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Agriculture, Food Security & Rural Development, Areas of Expertise, Economic Growth, Environment & NRM, Information and Communication Technology for Development

Ambassador Verveer discusses “Women’s Economic Success and Global Growth”

Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer. (Photo: US Dept of State)

On Monday, July 23, 2012 the Center for American Progress hosted Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer for a discussion on “Women’s Economic Success and Global Growth.” Amb. Verveer’s talk focused on the crucial role women play in sustainable development and economic growth worldwide. US women generate $3.5 trillion yearly, and women’s employment in developing countries contributes more to the global economy than China. By 2050, women will control 2/3 of all spending worldwide. Noting that women traditionally spend their earnings in sectors that create a multiplier effect (i.e., health, education, food), Amb. Verveer emphasized the tremendous consumer power women will wield in global markets. She also highlighted growing research that shows how countries where women’s rights are more closely equal to those of men are more peaceful and prosperous than countries that ignore, marginalize or limit the role of women.

Amb. Verveer spoke of three main areas the State Department focuses on increasing the role and influence of women: Economic Empowerment, Women in Development, and Peace and Security. Within the Women in Development sector, three initiatives discussed fit squarely within Integra’s areas of expertise: Feed the Future (Agriculture), Global Climate Change Initiative (Environment) and mWomen (Information and Communications Technology).

Agriculture: Women are vital to agricultural development, often making up the majority of farmers in developing countries and the backbone of agriculture-based economies. FAO reports claim that if men and women farmers had equal access to credit, training, property rights and technical inputs, yields could improve 20 to 30 percent and the number of malnourished people worldwide could be reduced by 150 million people.

Environment: Women bear the burdens of climate change disproportionately more than men. Yet women are uniquely empowered to address climate change because of their central role in agriculture, forest management, and running the home (i.e., making crucial energy decisions as pertains to energy sources used in the home).

ICT4D: Increased technological access creates opportunities for financial security and independence. With mobile access, women are able to gain information about the current market, including data on pricing and weather systems, in addition to business insights and trainings, access to support networks, and the ability to transfer and save funds. “The significance of mobile technology cannot be underrated,” said Ambassador Verveer, who emphasized both the economic and social value of mobile technology. While 350 million women still do not have access to cell phones, the State Department is working to bridge this gap in connectivity through various initiatives, including the GSMA mWomen initiative. mWomen is committed to reducing this gender gap in connectivity by 50%.

In each development sector highlighted, Ambassador Verveer reiterated that gender equality is not only smart economics, but in line with US values and “a moral imperative of the 21^st Century.” While the State Department and USAID continue to add gender guidance components to trainings and major international initiatives, true change will only be achieved once gender equality becomes institutionalized and integrated across all bureaus. Women’s rights need to be viewed as human rights essential to fostering economic growth, social stability and a more peaceful prosperity worldwide.

To view full event video, click here. To read Ambassador Verveer’s article on “Why Women Are a Foreign Policy Issue,” click here.

July 27, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

mEducation Alliance Call for Proposals

You are invited to submit a proposal for a presentation, open session or poster at the…
2nd Annual mEducation Alliance
International Symposium:
2012- Partnering for Scale & Impact
September 5-7, 2012
Washington, DC.

For this year’s mEducation Alliance International Symposium, we want to highlight your experiences and insights on partnership. What does a successful partnership mean for your work? What are the challenges and opportunities evident in partnerships designed to improve learning outcomes through the use of mobile technologies? What kinds of additional or expanded partnerships could your work benefit from, and what could the mEducation Alliance do to support this?

Under the broad theme of partnerships, we’ll be looking for presentation and open session proposals involving the following themes:
Public and Private Sector Partnership Engagement
Mobiles for Reading
Mobiles for Inclusive Education and Assistive Technology
Mobiles for Education System Strengthening
Mobiles for Youth and Workforce Development
Mobiles for Education in Crisis and Conflict Settings

The Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Alliance is an international collaborative effort between bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, foundations, private sector partners, academic researchers, and implementing organizations. Our collective agenda is to explore cutting-edge intersections between mobile technologies, education and development, to reduce duplicative efforts, and promote collective knowledge-sharing. The increasing ubiquity of mobile phones and coverage and the current and possible utilization of other mobile devices, including e-Readers, tablet computers, flash memory, micro/ “pico” projectors, and audio/visual devices among other technologies, provide valuable opportunities for supporting quality education impact in developing countries.

