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Mosoko - NRCC Wiki - 0 views

  • Two recent examples show how mobile phones can improve peoples' access to information in developing economies. Robert Jensen studied the effect of the growth in mobile phone use in fishing villages in the Indian state of Kerala. As cellular coverage grew from nothing to 100% from 1997 to 2000, the fish market became more efficient: fishermen knew where that days' catch would fetch a good price, price fluctuations between villages diminished, and fewer fish were discarded at the end of each day. A second example shows how markets for agricultural goods -- accessed via phone -- aided farmers in East Africa. The Kenyan Agricultural Commodity Exchange makes nationwide prices available through text messages. Prior to the Exchange, the main source of pricing information was the middleman to whom the farmers were selling -- people who were motivated to buy the commodity as cheaply as possible. Armed with better pricing information, farmers can now sell their goods for prices closer to market rates.
  • Billions of people have mobile phones but only a small fraction of those people have access to the Web. We are focusing on three main types of services that are widespread on the Web, but are absent in developing regions: classified advertising, social networks, and information sharing through Wikis. In all three service aspects, we seek to provide an intuitive and dynamic infrastructure for user-generated content. Craigslist, in the US, and similar free classified services in other developed countries have created marketplaces for exchanging goods and services where none existed before. Their web-based access cannot be brought to developing countries in the near future. Instead, what if we could assist people in forming similar types of connections using only their mobile phones?
  • Short-term goals: Focus on one domain: apartment listings. Build a prototype and deploy it for a month in Nairobi for free.
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  • Provide more powerful interfaces to users who do have Internet access. These interfaces will be both through standard computer web browsers and through customized applications that run on higher-end phones. Currently, the vast majority of phones in developing regions are not capable of running customized applications (e.g. Java). Use speech recognition to improve matching process.
  • This project seeks to develop an "audio wiki" -- an open platform (like Wikipedia) that people can freely access and contribute to, but rather than using a desktop computer, they use a cell phone. This means that all content will be spoken rather than written, and there are a host of interesting challenges in user interfaces, speech recognition, and audio processing that need to be tackled.
Teachers Without Borders

Mobile phones help bring aid to remotest regions - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

  • One of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) partners is Souktel, a mobile phone service based in the Middle East.
  • Souktel creates databases, message surveys, and instant alerts that can be sent out and received via mobile phone. The platform tries to better connect job seekers with employers through basic Short Message Service (SMS) texting.
  • More recently, Souktel has applied this system to international development work. By expanding their service into northern and eastern Africa, messaging services are being used to connect mobile phone users in previously impenetrable locations with aid and relief workers.
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  • Souktel’s services are coinciding with the exponential rise of mobile phone use in the developing world. The United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union reports that there were 360 million African and 310 million Middle Eastern mobile phone subscribers in 2010. These recent numbers are up from just 87 million and 85 million respective subscribers in 2005.
Teachers Without Borders

Mobile Phones and Community Development: A Contact Zone Between Media and Citizenship |... - 0 views

  • This paper considers how mobile phones have been taken up by citizens to create new forms of expression and power. The specific focus is the use of mobile phones in community development, with examples including the Grameenphone, agriculture and markets, the Filipino diasporic community, HIV/AIDS healthcare, and mobile phones in activism and as media. It is argued that mobile phones form a contact zone between traditional concepts of community and citizen media, on the one hand, and emerging movements in citizenship, democracy, governance, and development, on the other hand.
Teachers Without Borders

The Mobile Web is NOT helping the Developing World... and what we can do about it. By N... - 0 views

  • The 2 billion phones being used in the developing world are really great at making and receiving voice calls and text messages: Why not shape the internet experience to meet the specs of every phone's inherent functionality (voice!) rather than requiring devices to have specs that quite frankly aren't going to be realistic for many years to come?
  • In Kenya there are countless SMS-based applications that provide subscribers with a different mobile web experience: helping people find jobs, keep up to date with sports scores, get weather information, find a date, get information about commodity prices, etc... All content we expect from a mobile web-experience, but now it can be accessed on any phone in Kenya.
  • Jonathan Ledlie and I are starting to build an audio equivalent to the web that can be accessed from any phone in the world. We're enabling people to make audio homepages where they can record interactive content (in any of Kenya's 1000+ languages) to whomever they wish; telling the family history, listing their CV, anything that the traditional homepage can be used for. But perhaps our most promising audio application is moSoko (soko is marketplace in Swahili) - like Craig's List, but for East Africa and through an audio interface.
Teachers Without Borders

