into STEM spaces, support them in sciences, etc.
And one of the first questions that popped up was “WhAt AbOuT ThE BoYs? Will there be a Fundi Boys?”
Just like “BUT ALL LIVES MATTER”.
The main problem with statements like these is the assumption that the playing field is equal. Or rather, that the suffering field is equal.
Yes, every demographic has challenges, BUT for some, they are deeply rooted systemic challenges that are unique and biased against them.
And for these people, their issues urgently need attention.
As an example, let’s explicitly explore the deeply biased systemic challenges that most girls in Uganda face.
Why were girls (rural and urban) dropping off so rapidly and so nonchalantly from science classes?
The answer? The entire system was skewed against them. We’ve asked hundreds, if not thousands of girls these questions over the course of four years.
The answers, almost always come back the same, some with more gravity than others.
Here are just a few of the drop-off points.
Drop-off 1: “Sciences are hard.”
Everyone can do sciences, but they generally need more time to learn and grasp. But if you’re a girl, chances are you’re being told to first do chores before doing school work. Before the day starts, you’re already behind the boys.
So girls consciously (and subconsciously) opt for classes that are easier to pass, to reduce the academic stress they have to deal with.
Parents and teachers see them lagging behind and assume it’s because they can’t manage sciences, so they encourage the girls to pursue arts.
Drop-off 2: “Those things are for boys.”
A lot of girls (rural and urban) are constantly told that some subjects/careers/games/ideas are not meant for women. For example, rough, dirty things likes machines. And they are constantly reminded that a woman’s place is in the kitchen.
Drop-off 3: Menstrual Health.
Nearly 60% of girls in rural Uganda miss school once a month because of menstrual health challenges (access to pads, dirty toilets, no privacy, stigma, etc). In a year, this girl will miss a quarter of her classes because of her menstrual cycle.
Guess which subjects suffer the most when you miss classes? Sciences. I facilitate science learning for a living; it is incredibly hard to catch up if you miss foundational principles. And that lack of knowledge builds up until you give up and opt for simpler subjects.
Drop-off 4: Teachers.
The majority of science teachers are male. Why? Because girls leave sciences early and never get to the point where they pursue it long enough to become teachers.
So girls have fewer science role models to look up to and get advice from.
Additionally, if your teachers are not invested in your growth or if they are misogynistic men (refer to drop-off 2), they will condescendingly advise you to try simpler subjects or course units, perpetuating the stereotype that some subjects are too hard for girls to handle.
Drop-off 5: Fellow students.
Teenage years are rough years in which self-esteem is made or broken. For girls, there are a lot of physical, psychological and academic attacks, and they come primarily from male peers. PS: It’s much, much worse in under-privileged schools.
Drop-off 6: Societal Pressure For Marriage.
Many rural families marry girls off at an early age. Also, sexual abuse, rapes, pregnancies etc. are tragic realities for young girls.
Inevitable, the first thing that suffers is school, while the boys happily continue onward.
The list is endless and many of us (particularly men) find it hard to understand, because it doesn’t happen to us.
We say things like “well, they should be stronger” or “they should report the rape” or “they asked for it” or my personal favorite “I survived the same system.”
We like to point to the success stories and say, “Well, she made it, so they should all be able to make it.”
That is not how life works; outliers are a statistical anomaly.
It takes tremendous willpower, grit and luck to succeed in a system that’s heavily stacked against you.
So when we decide to dedicate more resources to supporting those that need it most, we’re not saying boys don’t matter. We’re not saying rich girls in fancy schools don’t matter.
We’re saying, this specific group has this very big problem and we want to address it. Urgently.
So yes, all lives matter, but right now, the house that is on fire is the black house, and it has been on fire for a long, long time.
And we need to give it urgent attention before it burns out of control.
I’m very dark-skinned, even by Ugandan standards and I travel a lot, but the only place I ever feel safe is when I’m in Africa. I love Emirates, but every single transit through Dubai is a nightmare of resolutely ignoring stares, hushed whispers and pointing, sneering adults.
It doesn’t help that I’m tall, so I stand out like a sore thumb in almost all crowds. I always joke with friends that if we ever get lost in a huge crowd, all they have to do is look for me.
