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"What Could Africa Do With More Broadband?

IntraHealth International and the IntraHealth OPEN Initiative respond in this video featuring Pape Gaye, IntraHealth International's President and CEO, with music created for the OPEN Initiative by Youssou NDour, Nas and Akronic.

Faster broadband means African ideas and innovation can move faster

It means we can more easily collaborate, educate, train and share

For the IntraHealth OPEN initiative it means more African developers can more effectively use open source technology to help solve the greatest global health issues of our time"

www.seacomblog.com/competition - Preview

ict

"At NiJeL, we create maps that tell powerful stories and have real community impact. Across the globe, NiJeL uses high performance mapping to identify and mitigate social, economic, and environmental problems in poor communities now so they don't become humanitarian disasters later. We think our maps can be potent decision-making tools that can, among other things, help communities advocate for better living conditions. So, if you're working to make the world a better place, we're looking to help you tell your story though maps.

We think the right maps can help people better understand a problem, and in turn, devise better solutions to those problems. To learn more about what mapping can do for you and your organization, please visit our "why mapping?" page. "

nijel.org - Preview

mapping ict

"Consider something even more fundamental: Water. Much of the villages have government-owned water pipes that are turned on for an hour or so once a day, or even in some areas once a week. Everyone has to bring their vats, pitchers and empty kerosene cans and get as much water as they can while the pipes are on. But these pipes don’t really run on a schedule so people frequently miss getting the day or week’s water. Now, SMSONE subscribers get a text when the pipes are about to be turned on.

I know it’s not as life-changing, but I’d pay to get micro-local, highly relevant news about my neighborhood in San Francisco in 160-character bursts, whether it’s about a power or cable outage, a construction project that’s disrupting traffic or details on a shooting that just happened. And I might even welcome local ads that report a hot new restaurant opening or a sale at a boutique two streets over. I feel like modern, uber-connected life has made us less interested in “local news” as we used to think of it on a city or region level, but more interested in the micro-local, hence the excitement in the Valley around Foursquare, CitySourced, and a host of location-aware iPhone apps"

www.techcrunch.com/...smsone-micro-local-india-news - Preview

ict sms comm217

ICT4D blog

ict4dblog.wordpress.com - Preview

ict

"Handheld Human Rights uses mobile phones to connect human rights workers around Burma’s borders. Using mobile text messages connected with a detailed computer interface, HHR helps aid workers quickly and securely share critical information in order to coordinate responses and save lives.

HHR allows groups to:

* Disseminate key information and messages to field workers.
* Facilitate communication between groups.
* Collect data that can be mapped on an international website.
* Rapidly disseminate news of human rights violations to the international community and advocacy groups."

www.digital-democracy.org/programming - Preview

smartmobs ict mobile_devices

"Locast Civic Media is a mobile & web platform to engage citizenship in the process of collecting, reporting and disseminating news and information related to the urban environment. Locast mobile application enables the user to create street reports (casts) through video & audio content and decide whether to produce them individually or to involve peers in larger-scale reports on a specific topic and/or urban area (projects). Casts and projects are created, collected and shared in real-time on Locast website where the entire members’ community can join the conversation with comments and further casts (more on Civic Media in Brazil and Locast) "

locast.mit.edu/civic - Preview

ict mobile_devices public_sphere

"More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest but fastest-growing economies, have rushed to sign up to learn English over their cellphones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch Thursday.

"We were not expecting that kind of response -- 25,000 people would have been a good response on the first day," said Sara Chamberlain, the manager of the discount service. "Instead, we got hundreds of thousands of people."

The project, which costs users less than the price of a cup of tea for each three-minute lesson, is being run by the BBC World Service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. Part of a British government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that cellphones have been used as an educational tool on this scale. "

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009111304245.html - Preview

ict mobile_devices

"In the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, unnamed streets meander through the hillsides. There are hospitals, coffee shops and restaurants, none of which appear on a map, and mail carriers struggle to get letters to homes without addresses.

A new project by Rede Jovem, a Brazilian nonprofit that loosely translates to "Youth Net," seeks to change that. With the help of five young "wiki-reporters" and GPS-equipped mobile phones, the nonprofit is building a map of five Brazilian favelas: Complexo do Alemão, Cidade de Deus, Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, Morro Santa Marta and Complexo da Maré. By uploading information to the phones, the reporters are mapping the unmapped, one road and cafe at a time.

"The main goal was to mark public interest spots on a map and show places like schools and institutions and hospitals and restaurants," said Natalia Santos, the executive coordinator for Rede Jovem. "We wanted to spread the news about what slums do have, so all the people can get to know that the slum is not just a place for violence and marginality and robbery.""

mobileactive.org/...rede-jovem-wikimapa - Preview

ict wiki mapping mobile_devices

"Being an economist myself, I can only agree with Richard Heeks on his advice to focus on money — economic growth, income, economic sustainability, productivity, competitiveness — when dealing about the role of ICTs in an economy.

But poverty has many causes and consequences. And I personally think that addressing the economic part of poverty is addressing only the material part of poverty, that is, poverty itself: lack of income, inequality, etc. But ICT4D should also focus in the part of the non-material causes, sometimes called the context. Indeed, Heeks somehow points at it too when he writes of the need to "speak to development".

In addition to that, there is a third course of action: to change the whole system, the whole landscape, the rules of the game. This is what (some) leapfroggers mean to do: change their whole (or a good part of it) economic system and take the chance of ICTs to base that change on, using ICTs as a locomotive to pull the rest of the economy upwards.