Africa Faces Surge of Secondary School Students | Africa | English - 0 views

  • Africa’s educational systems are suffering from growing pains.  More students than ever are enrolling in school, but the supply of teachers and infrastructure have not kept up with demand. Educators say about 80 percent of African students are completing primary school -- thanks in part to the push to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. They call for universal primary education by the 2015. John Daniel, the president and CEO of the intergovernmental organization the Commonwealth of Learning, says success is bringing more challenges. SCOPESecondary school students at KwaMhlanga High School in Mpumalanga, South Africa. “The African countries achieved in 10 years what it took many developed countries 100 years to do two centuries ago," he said, "and they don’t have many resources left over to do secondary.”
  • “Girls who have secondary education … have on average worldwide one-point-eight fewer children than girls who don’t," he said. "That’s a difference of two or three billion to the population of the world by 2050. There is [one educational researcher, Joel Cohen] who says therefore girls’ education is best way of stopping population growth and climate change.”
  • The Commonwealth of Learning proposes open schools, using new technologies and new ways to meet the needs of school aged children, drop-outs, mothers who want to learn at home and working adults. He said the schools cut costs and save time by using new technologies, including cell phones. Secondary school curricula can be created and shared among schools without costly intellectual property rights.
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  • That’s exactly what’s happening in a project involving six Commonwealth countries that develop and share course materials – Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Seychelles, Zambia and Trinidad and Tobago.
  • Some secondary schools in Africa are considering the use of cell phones to reach students who cannot attend traditional classroom lectures.  Instead, they can listen to lessons sent by voicemail and even take tests by phone.
Teachers Without Borders

Tracking Mobile and Internet Services Across Africa | White African - 0 views

  • I decided to put together a site, African Signals, where people could leave information on the availability, costs and service levels of mobile phone and internet connections in their country. Right now there is a basic skeleton for every country, but it needs to be updated and improved.
Teachers Without Borders

Wapedia - 0 views

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    Wikipedia for mobile phones
Teachers Without Borders

UNESCO Uses Souktel Mobile Alerts System to Keep Gaza Schools and Students Safe - 0 views

  • UNESCO staff in Gaza recruited Souktel to create an SMS alert/survey system that warns parents and their children of any danger happening near local schools. The service forms a key part of UNESCO’s Crisis and Disaster Risk Reduction project, which aims to ensure that schools are secure community spaces.
  • "In conflict zones, when it's not safe to leave your house to get information, mobile phones can bridge the gap and keep everyone connected," says Souktel co-founder Jacob Korenblum. "This basic technology allows aid workers, educators and local families to stay in contact at all times." 
  • Here’s how it works: At each school, principals and teachers are given password-protected access to a web interface, where they can send SMS alerts to all parents’ mobile phones. In an emergency, they could write, "Attack near school today, please keep your children at home." Once the violence has ended, another message could go out saying, "Shelling has stopped; please come to school this morning."
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  • So far, 29 schools have been targeted for this project, with more than 11,700 students benefitting from the service.
Teachers Without Borders

Locator chips keep track of students in Brazil - World - NewsObserver.com - 0 views

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    Radio frequency chips in "intelligent uniforms" let a computer know when children enter school and it sends a text message to their cell phones. Parents are also alerted if kids don't show up 20 minutes after classes begin with the following message: "Your child has still not arrived at school."
Teachers Without Borders

FAQ | DataDyne.org - 0 views

  • What's the big deal about EpiSurveyor? EpiSurveyor is the first web 2.0 application for global health and international development. It's software that allows anyone to set up a worldwide, mobile-phone-based data collection system in minutes, for free. Our philosophy is that anyone who needs to collect critical data for public health or development should be able to do so quickly and efficiently, without consultants or meetings or grants or contracts. EpiSurveyor lets you do that. And that's one of the reasons our team has won so many awards: we're really building worldwide  capacity to collect, analyze, and use data worldwide -- for public health, for development, for anything!
Teachers Without Borders

Nokia, Unesco join hands | The Nation gives news details - 0 views

  • ISLAMABAD - Nokia and UNESCO Islamabad have launched “Mobile Learning Project for Teacher’s Professional Development” on Thursday as formal collaboration took place in the presence of senior government officials, Nokia and UNESCO representatives.
  • In Pakistan, through the project, Nokia will help UNESCO to enable the delivery of high- quality educational materials to teachers who lack training and resources.
  • Nokia developed the Nokia Education Delivery programme to allow using a mobile phone to access and download videos and other educational materials from a constantly updated education library
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  • We are confident to collaborate with Nokia to provide us with the best platform to train public school teachers. Nokia Education Delivery programme is fit to match our need of delivering quality training to a large number of public school teachers across Pakistan through the project named “Mobile Learning for Teachers”.
  • This unique pilot project for Pakistan has been initiated by UNESCO and AGAHI while Nokia Pakistan will enable the project implementation by providing not just Nokia devices but a complete solution via its Nokia Education Delivery programme.
Teachers Without Borders