I am, in very, very many ways, hard to ignore. Especially because I’m very dark-skinned.
Every trip comes with the mental preparation for the fact that I will be judged first by of the color of my skin.
Not by the decades of experience. Not by the skills I have acquired. And not by the impact of our work.
But judged by the one thing I have no control over: My skin.
I’ve never felt comfortable walking down the streets of the United States, because I am ALWAYS afraid.
The month Trump won elections, I was with a group of friends in Atlanta, and I remember us saying that if anything happened, our white friends would form a shield around us.
I’ve never felt more aware of the color of my skin than when I was in India, walking alone through a mall in Mumbai, and people pulled out their cameras to start filming me, laughing with each other. Or when I went to this school and the teachers pulled the kids away from me.
Or the incredible relief I felt that one time, deep in a rural American town, when I was hanging out with a bunch of awesome white American friends at a store, and I finally saw a black person for the first time that day.
Racism can be overt, aggressive, and it can also be subtle and nuanced to the point where you may never realize it.
Like back in the day when my friend Kizito and I used to joke that maybe we should hire a white person to be the face of our company so we could get more business.
Or being in a meeting with a white consultant who was guiding and advising us, and everyone in the room addressed the white person, for almost the entire meeting, until I spoke and they realize that I’m actually the one in charge of the company.
Or being in conversation or discussion and being ignored because I couldn’t possibly have anything of value to add, until I speak and then suddenly its all about whether I went to school in the US or if I really grew up in Africa.
I have an entry in my journal that’s filled with rage because we lost a competition where we were hands-down the most qualified organization to drive consistent, long-term impact, but the organizations that won were all African organizations… with white leaders.
I have had conversations with potential funders in which it was obvious within a few minutes that my funding request wouldn’t go far because I didn’t LOOK like someone they could trust with their money.
I would never be given the chance to prove that we knew what we were doing.
And yet, in all this, I am privileged. Why? Because I have the option of walking away and choosing better people and places to direct my energy.
But my biggest privilege? I know that when I come back home, I’m not going to get killed just because of the color of my skin.
Racism can be subtle, nuanced and harmless. But it can be overt, aggressive, and increasingly, fatal.
Our experiences will always be subjective, and we’ll all point towards the data that suits us to frame the arguments that support our own biases and privileges.
But when someone stands up and screams their lungs out at the injustice, when someone is afraid that each day their child walks out the door, they may not return home, you listen.
When someone tells you that they are being murdered in their own homes, you f***** listen.
So when people are out on the streets fighting for justice and raging against centuries of oppression, I support without reserve because I know that even though I have my own problems at home, in my country, it doesn’t erase their struggle and their fight for social justice.
And I know that racism can be a slow, nefarious, centuries-long campaign to prove that someone is inferior because they LOOK different. And that is then used to subjugate them, re-write their history and erase their identity. And ultimately, create a narrative perpetuated across the entire world.
And I know that racism can also violently culminate in a single moment of blinding hatred for a race that leads to a man being killed as they beg for mercy, as a grown man cries out for his mother, ignored by the law, even as cameras roll and people watch.
I wanted to share a few thoughts on working from home/learning from home, diving a little deeper beyond our Facebook comfort zones.
These observations are informed by our discussions on extending learning at Fundi Bots and our work-from-home experiments with our team members across the country.
[There is a stronger bias towards remote learning within the content].
Let’s break this down into access levels.
Level 1: Electricity.
The primary foundation necessary for remote work or remote learning is inaccessible to a lot of people.
Our teams in Mbale and Gulu especially suffer with this; these regions are notorious for day-long power cuts.
Level 2: Fast, affordable internet connectivity. Video calls and conference calls consume A LOT of data. I saw estimates that a 1 hour zoom call uses about 500MB to 1GB. Factor in about 3 calls a week, across X number of employees and you’re heading for above-normal expenses.
(PS: The more people you have on the call, the more data you use).
Data aside (we’re not going to survive on current bundles), stable internet is limited to urban areas and even those regions are sometimes spotty. A child trying to study online even just a couple of miles outside a small town will struggle with connectivity.
Level 3: Personal hardware.
