I’ve travelled to Africa before and it is a place that has grabbed hold of my soul since.
I’ve often thought that I’d like to work there for a period of time (3 - 6 mos if not more). My wife is a school teacher, and her skills would be very easy to sell there, I would imagine. But I have no clue how to even begin looking for an opportunity like this.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
My Google search returns a bunch of garbage affiliate sites and sketchy looking stuff. I’d like to find some first hand accounts before I start getting serious about this.
The kicker, for me, is it has to be kid-friendly. Ex-pat environments, etc.
There is design work down there if that’s what you’re looking for… for one, there’s an Olgivly and Mather in Uganda. Additionally, a LONG time ago I did an informational interview in Cape Town with a product design house called …XYZ design (cool guys to by the way.) They did projects that were as interesting as you might expect; outfitting vehicles for the field, navigation products, low cost stuff, etc. There is an AEG in Durban too, so if SA’s your slant you could try up there as well.
Engineers Without Borders had interesting stuff going on too… and connections to independent grant projects. In the Bay Area several people were doing innovative work and were back/forth quite a bit. One project was making/distributing instruction for pairing old car alternators with bikes to charge nightime lights - stuff like that. You could check them out too
The design directory on Core77 has some other African design companies as well
Try contacting the people from Design for Development. They have been doing some good work in Africa with projects like the Bambulance.
Design for Development http://www.designfordevelopment.org/
Bambulance http://plippo.com/client/bambulance/home.html