Tag: ICT4D

Trends

The importance of algorithms in education and development

Algorithms are becoming an increasingly pervasive aspect of everyday life – so much so that a recent UK Council for Science and Technology report described our epoch as the ‘age of algorithms’. Yet despite their prevalence, often providing the driving force behind our usage of a range of products and services from mobile phones to insurance policies, they remain relatively obscure to the general […]

Field Stories

ICT empowers communities in fight against Ebola

The current outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is the worst on record, with the World Health Organization reporting 5,420 deaths – Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia have been the hardest hit nations. As international efforts are stepped up to combat the disease, attention has turned to the ways in which mobile technology can assist in Ebola awareness, diagnosis and prevention. 

Opinions

Information is the major driver in development

The Yazmi story starts with two satellites, in orbit above Africa and Asia, originally used to broadcast radio across the Eastern hemisphere. It is in these two satellites that company Chairman and CEO Noah Samara has found a solution to one of education’s major global problems: that of delivering quality content and information where it is most needed. “The problem is not the organisation […]

Opinions

“No country can make progress on the basis of a borrowed language”

Professor Kwesi Kwaa Prah is the founder of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS), a civil society, Pan-African organisation which focuses on African development through the lens of cultural, social, historical, political and economic research. Currently, through the CASAS Harmonization and Standardization of African Languages Project, Professor Prah and CASAS are working towards improving African literacy rates. By forming standardised groupings […]

Field Stories

Harnessing TV White Spaces for Learning

What constitutes good connectivity?  The answers to this question seem to be related to personal experience: dial-up users think that every other option is great, whereas ADSL users want cheaper, faster upload and download speeds.  So we need to start with the premise that good connectivity is subject to the individual user’s experience, and this is by no measure an observation unique to South […]

Field Stories

Seeds 2.0 to Modernise and Boost the Agricultural Sector

“Really? But what has the agricultural sector got to do with Web 2.0?” That was the sarcastic question I was asked one day when I was describing the Web 2.0 training that I provide to CTA (the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation). It was an understandable question; on the one hand the Web 2.0 concept seemed to be a current reality reserved […]