Following an idea I already developed in Fostering the Information Society for Development in the Web 2.0 framework, and partially based on Welzel et al.’s The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis, I think that these three approaches of ICT4D could be schematically put this way:"

ictlogy.net/t-and-an-alert-on-leapfrogging - Preview

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"Gamos is a small but influential company working with the social factors surrounding development interventions, organisational development, technology use and transfer. A group of professionals who select their clients (Governments, International Agencies, Non Government Organisations and Civil Society) to make the optimum impact. "

gamos.org - Preview

ict

"The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) today launched a program to foster the development of mobile services for people at the base of the socio-economic pyramid in Latin America and the Caribbean, aiming to address poverty problems in sectors such as health, education, social protection, employment and business.

About 80 percent of this region’s population (about 460 million people) has cell phones. Almost half of them have incomes below $300 a month. Mobile technology could expand their access to many additional services to improve their living standards.

The Mobile Citizen program, designed and managed by the IDB’s Science and Technology Division and funded by the Italian Trust Fund for Information and Communication Technologies for Development, will provide grants totaling $750,000 to organizations interested in developing such services.
"

www.iadb.org/...detail.cfm - Preview

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"Nokia (NYSE: NOK) just announced “Nokia Money” which will be shown off next week at Nokia World. We told you about the Nokia Money trademark a little over a month ago, and it looks like the service is going to launch some time early next year. Similar to how Nokia purchased Twango and rebranded it Ovi Share, Nokia is going to be built on top of Obopay’s mobile payment platform. More details will be revealed next week and it can not be stated enough how important this is at helping Nokia remain relevant going forward. In my open letter to Nokia earlier this month, I told them to become a bank. I hope this is the first of many steps in achieving that transformation.

Note: Obopay only works in the United States and India at the moment. Nokia also invested roughly $70 million into Obopay in March of this year. Current Obopay users pay $0"

www.intomobile.com/...the-launch-of-nokia-money.html - Preview

mobile_devices ict

"A project based at Carnegie Mellon University will study how effective games on cellphones are at teaching English to students in rural India.

Led by a professor at Carnegie Mellon, professors, graduate students and undergraduates have been working on developing games over the last six years. Now, because of financial support from Nokia, the professors will be able to lend 450 cellphones to children in villages in Andhra Pradesh, a region in the south of India. The children with games on the cellphones will be compared with children who will not play the games and will learn English in a traditional classroom setting.

"If it's very difficult for so-called poor children to go to school regularly. You could take mobile devices and make it possible to access learning anytime, anywhere,""

chronicle.com/...8555 - Preview

ict gaming2learn mobile_devices educational_technology

"Our technologies are starting to work well together because we are working together.
Author:
Neal Lesh

One of OMC's primary goals is to maximize interoperability and data-sharing capabilities among our technologies so that the whole of our collective effort is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Think of the OMC technologies as a set of Lego-like building blocks that can be snapped together in different ways. It's a great goal in theory, for sure -- but in practice it is more difficult to achieve. There is redundancy, and systems that could and should share data may not. Being open source or championing open standards is necessary -- and we certainly do – but it's not sufficient.
Building the Open Source Mobile "Lego" Pieces for Social Impact

This is a story about progress towards integrating several OMC technologies in Tanzania and some of the lessons we are learning along the way. It illustrates the potential of the OMC ‘Lego’ pieces for mobile for social impact and where we still need to do more work."

www.open-mobile.org/...lessons-interoperability - Preview

ict mobile_devices collaboration

"It’s an unlikely medical device: a sleek smartphone more suited to a nightclub than a rural health clinic. But it’s loaded with software that allows health workers in the remote northernmost Philippines province of Batanes to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get X-rays to a radiologist - and to get a diagnosis for a patient being tested for tuberculosis.
Discuss
COMMENTS (8)

The software, created by a nonprofit organization called Moca, is one of nearly two dozen cellphone-based projects that have sprung from NextLab, a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s taught by Jhonatan Rotberg, who was sent to MIT by Telmex, one of Latin America’s largest telecommunications companies, to bring cellular technology to the “90 percent "

www.boston.com/...nge_the_world_using_cellphones - Preview

ict mobile_devices

"Handheld Human Rights provides a secure hub for groups around Burma’s borders documenting human rights abuses. By allowing users to submit data directly from their mobiles, Burmese refugees in community organizations will be able to turn data on abuses into action. Once abuses and alerts are channeled through the hub and mapped, this information can be used to raise international awareness and support advocacy campaigns to bring gross human rights abuses to the International Criminal Court."

www.netsquared.org/...handheld-human-rights - Preview

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Connectivity may be rising rapidly up the political agenda, but it has been high on the Digital Business agenda for some time and today we pull together the strands, analysing the implications of a connected planet in this Connected Lives Digital Business special report.

It considers the effects on business of mass collaboration; the change in working behaviours that mobility introduces; and the spotlight it places on skills and generational differences.

www.ft.com/...e-9316-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html - Preview

collaboration literacy ict

"Grayson Daughters and Tessa Horehled talk using Twitter hashtags in crisis communication and disaster relief during the Atlanta, Georgia flood of September 2009."

www.youtube.com/watch - Preview

twitter smartmobs comm217 ict

Laban Rutagumirwa charges his mobile phone with a car battery because his dirt-floor home deep in the remote, banana-covered hills of western Uganda does not have electricity.

When the battery dies, Mr. Rutagumirwa, a 50-year-old farmer, walks just over four miles to charge it so he can maintain his position as communication hub and banana-disease tracker for his rural neighbors.

In an area where electricity is scarce and Internet connections virtually nonexistent, the mobile phone has revolutionized scientists’ ability to track this crop disease and communicate the latest scientific advances to remote farmers.

www.nytimes.com/...06uganda.html - Preview

ict mobile_devices

A text messaging-based program, called Mobiles in Malawi, is saving lives by connecting rural communities to hospitals. Kasey-Dee Gardner explain how it works.

www.youtube.com/watch - Preview

texting ict mobile_devices