One in four children targeted by cyber bullies with 350,000 suffering persistent tormen... - 0 views

  • Thousands of children are too frightened to go to school or suffer depression and even attempt suicide after being targeted by ‘cyber bullies’, according to a study.It found 28 per cent of children aged 11 to 16 had experienced bullying on the internet or via a mobile phone.
  • More than half the incidents of ‘cyber bullying’ happen on Facebook, with the MSN messenger service the second most common platform for harassment.
  • The survey of 4,600 children was carried out by the charity Beatbullying and the National Association of Head Teachers, and the issue will be highlighted tonight in a BBC1 Panorama programme called Hunting The Internet Bullies.
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  • The report said: ‘There have been a significant number of child and teenage suicides caused by relentless online aggression.‘In the face of this, it is increasingly difficult to argue that the online world is not “real” when activities there can have such devastating repercussions in the real lives of young people.’
  • Children from an ethnic minority background are more likely to be targeted, with ‘white non-British’ youngsters the most at risk from persistent cyber bullying. The report stated this indicated ‘recent immigrants’ were most at risk.
  • Teachers are also suffering from cyber attacks on a significant scale, according to the study.One in 10 teachers said they experienced technological harassment, 15 per cent said they felt afraid for their safety or that of their family.
  • Teachers also spent an average of six hours a week dealing with cyber bullying cases - costing the taxpayer an estimated £18million a year.
  • Emma-Jane Cross, chief executive of Beatbullying, said: ‘Cyber bullying continues to be a dangerous problem for a significant number of young people and we must not ignore its complex and often devastating effects.
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    UK Report on bullying: One in four children targeted by cyber bullies with 350,000 suffering persistent torment
Teachers Without Borders

Haiti: a boy's story - Guardian Weekly - 0 views

  • My sister and I now go to sleep behind a tree. I don’t have dreams. We have both been sick. My sister makes tea for me but I have to ask people for food or some money to buy food. Some people tell me a bad word that I can’t repeat. Some people tell me to go away before they kick my butt. I tell them: “You don’t know what you’re saying.” I just walk away and go somewhere to cry.
  • What do I want for the future? I would like somewhere to sleep – and for God to bless me. I need money to buy a tent and to eat with my sister. My clothes and phone are still in my house, so I have no clothes to wear. I have no tennis shoes.
  • My school is still there but I can’t go because I have no money to go to school. The school asks me for money but I don’t have a job or any money. I ask people if they have jobs, but they swear at me and tell me there are no jobs here because there are too many people. We keep seeing the planes. What they bring, I don’t know, maybe food boxes, water and maybe a tent. I try to see if I can help with the unloading. I’m going to see if I can get a tent and put it up near the tree where I sleep. It should help me sleep better than I have been at least.
Teachers Without Borders

India: The Open Defecation Paradox - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

  • Open defecation—humans defecating outside—is the ugly stepsister of clean water scarcity, which we commemorate on World Water Day. Two-and-half billion people lack access to even simple pit toilets, which is three times as many people as lack access to clean drinking water and results in two million preventable deaths per year, mostly of children under five from intestinal diseases.
  • Jack Sim, the self-described “evangelist of toilets,” from the World Toilet Organization, theorizes that’s because “every politician wants to be photographed standing next to a new well, but no one wants to be photographed standing next to a new toilet.” And without some portion of the powers that be to drive a story, coverage becomes scarce.
  • India has the largest number of open defecators in the world, over 600 million of them. At a certain level, this fact is inescapable. Within a hundred yards of our five star hotel in New Delhi, we could find expanses of human feces—we could find them because we could smell them. Touring Delhi slum clusters with local activists, we traversed neighborhoods where 5,000 people share 20 public toilets, which is nearly the same as having no toilets, resulting in even vaster expanses of human feces. But in urban areas, open defecation can also be invisible in the way poor people can quickly become invisible.
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  • For example, NGOs can produce statistics indicating that more households in India have cell phones and television than access to toilets. But for rural people to want to put in toilets, they have to be informed.
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