Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14giridharadas.html?sudsredirect=true

Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.

Cheap computers from TVs and old videogame consoles

UC San Diego-based Playpower Project Receives $180K MacArthur
Digital Media and Learning Grant. Details here

W3C Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development

held in Maputo, Mozambique on 1-2 April 2009. This workshop was organized by the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group, part of the EU FP7 project Digital World Forum. During the two day event, the 70+ participants held discussions regarding the potential of mobile technologies in the development sector. The key outcomes that are expanded in this document can be summarized here

Farmer Info Station with mobile Internet and solar power

To make information on improving agriculture accessible for small scale farmers Avallain E4D is refining the "Info Station". It consists of the XO hardware, better known as the "$100 laptop", enhanced with bandwidth-controlled mobile Internet access, solar energy power and a custom software set based on the Ubuntu OS.

more

East Africa gets broadband

Kenya has abolished sales tax on computers and in last week’s budget ended the sales tax on new mobile phones. more

randomised evaluation of dumping computers (+training) on schools in Columbia: no effect

Barrera-Osorio, F. & Linden, L. (2009), 'The use and misuse of computers in education : evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia', World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (WPS4836)

This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have had little effect on students' test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum.

- thanks Yishay for this info

Datadyne EpiSurveyor

EpiSurveyor is a free, open source tool enabling anyone to very easily create a handheld data entry form, collect data on a mobile device, and then transfer the data back to a desktop or laptop for analysis -- without expensive consultants.

Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages

In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main modern communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cellphones grew almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population... more

Kenya elephants text rangers

Elephants in Kenya are sending text messages to warn wildlife rangers that they are heading for the crops of neighbouring villages. more

Microsoft supports women in Kenya

Microsoft has sponsored ICT and entrepreneurship training for 1,093 Kenyan women from six settlements under its Unlimited Potential program. Details here.

Universal Science Bench

Portable teaching tool using solar and wind for powering local experiments. Details here

Stanford-Ericsson mobile learning collaboration

Stockholm (SE), July 2007 - Ericsson announced at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in Geneva (05-06 July) that it is collaborating with Stanford University to explore the innovative use of mobile technologies in distance eLearning. Ericsson will work with Stanford University's International Outreach Program to bring distance learning to countries in Africa.

The program offers students on different continents the opportunity to learn from researchers in environmental sciences from several countries and perspectives, as well as contribute to lively discourse and debate through Internet and mobile phone interaction.

Further details here.

Voiping the outback

Communications in the remote Australian outback are getting a boost following the development of a system that links the internet to amateur radio technology. more

Google Activity in Kenya

Report on first 'skunkworks' meeting hosted by Google in Nairobi including some
information on Google's work to map Kenya, work with Safaricom etc...

http://bankelele.blogspot.com/2008/03/skunkworks-nairobi-march-4.html

AfricanClimate@home

The mission of AfricanClimate@Home is to develop more accurate climate models of specific regions in Africa. This will serve as a basis for understanding how the climate will change in the future so that measures designed to alleviate the adverse effects of climate change can be implemented. World Community Grid's tremendous computing power will be used to understand and reduce the uncertainty with which climate processes are simulated over Africa.

See also Africa@home

Big Picture: The digital gap

'Only 4% of Africans have access to the internet. They pay the most in the world, around $250-300 a month, for the slowest connection speeds.'

'Interfaces are being written in a number of African languages, but even the clearest instructions in Wolof or Yoruba as to how to use Windows presume a fair degree of literacy.'

from The Economist.

Emerging journalism

Journalism training is booming in the developing world. David Okwemba of Kenya's The Nation newspaper also helps train journalists. For community-generated podcasts (esp. in Kambu for the radio station) we have envisioned community members conducting interviews and making stories.

Economist story here.

Open source mobile phone platform

Mobile phones, currently closed and self limited, will rival broadband computers. When based on Open standards, they will deliver ubiquitous computing and vanish.

Ubiquitous computing means more than computing wherever you wander: It means knowing the locale, weaving seamlessly into the local fabric, and vanishing.

OpenMoko is an open source, Linux-based mobile phone software platform. Read more here.

Inveneo

The Computing Station is an ultra-low-power, affordable and fully functional desktop computer designed for use in rural locations such as schools, clinics, field offices, community centers and Internet cafes.

Workshop on Ubiquitous Sustainability: Technologies for Green Values

Workshop in Conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2007)