From a 360-degree panorama of the dusty landscape to a cheeky rover selfie: NASA's most stunning shots of Mars from Perseverance's first week on the Red Planet

• More than 5,000 images have been sent back to Earth by the NASA Perseverance rover from the Red Planet
• The images include thousands of the entry, descent and landing stage of the mission including the parachute
• There are 23 cameras on board the $2.2 billion Mars vehicle covering science, landing and engineering 
• As well as capturing images of the Martian sunset, the desert-like landscape and the rover itself, the cameras will be used to better understand the planet and guide the rover over difficult and rocky Martian terrain 

Released Monday was the mission's first panorama of the rover's landing location, taken by the two Navigation Cameras located on its mast

SEE THE REST HERE

NASA's Perseverance's most stunning shots of the Red Planet from its first week on Mars | Daily Mail Online

WHAT IS THE SNOW MOON?

According to The Old Farmer's Almanac, each Full Moon of the year goes by several names. The February Full Moon is most commonly called the Snow Moon. Other names include Bear Moon, Eagle Moon, Raccoon Moon, Groundhog Moon, and Hunger Moon.

As for why February's Moon is called the Snow Moon, the Almanac says:

 "February is typically a time of heavy snowfall."

This graphic collects all the relevant data about each Full Moon of 2021, including their popular names, whether they are a 'super' or 'micro' Moon, a perigee or apogee Full Moon, and whether they are remarkable in some other way (Blue Moon or Harvest Moon). Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Scott Sutherland

Most of these Full Moon names are simplifications or loose translations of names and phrases from First Nations peoples. According to Western Washington University's Spanel Planetarium, many First Nations tribes had names for the February Full Moon. Some named them after animals, such as the goose (the Haida and the Omaha), the rabbit (the Potawatomi), the crow (the Shawnee), the coyote (the Shoshone), or the black bear (the Tlingit). There are references to cold (the Lakota and Wishram), ice or frost (the Algonquin and Arapaho), and sleet (the Comanche). The Kalapuya of the Pacific Northwest referred to it as "atchiulartadsh" — which translates to "out of food" — and could be a possible reference to 'Hunger Moon'.

Does it live up to the name Snow Moon, though?

There is certainly an abundance of snow on the ground across Canada right now. Also, plenty of that snow fell during storms that swept across parts of the country during the month of February.

According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, however, at least over the past 30 years, January has been the month of the year when most Canadians see the highest snowfall amounts.

"February may not be the month where the most snow falls in a year, but because it comes at the end of the season, and at a time when temperatures for most places average below zero, you probably see more snow on the ground since you've had your best chance to build up snowpack," says Weather Network meteorologist Michael Carter.

The Weather Network - Three fun facts about tonight's Full Snow Moon

'Spooky' AI tool brings dead relatives' photos to life

  

By Umberto Bacchi
MEDIA INDUSTRY
FEBRUARY 26, 2021 

(Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Like the animated paintings that adorn the walls of Harry Potter’s school, a new online tool promises to bring portraits of dead relatives to life, stirring debate about the use of technology to impersonate people.

Genealogy company MyHeritage launched its “Deep Nostalgia” feature earlier this week, allowing users to turn stills into short videos showing the person in the photograph smiling, winking and nodding.

“Seeing our beloved ancestors’ faces come to life ... lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history,” MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet said in a statement.

Developed with Israeli computer vision firm D-ID, Deep Nostalgia uses deep learning algorithms to animate images with facial expressions that were based on those of MyHeritage employees.

Some of the company’s users took to Twitter on Friday to share the animated images of their deceased relatives, as well as moving depictions of historical figures, including Albert Einstein and Ancient Egypt’s lost Queen Nefertiti.

“Takes my breath away. This is my grandfather who died when I was eight. @MyHeritage brought him back to life. Absolutely crazy,” wrote Twitter user Jenny Hawran.

While most expressed amazement, others described the feature as “spooky” and said it raised ethical questions. “The photos are enough. The dead have no say in this,” tweeted user Erica Cervini.

From chatbots to virtual reality, the tool is the latest innovation seeking to bring the dead to life through technology.

