Firelight Director Peter Laugharn joins TEDxChange, a series of big picture TEDx Talks happening around the world. His talk, Helping Africa Help Itself is a powerful message of the strength in African communities. Watch the video here and let us know what you think!                ...

It’s not often that I wake up to hear the name of someone I know well on all the morning news programs, but it happened today with President Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim to become the next president of the World Bank. Jim is a bulldog for what he believes in. He knows how to make bureaucracies accomplish more than they think they are capable of. He is knowledgeable ......

Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video has been viewed millions of times and pretty much every news source and internationally focused blogger has written about it so you’ve likely heard about it by now. Since it’s about children and Africa, we thought it was important to give you our view too. So yesterday, we gathered in the Firelight offices to sit down and talk about it. There’s no question the video ......

Yesterday my fiancée and I went to the county courthouse to pick up marriage license forms. Going out the backdoor, we stumbled onto the Occupy Santa Cruz encampment. There were probably 100 tents and a tepee right in front of us. I had a flashback to when I was working for the United Nations Development Program in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Every morning I walked to work. Our offices were in ......

When we think of an engineer, many of us probably think about the years of rigorous schooling, complex math problems, and difficult wirings or chemicals. While in other places, an engineer is anyone who creatively develops solutions for technical, practical and social problems either for themselves or others. Firelight team member, Gretchen Ellis, saw this on her first visit to Africa,“While I was in Africa, I wrote to my engineering ......