Community and Academia Engagement

This year for has been incredible for the Youth Works Asia team and The Champions in Malaysia who really took up the challenge to impact their communities positively. It has been a few months that they’ve come together and started The Champions programme that was birthed in March this year. Below is the year in [...]

Earlier this year RLabs and its Asia partner, Youth Works Asia, participated in a research project with Mobile Youth giving some insights from young South Africans into how they adopt their brands. You can download the FREE ebook over here and happy reading. Influence – A Marketer's guide (Free Ebook Download by mobileYouth) View more [...]

Last week the RLabs Nigeria partners had an interesting call discussing the rollout of the new project that will be using technology to address the problems of HIV. This partnership between Youth for Technology and RLabs will be supported by Indigo Trust who is know for its impact investments in Africa. The next few weeks [...]

As part of the continuous growth of RLabs to empower and equip communities especially youth, our Nigeria partner Youth for Technology received a welcomed grant from Indigo Trust to provide peer-to-peer sexual health counselling in the southeastern and Niger Delta regions of Nigeria. The project aims to equip young people with the tools to be [...]

As part of our Innovation Incubation and Acceleration (InnovIA) profile series, we highlighting another exciting social enterprise start-up, Social Media Factory, which was founded by Craig Ross to maximize the use of Social Media to create employment and provide quality services to organisations, businesses and corporate companies. The idea was birthed after realising the high [...]

This past weekend the RLabs crew found themselves 40km outside of Cape Town, South Africa in a town called Atlantis. It has approximately 210,000 residents and suffers under high levels of poverty, substance abuse and unemployment. Atlantis has always been best known as the town that apartheid built. Above all it is a community in [...]

The RLabs Innovation Incubator and Accelerator (InnovIA) for 2012 have an exciting line-up of Social Enterprise start-ups and one of our enterprises just released the following exciting announcement: It has been just over 7 weeks since Uusi had its soft launch (BETA) via Mxit and this decision of launching via Africa’s most popular Social Network [...]

The Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs) together with Entrelaces (Brazilian Association for Research and Projects in Education) are proud to announce the beginning of their partnership and the foundation of RLabs Brazil. The goal of this collaboration is to promote social transformation through the creation and dissemination of knowledge in order to increase the empowerment, upliftment [...]

RLabs is proud to launch our latest partnership in Brazil with Entrelaces with our champion Monica Garcia. We are looking forward to growing with our team in Brazil and below you can find out more about our partner organisation in Rio de Janeiro. In 1999, Entrelaces (Brazilian Association for Research and Projects in Education) was [...]

RLabs in partnership with the Namibia Business Innovation Centre (NBIC) will be offering a 3 x 2 week workshop for unemployed young people who would like to enter the Digital Industry. The workshops are designed for young people with a secondary or tertiary degree. Initially they should come from Windhoek to make participation and later [...]

Nothing prepared me for the journey I took to Windhoek, Namibia. Not only is it one of those beautiful picturesque landscapes but seeing the amazing talent and potential in people got me excited on this trip. Rene Parker and I were fortunate enough to visit the Namibia Business Innovation Centre (NBIC) after almost being in [...]

The RLabs team in Portugal have been working the last few months on a Web-based SMS Counselling Application that allows users to chat, send messages and manage their profile. The system currently known as “RLabs” has been developed as part of a partnership with the Mobile Computing group at the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade [...]

It has been just over a year since our last visit to Porto, Portugal where the RLabs movement started its first international social franchise. Being back with champions Tiago and Gustavo was a wonderful opportunity to connect and assess the growth of RLabs in Portugal. The visit by Marlon and Rene gave RLabs the opportunity [...]

It is with lots of excitement that RLabs Rhini (Grahamstown, Eatern Cape) have kicked off and is on the move with its 14 week Social and New Media programme. The programme will empower and equip communities in Rhini to share their stories and engage using Social Media. This is a partnership with the local NGO [...]

This week was another big week for RLabs as we signed a memorandum of understanding with Aalto University, Department of Computer Science who will be one of our key partners in Finland. This exciting partnership will provide RLabs with the opportunity to ensure bringing the best innovations to life making a difference in the lives [...]

One of the RLABS team, Brent Williams, was invited to attend and do a presentation at the, 3rd Euro-Africa Cooperation Forum on ICT Research. This Forum was organised as a side event to the 3rd Africa-EU Summit. An event designed for anyone with an interest in Euro – Africa collaborative research on ICT. This event [...]

RLabs is excited to have Nairobi Innovation Lab (NaiLab) as one of its partners in Kenya with a goal of fostering new innovation and entrepreneurs in Africa. This collaboration came through our partnerships with One Percent Club and we know that Africa’s heart beats for a new breed of innovators. NaiLab based in Nairobi is [...]

Over the last few months RLabs and NaiLab have been in discussions about a partnership since our first meeting in Amsterdam (thanks to One Percent Club). It was there that we saw an opportunity to work together but also change and transform the way traditional technology incubation happens. Both myself and Sam Gichuru have a [...]

Brent Williams, one of the RLabs team members, were in the UK for 6 weeks to explore the possibility of setting up a Social Franchise in Southampton. This will be a partnership with Southampton University under the leadership of Dr. Gary Wills. The focus of a RLabs in Southampton will be to provide Digital Literacy [...]

Today was another exciting day for us as we announced a partnership between ExtendedBITS and RLabs to start the first ICT Innovation Incubator in Somaliland. This will provide young people from Somaliland the opportunity to not just gain valuable ICT and Entrepreneurship experience but also provide an opportunity to grow a new breed of African [...]