Last year U.S. rapper Kanye West famously gifted his wife Kim Kardashian a hologram of her late father congratulating her on her birthday and on marrying “the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world”. WHY SHE DIVORCED HIM

‘ANIMATING THE PAST’

The trend has opened up all sorts of ethical and legal questions, particularly around consent and the opportunity to blur reality by recreating a virtual doppelganger of the living.

Elaine Kasket a psychology professor at the University of Wolverhampton in Britain who authored a book on the “digital afterlife”, said that while Deep Nostalgia was not necessarily “problematic”, it sat “at the top of a slippery slope”.

“When people start overwriting history or sort of animating the past ... You wonder where that ends up,” she said.

MyHeritage acknowledges on its website that the technology can be “a bit uncanny” and its use “controversial”, but said steps have been taken to prevent abuses.


“The Deep Nostalgia feature includes hard-coded animations that are intentionally without any speech and therefore cannot be used to fake any content or deliver any message,” MyHeritage public relations director Rafi Mendelsohn said in a statement.

Yet, images alone can convey meaning, said Faheem Hussain, a clinical assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

“Imagine somebody took a picture of the Last Supper and Judas is now winking at Mary Magdalene - what kind of implications that can have,” Hussain told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Similarly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) animations could be use to make someone appear as though they were doing things they might not be happy about, such as rolling their eyes or smiling at a funeral, he added.

Mendelsohn of MyHeritage said using photos of a living person without their consent was a breach of the company’s terms and conditions, adding that videos were clearly marked with AI symbols to differentiate them from authentic recordings.

“It is our ethical responsibility to mark such synthetic videos clearly and differentiate them from real videos,” he said.


Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi in Milan; Editing by Helen Popper. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit news.trust.org

Exclusive: Lilly Singh Explains Why Canada Categorizing The Proud Boys As A Terrorist Organization Is A Turning Point

© Provided by ET Canada

Lilly Singh is sharing an exclusive new video with ET Canada, and she's got an important point to make.

In the video, the star of "A Little Late with Lilly Singh" begins by expressing her appreciation for being able "to talk about important things and have conversations that I believe matter."

She's been thinking about "the power of words and language, because if you think about it, some words and how we understand them can change our entire view of the world."

RELATED: Lilly Singh Talks To Drew Barrymore About Being The Only Female Daily Late-Night Host

A big example of that, she explained, is the word "terrorist," which "as long as I can remember has been an insult toward Muslim people," something that took on an even more racist component after 9/11.

This, she explained, is present in the way gun violence and other types of terrorist attacks are characterized by the media, depending on whether the person who commits that act is white or a person of colour. The former, she said, are always described as terrorists, while the latter are usually described using other terms, such as "gunman."

However, she pointed to Canada's recent designation of the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization as a major turning point.

"It's like somebody turned off the gaslight for two seconds and thought, 'If they walk like a terrorist, and talk like a terrorist, and attack like a terrorist, maybe they're more dangerous than your Muslim neighbour who'll come over and drink sparkling grape juice instead of have a drink with you,'" she said.

RELATED: NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh Gets Quizzed By Lilly Singh On Strange Canadian Laws

"Congratulations Proud Boys on breaking terrorism's glass ceiling," she added.

“A Little Late With Lilly Singh” 

Proud Boys leader throws pals under the bus for attacking Capitol during CNN interview

Tom Boggioni RAW STORY February 26, 2021


CNN screenshot

In an interview with CNN's Sara Sidner, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio admitted that, although he encouraged members of his far-right group to attend the "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan 6th that led to a riot at the Capitol building, he doesn't believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump -- and then added that members of the Proud Boys who entered the building broke the law.

Tarrio, who has been accused of being an FBI informant and was not on the Capitol grounds the day of the insurrection because he was in jail, (PROTECTIVE CUSTODY) stated that he had no sympathy for the terrorized lawmakers, telling Sidner, "I'm not gonna cry about people who don't give a crap about their constituents. I'm not going to sympathize with them."

"They [lawmakers] are doing the job that the people put them there to do, and if they don't like it, they can vote them out," the CNN correspondent asked. "They are still Americans, they are still human beings who felt that their lives were in danger. How can you not feel any sympathy or any empathy towards them like that?"

