Posts Tagged ‘ICTI’

Agriculture and Mobile Phones Come Together With Our Community Knowledge Worker Project in Uganda

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
CKW Joseph Nashimolo

CKW Joseph Nashimolo

Last week in Uganda I was fortunate to attend a meeting in Busano subcounty, Mbale district, with some of the Community Knowledge Workers  (CKWs) – local farmer leaders empowered with mobile applications to improve the livelihoods of their communities by distributing and collecting relevant information about agriculture – and their clients, the smallholder farmers we all seek to benefit.  There was a lively discussion of the pros and cons of a variety of information services we have been testing nearby.  One farmer, Elias Mabala, then stood up and spoke about how his income improved more than 100% last harvest by virtue of having greater access to market information through the CKW assigned to serve the information needs arising in his village.  Stories like that explain why we come to work each day. (more…)

Rapid Prototyping Goes “Up Country” with MoTeCH

Monday, October 19th, 2009
MoTeCH Women On Phone Amazing

Woman on phone - UER

Since the beginning, the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTech) team has been focusing on using rapid prototyping for figuring out what will – and won’t – work in the rural environment.  A week ago, the team headed to the poorest region in Ghana – the Upper East (UER) – to set up a series of exercises to determine whether pregnant mothers would be interested in asking questions about their pregnancy and newborn care via mobile phones. We were wanted to understand what types of questions they were interested in having answered, and what the technical (mobile phone usage, SMS vs. voice, network issues) aspects of providing this service to parents in rural areas would be. (more…)

Grameen Foundation´s ICT Innovation Program – Approach and Philosophy

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

We officially launched our Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Program two years ago, when we began our Application Laboratory (AppLab) efforts in Uganda.  This initiative, in collaboration with the mobile operator MTN and Google, built on the successful Grameen Foundation/MTN Village Phone Program.  With over 10,000 Village Phone Operators, this served as a unique testing ground for developing applications and information services tailored to the needs of the poor.  Over nearly two years we explored the potential of more than 50 services, actively tested a subset of these, and in the end of June launched a suite of five services nationwide (additional details at www.applab.org). (more…)