Computers and internet-ready smartphones are not exactly accessible to the majority of people. Just the other day, the Ministry of Education said radio penetration was too low for remote learning.
Radio. Guys, not even TVs, but radio.
[ As an aside, it would it would be interesting to see data on fully-internet-capable device penetration in Uganda as a measure of workforce readiness for remote work. Maybe those exploring gig economy projects can advise on this. ]
Level 4: Broader socio-economic comforts.
If you have the previous three levels in place, can you competently work or learn from home? Various issues come to mind: Cramped living spaces, security concerns for expensive (company) equipment, peace-of-mind in the house/home, etc.
An interesting observation for home learning is that many parents offload learning to school time. When the child is home, it’s time for work around the house. In one of our education groups, there are concerns that many children may not return to school after the lockdowns end.
This is especially devastating for female children in rural communities who are suffering from domestic violence, sexual abuse and are at high risk of being married off earlier than usual as parents grapple with the financial implications of COVID.
Level 5: Technical skills.
We would need to rapidly improve ICT skills for workers, students, teachers and parents. While the government touts progress with basic ICT skills, I think the reality on the ground tells a different story.
For teachers, pedagogical transformation is absolutely necessary. For many, their idea of remote learning is basically a teacher being filmed as they (once again) talk at the audience.
There has to be a fundamental re-calibration of content delivery and performance evaluation.
For parents, I believe that anyone seriously considering remote learning should have a parent-training program embedded within their e-learning solution to help parents adapt to the technology.
The support structure at home is the primarily the parent or guardian. If they cannot understand what the child is doing, then learning is crippled.
We have a lot of digital content available online, but:
i) the good content has no local context
ii) the local content is poor quality, most of it is a direct copy & paste of textbooks and pamphlets with no attempt to re-factor for digital learning pathways.
I believe we can chip away at these layers systematically (and many organizations already are), but we need to chip away with the awareness that technology, while being a potential catalyst for learning transformation can also become an enabler of inequality across a country, and sometimes even within the same town.
A lot of my thoughts and ideas for intervention start with the most vulnerable beneficiary: the child, deep in the village, in a hut, without electricity, internet, hardware and technical skills.
What does remote learning look like for THAT child?
My biggest business lesson from 2019 starts with this:
One of the most painful things that ever happened to me was shutting down Elemental Edge in 2017 after spending 12 years trying to build an international-level multimedia studio.
At the core of my failure were two things:
1. My constant inability to bring in consistent business.
Marketing, sales or business development were not within my skillset. I hated it, and couldn’t understand why people could not see how awesome we were. I was exceptionally good on the creative side, but awkward and introverted on the client side. I couldn’t close deals to save my life.
Lessons:
a) Founders have to do the tough things, and the toughest of things is selling the vision to the team and to the clients. For introverted tech-focused founders like myself, this is where a business-savvy co-founder would have brought much-needed balance to the force.
b) There are things that only the founders can sell well. And part of that is the excitement of vision, purpose and shared goals. Being at the cutting edge of design technology meant our language and process was too unique for the average external sales person or marketing person to grasp. We cycled through quite a few marketing people, but…
c) Lack of money to run a business is a vicious cycle: you can’t recruit good business development people, your team is constantly unmotivated, culture breaks down, reputation takes a hit as you miss payroll after payroll, you’re all broke AF and the quality of work degrades as people look for side gigs.
2. I absolutely refused to bribe anyone or give kick-backs in order to get business or get paid faster.
Our major clients were advertising agencies, and if you’ve worked in this industry, you know the kick-back drama.
There’s no lesson here; I still refuse to bow to corruption.
Obviously, there were lots of other failures from different perspectives, different people, all too many to list.
But as a leader, you take full responsibility. Quite simply, the buck stops with you. And I know a lot of the other challenges would have been resolved (or reduced) if there was consistent cash-flow in the business.
So (the lesson is coming, I promise).
After almost three years of struggling with the same issue at Fundi Bots, I decided to do something about it. Our fundraising wasn’t working. I still was more interested in the technology, and kept looking for a fundraising lead, hoping that someone more experienced and knowledgeable would have more success.