"I'm not going to worry about people that their only worry in life is to be re-elected," he replied which led Sidner to report that eight friends of his within the Proud Boys-- which has been designated a terrorist organization by the Canadian government -- have been taken into custody so far.

With Sidner reporting that Tarrio encouraged the Proud Boys to "show up in record numbers," she asked about the close associates of the leader -- including one in particular --who have been taken into custody.

"I condemn the actions," he replied. "I don't think that he should have done that. I think it was completely wrong, but the other seven individuals were trespassing. I think that they got caught up with the entire -- like the entire crowd, and they made a poor decision to go in there."

"Members of the Proud Boys didn't appear to just be getting caught up in this, some of them were leading this attack," the CNN correspondent pressed. "You had people removing barriers who were Proud Boys. You had someone threatening an officer, breaking the Capitol window. They weren't just following in this insurrection, it appears that some of them were leading the charge."

"Now, those three accusations, I do want to touch on those," he replied. "The breaking of the window, we've already hit."

"You think that's wrong?" Sidner interjected.

"Yeah, definitely, unequivocally, I think that's wrong. But the threatening of police officers, I didn't -- I didn't see that," he attempted.

Pilot reports unknown flying ‘object’ in airline audio of close encounter

© AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images In this file photo, an American Airlines Boeing 787-9 takes off from Los Angeles international Airport on January 13, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.

Josh K. Elliott  2 days ago

An unidentified flying object reportedly whizzed past an American Airlines passenger flight over New Mexico in a close encounter captured in a radio transmission from the pilot.

The incident happened around 1 p.m. local time on Sunday, while American Airlines flight 2292 was en route from Hebron, Ky., to Phoenix, Ariz.

A 15-second audio clip captures the pilot's excited voice as he tries to make sense of something he spotted above the clouds during the flight.

Read more: The CIA released thousands of UFO documents online. Here’s how to read them

"Do you have any targets up here?" he says over the radio. "We just had something go over the top of us that — I hate to say this — looked like a long cylindrical object."

The pilot describes the object as a "cruise missile type of thing" that was "moving really fast."

He adds that the object "went right over the top of us."

Steve Douglass, an airline radio enthusiast, first captured the audio chatter for his blog. American Airlines later confirmed that the audio was authentic, and referred all further questions to the FBI.

"Following a debrief with our Flight Crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21," American Airlines said in a statement to several outlets. "For any additional questions on this, we encourage you to reach out to the FBI."

Douglass said he was listening to the airwaves on Sunday when he heard the strange tone of the pilot's voice.

“I heard this aircraft, basically, above all other aircraft because the tone in his voice was so excited," Douglass told local station ABC 7.

He added that it's unlikely that the object was a missile, because Sundays are a "day off" for the military.

No military test notifications were made ahead of time, ABC 7 reports.

White Sands Missile Range, which operates in the area, did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News.

Cockpit audio recordings have captured a handful of close encounters over the years, though some have been more obviously terrestrial than others.

Last year, for example, pilots reported seeing a man with a jetpack around Los Angeles International Airport on two separate occasions.

Nevertheless, the close encounter sparked some speculation about aliens on social media, especially given that New Mexico is the site of the infamous alleged Roswell UFO incident.

The so-called UFO involved in Sunday's encounter remains, by definition, an unidentified flying object.

The Pentagon in recent years has confirmed several recordings and encounters with UFOs, which it calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Officials say they want pilots to be more comfortable with reporting such encounters due to the potential danger they might represent.

Video: Pilot claims UFO spotted while flying over Arizona

The government recently released a vast trove of documents about UFO sightings over the past several decades, although enthusiasts are still combing over those documents for evidence of alien visitors.

U.S. defence officials have not said that UAPs or UFOs are proof of alien visitors, despite rampant speculation that the truth is out there.

Britain's GCHQ cyber spies embrace the AI revolution

By Guy Faulconbridge

Reuters/POOL New FILE PHOTO:
A GCHQ logo on a wall inside Britain's Government Communication Headquarters, in Cheltenham

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's cyber spies at the GCHQ eavesdropping agency say they have fully embraced artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover patterns in vast amounts of global data to counter hostile disinformation and snare child abusers.