The mEducation Alliance has formed a symposium planning committee, composed of representatives of a number of supporting organizations, which will select 10-15 presentation proposals and 20-25 poster proposals based on a rating system which takes into account: 1) topical relevance to Symposium themes, 2) leading edge research or piloting of highly promising mobile technology utilization for improving quality education impact, and 3) highly participatory and interactive format to encourage networking and partnership development. The planning committee will work with selected presenters to promote interactive presentations to maximize dialogue with the audience. The Alliance will also accept a number of Open Session proposals, which will be reviewed based on the format of proposed session and level of interaction with participants, in addition to the session topic’s relevance to the overarching goals and mission of the mEducation Alliance.
Guidelines on Presentation and Poster Session Objectives
Preferred approaches to sessions include:
– Emphasis on innovative and/or cross-sectoral approaches to partnerships, and on “yet unsolved” challenges in education and the use of mobile devices;
– Innovative, interactive formats, preferably with live demonstrations whenever possible;
– Focus on lessons learned, findings, and project and research designs that have broad applicability to the education sector;
– Highlighting outcome- and impact-level results in education in developing countries; and,
– Sharing useful tools, guidelines, and methodologies that could be immediately applied elsewhere.

Guidelines on Open Session Objectives
Preferred approaches to these informal learning opportunities include:
– Highly participatory dialogs relevant to the Symposium themes;
– Creative formats which encourage networking, partnership building, and knowledge sharing (such as a FailFaire, or other format sharing lessons learned);
– Open sessions organized around a specific focal area of interest, such as geographic regions, educational level, mobile device or languages (sessions conducted in languages other than English are welcome in this regard);
– Sessions designed to delve into reflections on cross-cutting issues and the state of the field, such as ethics, gender, evaluation, or a session looking at relevant technological developments.

Proposal Template
The following items should be covered in proposals not exceeding 2 pages (excluding CVs and examples of handouts, tools, etc.).
– Presentation, Poster or Open Session title
– Type of session (panel presentation, demo, poster, quiz show, debate, discussion, etc.)
– Short abstract of the presentation, poster or session, including 2-3 learning objectives
– Presenters and their relationships to the session content (attach CVs)
– Detailed session outline
– Examples of handouts, tools, guides to be shared with participants
– Contact person and email and phone

Session proposals should be sent by Friday, May 25, 2012, to: mobilesforeducation@gmail.com.

Important Dates
Session proposals due to mEducation Alliance
Friday, May 25, 2012

Selected presenters invited to present
On or before Friday, June 22

Presenters submit all A/V requests
On or before August 1

Final Presentations, Posters, Sessions due
On or before August 8

mEducation Alliance International Symposium
September 5 – 7

Please feel free to share this letter of invitation with relevant units within your organization or to other partners or researchers who work with mobiles in the context of education, but please note that participation will be by invitation only. There are no registration fees for the Symposium, however presenters and participants will be responsible for all travel costs associated with attendance. More information is available at www.meducationalliance.org. Please address any questions to Rebekah Levi (rlevi@jbsinternational.com) and Scott Kipp (skipp@jbsinternational.com).

May 15, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Tangerine: Early Grade Reading Assessments Go Digital

Photo Credit: eddataglobal.org

The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), a tool used in over 50 low-income countries and 70 languages to measure students’ progress toward learning to read, is going digital through its new Tangerine™ platform. The mobile software application designed by RTI International specifically for recording student responses during the administration of the EGRA can now be used by organizations and governments to simplify preparation and implementation of fieldwork, reduce measurement and data entry errors, and eliminate manual data entry.

The EGRA is a 15-minute test administered orally to students in the early grades of primary school. It was designed by RTI International under USAID’s EdDAta II project to help educators in low-income countries break the pattern of illiteracy among their poor. Since 2006, the EGRA has been used to evaluate students’ foundation literacy skills, including pre-reading skills like phonemic awareness and listening comprehension, which have been shown to predict later reading abilities. Using test results, education ministries and their donor partners are then able to identify and address learning barriers to develop strategies to improve literacy.