So, with the help of the Segal Family Foundation‘s African Visionary Fellowship and my amazing friends and advisors, I finally figured out how to make fundraising comfortable and exciting for me.
Quite simply, it involved four things:
i) Focus on developing relationships around shared goals.
As an introvert, I decided to invest more time in meaningful one-on-one conversations with partners around shared purpose & goals. I love stories and deep conversations, so this was something I could leverage very, very well.
I would have conversations with potential funders and realize early on that our partnership would not be a good fit, but I still enjoyed the discussions around impact, business and the general landscape of education.
It opened my world-view and gave me incredible perspective that informed better business decisions later on.
ii) Less faceless grant applications.
While general grant applications have huge financial upside, they didn’t quite work for us. Our work at Fundi Bots was (and still is) very strange and it’s not the kind that translates well in an application.
I realized quickly that writing a grant application in which you’re trying to sell a radical idea while competing with thousands of very professional and experienced grant-writers was not the best use of my time.
Especially not when we had no proof of impact or effectiveness.
Shout out to Google RISE, Ashoka and Echoing Green for believing in us very early.
iii) Highly curated funder prospecting.
It was more rewarding to sift through hundreds of prospects, do inquiries and get advice in order to zero in on one potential funder before our first email, meeting or call.
This meant better conversations, stronger partnership pipelines and better success rates.
iv) Gamifying my process.
When your background is in normal business (providing service or product in exchange for money), then fundraising is weird. You’re basically asking someone to give you their money – for “free” – for an idea you think may work.
It was very uncomfortable for me.
But, as I learnt from a fundraising workshop back in 2016, you should never let your discomfort stand in the way of changing lives.
One morning, during a call a few years ago with one of my advisors (shout-out Eve K.), I realized I could gamify fundraising.
I had been studying and practicing video game design and I was fascinated by the Skinner Box and the general concept of gamification. And then, right in the middle of that call, I got an epiphany:
I could leverage what I had learnt about gamification to reduce (even possibly negate) my frustration with fundraising.
So, I “off-loaded” the discomfort of consistently checking in with potential donors to a CRM system I found and customized.
[This is also me advocating for my personal philosophy that widespread learning + experimentation leads to razor-sharp intuition and faster problem solving. It’s a chaotic system that creates underlying order.]
And so the biggest 2019 lesson is this:
Focusing on developing partnership relationships leads to excellent partners.
There are conversations I had early on where I realized we would have no control over how we did our work. Or that the pressure to grow fast would be too risky.
There are also lots of grant applications we get sent (or find online) that would be an excellent fit for us, but the reputation of the funder was less than stellar, leading to stories of very toxic donor-grantee relationships. Or, for more government-sourced funding, stories of corruption and kick-backs that would give me nightmares.
Having a values-filter helps us focus better. I already have issues with sleep, I didn’t want a troubled conscience to be one of the reasons I’m not sleeping.
I never want Fundi Bots to get funding for the sake of it. It has to serve a shared goal that leads with agency, dignity and empathy for our beneficiaries and our team.
And sometimes it means staying small, or waiting a little longer (while panicking in the middle of the night about payroll, and under-served beneficiaries).
But, Fundi Bots has been able to get some of the best funding partners and advisors. Funders who support with empathy, and who trust in local leadership. Funders who are happy to jump on a call to brainstorm project implementation with you, however risky or crazy the ideas are. And especially funders who respect and understand that your work is highly experimental, and failure is part of the learning process.
We founders and entrepreneurs are constantly under tremendous pressure from all sides, and many times, we are battling situations that are 100% outside our control (hello COVID-19). Yet, we have to find ways to course-correct, pivot and re-calibrate almost on a daily basis.
Sometimes you’re leading a team of 5 people, and other times you’re leading thousands of people scattered across the world.
But having funders, or investors who reach out to check in with you and ask how they can support during times of crisis significantly relieves much of this pressure and leads to stronger outcomes for your work.
But there is no solid peace of mind for any founder or entrepreneur than knowing that they have a good, focused team that is committed to the work, the vision and above all, the beneficiaries.
So, major shout-out to the entire Fundi Bots family, from those who’ve been with us since we started to those that joined a few weeks before COVID hit. I’m incredibly honored to work with you!