AI, which traces its history back to British mathematician Alan Turing's work in the 1930s, allows modern computers to learn to sift through data to see the shadows of spies and criminals that a human brain might miss.

GCHQ, where Turing cracked Germany's naval Enigma code during World War Two, said advances in computing and the doubling of global data every two years meant it would now fully embrace AI to unmask spies and identify cyber attacks.

The world's biggest spy agencies in the United States, China, Russia and Europe are in a race to embrace the might of the technological revolution to bolster their defensive and offensive capabilities in the cyber realm.

"AI, like so many technologies, offers great promise for society, prosperity and security. Its impact on GCHQ is equally profound," said Jeremy Fleming, the director of GCHQ.

The Cheltenham-based Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) - the British equivalent of the NSA - is publishing a paper "Pioneering a New National Security: The Ethics of AI" confirming its full use of the technology.

"AI will be a critical issue for our national security in the 21st century," the report, released on Thursday, said.

While AI is not yet at the science-fiction stage of competing with humans to generate revolutionary ideas such as AI itself, computer software can see patterns in data within seconds that human minds would take hundreds of years to see.

GCHQ has been using basic forms of AI such as translation technology for years but is now stepping up its use, partly in response to the use of AI by hostile states and partly due to the data explosion which makes it effective.

Hostile states were using AI tools in an attempt to undermine free societies by spreading disinformation, GCHQ said, so it would use AI to counter such networks.

Similarly, AI could be deployed against organised crime or child abusers to uncover their networks or the maze of complex financial transactions which have traditionally been used to shield criminal empires.

In cyber intelligence, the United States is ranked by the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center as the top global power, followed by Britain, China and Israel.

"We can expect the deployment of new computing techniques, synthetic biology and other emerging technologies over the next few years," GCHQ said in the report.

"Each new development helps our economy and society grow stronger, and provides opportunities to keep us secure, but also has the potential to be misused by those who seek to do us harm."

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Canadian universities: 10 years of anti-racist reports but little action

Ayesha Mian Akram, PhD Student, Sociology/Social Justice, University of Windsor, Natalie Delia Deckard, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology,


Last fall, around 20 students sat-in for five days to demand concrete action on institutional anti-Black racism at the University of Ottawa. Similar actions took place at the University of Windsor where two groups, ExposeUWindsor and At UWindsor, started social media campaigns to reveal institutional racism. To do this they exposed Facebook messages that contained racist slurs, homophobic language and lynching threats from members of the Delta Chi fraternity connected to the university.

© (GoToVan/Flickr) Students often carry the bulk of the burden to combat systemic racism on campus.

The protests are a symptom of the well-documented systemic racism across Canadian universities. Examples include discriminatory treatment during adjudication proceedings and professors cavalierly using racial slurs in their lectures. In 2019, a white supremacist professor published anti-Black, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

This explicit climate of racist hostility across Canadian universities endangers our collective commitment to human rights, and it is students who have assumed the burden of exposing it and demanding accountability from university administrations.
Students carry the burden

Students expose this racism at great risk to their future educational and career prospects. While managing assignments, lectures and group projects during an already stressful and isolating time, they have taken to social media to organize protests and initiate letter campaigns to administrators.

This public exposure has attracted personal threats and hate messages to these students as well as faculty. The continuous emotional toll of this racism on their mental health is enormous. University of Windsor student Ruth Bisrat told the Windsor Star: “This is something I would literally have nightmares about ….”
Administrators must act

In response, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) Chief Commissioner Ena Chadha wrote a letter to university administrators. She said:


“It is problematic that students have felt the need to independently seek OHRC support, when the primary responsibility for addressing human rights issues at their institutions does not rest with them …. Instead, the legal and practical responsibility to examine the conditions, challenges and impediments to a respectful learning environment is in the hands of the ‘directing minds’ of universities, namely senior administrators and their human rights advisers.”

University administrations have convened task forces over multiple decades, and each has issued a report recommending action. These recommendations are remarkably similar across time and institution. A consolidation of the findings of the anti-racism working groups of 10 Canadian universities indicates that the reports overlap almost entirely and have said largely the same things since the mid-1990s.

However, each represents countless hours of work by students, faculty and staff who are effectively volunteering. They have a genuine hope that their work would lead to an end to racism on their campus.

© (Bluescruiser1949/Flickr) Universities can no longer claim to lack the knowledge of what needs to be done to deal with racism.

Recommendations

Here are some of the recommendations drawn from a number of reports from Canadian universities over 10 years:


Build (through targeted recruitment) and retain (through active intervention) a diverse community in which students of all races are represented in proportion to the community, and all cultures are respected.


Increase hiring and promotion of racialized community members, so that faculty and administration, particularly, reflect the communities their universities serve.


Systematically collect race-based data to facilitate the benchmarking of equity goals.


Support research curricula, centres and funding around racialization.


Create a clear and cogent anti-racist policy that streamlines the human rights process for those experiencing racism at the university.


Build, staff, resource, and empower a human rights or equity diversity and inclusion office with a mandate to train for and administer an equitable community in which to work and learn.


Create a mentorship program to facilitate the success of students, staff and faculty.

These communities have collectively invested our university communities’ time, energy and expertise in determining what the problems are, how damaging they are to our communities and what should be done to mitigate them.

Students continue to mobilize, demonstrating that the esteem to which universities are held is in the balance. Faculty, staff and community stakeholders have demanded an end to the scandals at the universities we have all worked to build.

Given this evidence of historical work, administrators can no longer claim to lack the knowledge of what needs to be done. What they perhaps lack is the will to carry the recommendations out.

Enough with the feigned ignorance and helplessness: university administrators must do the things we know we must do to meet our human rights obligations to all university community members, irrespective of race.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ayesha Mian Akram receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for her doctoral research.

Jane Ku receives funding from Social Sciences Humanities and Research Council.


Natalie Delia Deckard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Moscow goes green: Russian capital eyes fully electric bus fleet by 2030
2021-02-19


MOSCOW (Reuters) - Moscow plans to nearly quadruple the number of electric buses it operates in coming years and replace all petrol or diesel-powered public transport vehicles with greener alternatives by 2030, a senior city transport official has said.

© Reuters/MAXIM SHEMETOV

 An electric bus travels along a road in Moscow

Mosgortrans, which runs Moscow's vast bus and tram network, said its fleet of around 600 electric buses would be expanded by 400 vehicles by the year-end, by another 420 the following year, and then by 855, bringing the fleet to more than 2,000 e-buses.

"Every year the plan will be to replace all wheeled public transport vehicles with electric buses," said Artyom Burlakov, deputy head of the innovative projects department at Mosgortrans.

Environmental activists have welcomed the initiative.

"They are also buying new, more power-efficient trams, which is a good thing," said Mikhail Babenko, head of the green economy programme at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Russia.

Babenko said there was still a long way to go, however, when it came to Muscovites changing their own behaviour and turning their backs on cars in favour of greener alternatives.

The Russian capital remains infamous for its traffic jams.

(Reporting by Dmitry Madorsky, Lev Sergeev, Mikhail Antonov and Tatiana Gomozova; Writing by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Alex Richardson)

The world's e-waste problem is being reckoned with in Rwanda, one gadget at a time
By Daniel Renjifo, CNN 

For Eric Nshimiyimanain, who owns two small electronic repair shops in Kigali, Rwanda, the startup chime of an old Windows laptop is the sound of a business opportunity.

© CNN Solar products and batteries contain hazardous chemicals that can harm the environment if not properly disposed. A technician at Enviroserve Recycling facility tests and recharge batteries for second hand use.

He refurbishes broken PCs, laptops, phones and secondhand gadgets classified as electronic waste, or "e-waste" that would otherwise end up as trash in Nduba, Rwanda's only open-air dump in the outskirts of the capital.

"Sometimes we even use computer screens as TVs," Nshimiyimanain says. Converting those screens to televisions then becomes a cheaper option, he adds, for "citizens who have low incomes and cannot afford buying a brand-new TV."

In this age of scrambling for the newest high-tech phone, tablet or television, refurbishing broken and outdated gadgets might seem impractical. But for many countries, it's an important link in the value chain of e-waste management.

According to the UN-affiliated Global E-Waste Monitor report, nearly 54 million metric tons of e-waste was generated around the world in 2019. It includes everything from phones and computer monitors to larger appliances like refrigerators and old fax machines. Together, it weighs "more than all the commercial airliners ever made," according to the UN.

Rwanda is one of only 13 countries in Africa that have passed national legislation regarding e-waste regulation, according to the report. And it has led to the first official recycling and refurbishing facility in the country.

Operational since early last year, this public-private partnership between the government and Dubai-based Enviroserve became a source of pride for Rwanda. The state-of-the-art plant near Kigali can process up to 10,000 metric tons of e-waste per year.


Rwanda's focus on local action

According to managing director Olivier Mbera, Enviroserve has already repaired and refurbished more than 5,000 computers, which were sold to public schools. To date, it has processed more than 4,000 tons of e-waste and created more than 600 jobs.

"We've also mitigated more than 2,000 tons (of carbon), equivalent to emissions from all the equipment we have recycled," he says.

Conveyor belts sort plastics from metals, while plexiglass chambers collect phosphor fumes from old tube TVs. Circuit boards pile up in bags and lithium batteries are constantly being tested. Every piece of e-waste is meticulously collected, compacted or crushed.

Video: How Rwanda is leading e-waste recycling efforts in Africa (CNN Money)

The hazardous materials are separated from the valuable ones for two reasons, Mbera says. "There are approximately €55 million ($66 million) of resources in (Rwanda's) e-waste, and if they are not recovered, they're affecting our economy. Also, there are a lot of hazardous materials that can contaminate the environment."

© CNN Workers sort e-waste using a system of conveyor belts across Enviroserve's recycling facility near Kigali.

Even before lockdowns boosted sales of IT equipment to supply people working from home, the Global E-Waste Monitor report projected nearly 75 million metric tons of electronic equipment will be discarded worldwide each year by 2030. Yet less than 10 million metric tons of e-waste was recycled in 2019.

The report also estimated as much as 20% of all e-waste gets exported -- some of which is arriving on the African continent.

In Nigeria, a 2017 study found that the country had annually imported between 60,000 and 70,000 metric tons of secondhand electric and electronic equipment (EEE) -- mostly from developed countries such as Belgium, the UK and Germany -- but that 19% of those devices were inoperable

.

© CNN Eric Nshimiyimanain (right) owns two small electronic repair shops in Kigali, Rwanda.

And in Ghana, a 2011 Basel Convention report found the country imports roughly 150,000 tons of EEE per year. Its biggest dumping site is Agbogbloshie, which has attracted international attention for its sheer volume of e-waste intake. Described by the Global E-Waste Monitor as a "well-organized scrapyard," there are more than 5,000 informal scrap workers extracting metals from burning the scraps every day.

A golden opportunity

Perhaps the biggest opportunity for sub-Saharan nations lies in extracting those valuable raw materials and metals. According to the UN, as much as 7% of the world's gold is in e-waste.

"Globally, waste is not only increasing in quantity, but also in its complexity and composition," says Okechukwu Daniel Ogbonnaya, country representative for Rwanda at the Global Green Growth Institute, an intergovernmental organization for sustainable economic growth. "Within an electronic device, there's gold, silver, platinum ... and these sorts of elements could be extracted, providing new business opportunities for small businesses and even for municipalities in regard to generating revenue."

"Rwanda (is) one of our earliest pioneer members and they've done really well when it comes to its transition to a green growth pathway," he adds.

Mbera points to Enviroserve's success in Rwanda as a potential spark for an e-waste movement, formal training and job creation across East Africa. "We're negotiating and talking with different governments in Africa to also establish similar facilities in their countries," he says.

One thing is certain: it will take all sectors to combat the growing e-waste crisis, whether on a large scale like Rwanda's Enviroserve or from a local business like Nshimiyimanain's repair shop.

"The world is tech-driven and everything we need is through the use of technology," Nshimiyimanain says. "When equipment invented by someone else gets spoiled and I'm able to repair these gadgets, it makes me very happy."