But now Tangerine has taken the paper-based EGRA tool to a new level of efficiency. The open-source electronic data collection software can be used on mobile computers, including netbooks, tablet computers and smartphones to enable assessment administrators to:

Simplify the preparation and implementation of field work
Reduce measurement and data entry errors
Eliminate costly, time-consuming manual data entry
Provide rapid turnaround of results

Through these advantages and the analysis of results of student populations, policy makers and organizations can respond even sooner to challenges within an education system. They can also develop appropriate strategies to improve early-age literacy rates, such as improving teacher training programs and curriculum materials.

In addition to the Tangerine EGRA software, RTI developers are currently developing two new tools that can be used by teachers themselves in their own classrooms:

Tangerine:Class – a version of Tangerine tailored specifically for teachers to assist in developing and administering classroom based math and reading assessments and interpreting results to inform their instructional practice.

Tangerine:Teach – a tool that can interpret results from Tangerine:Class to identify and develop learning materials to address student weaknesses.

To learn more about Tangerine:

The Edutech Debate posted a blog, ICT and the Early Grade Reading Assessment: From Testing to Teaching by RTI’s Carmen Strigel, which offers an in-depth analysis of Tangerine’s application and cost benefits.

There is also a brief video of EGRA being administered using Tangerine.

May 2, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Youth Development

Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India: An Anthropological Case Study for ICT4D

Photo Credit: www.dailycontributor.com

Omar, 19 years old and living in an urban slum in India, is an early mobile internet user who repairs mobile phones in his brother‘s store. “This is magic in my palms,” he says valuing the weight of his mobile phone, not only in his hands, but in his day-to-day life. “God knows what I would do without this. I download songs and listen to them all day, I download movies and watch them in the night when I get back home, I play games in between servicing client, I change my internet plans as and when I come across a great one that gives me the most for the least.”

Omar is certainly not the only teenager in his slum who is fascinated with mobile technology. It’s this appreciation for ICT and its various uses for finding comfort — a way of managing and building personal technology infrastructures as an important element in conducting one’s own life — that Microsoft researchers wanted to portray in a new report, Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India. The report aimed to bring awareness to the ICT for development (ICT4D) community of the important insights that be gained from anthropological studies within an understanding of what drives a specific user population to adopt technologies in specific ways: even if the latter is only for entertainment purposes.

Researchers observed how twenty underprivileged teenagers living in a slum used ICT in their day-to-day lives by employing a variety of qualitative methods, including open-ended interviews, observations of community life, and semi-structured baseline surveys. They focused their findings on:

1) Investigating everyday entry points for internet use

2) Identifying ways the internet is understood, accessed, used and shared in multiple ways among the user population

3) Qualifying the social paths sustaining the persistence of internet use among teenagers in a constrained infrastructural environment — specifically that of an urban slum.

The report offers a fascinating anthropological view of how ICT could, and perhaps should, be seen by the ICT4D community:

“If constrained technology environments such as urban slums or how youth use ICTs are legitimate interests for ICTD research, such concerns could pave way for a subtle yet vital exchange between the domains of anthropology and development with the aim to expand a utilitarian notion of ICTs and their role in human progress.”

With so much focus being given to ICT for education initiatives, this leads us to wonder: Should technology be introduced into communities where ICT has not yet been adopted? Or is it better that we first observe how technology is already being used, such as use of mobile phones, and structure our education programs around these pre existing uses? The report suggests the latter and encourages ICT4D developers to consider all of the ways technology is already being used even if it doesn’t have the direct effects that we anticipate or fit a preconceived definition of “development”.

“Indeed, this may require us to broaden our view of how we think about what underlies a good ICTD research project and how we view a range of human behaviors as incremental to development. Rather than using the internet to search for educational material, the youth in our study search for music and Bollywood teasers. These are hardly developmental in any conventional sense, but more akin to behaviors of youth in any part of the globe! No doubt what begins as entertainment can lead to more serious activities.”

The report is certainly a welcome and valuable resource to developers in the ICT4D community. The full report can be accessed here.

April 23, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

From ICT4Ed to ICT4Ag: The Potential of EasySMS Mobile App!

Photo Credit: EasySMS

EasySMS mobile app intends to enable illiterate people to “read” SMS on Windows Phone 7; understand the meaning of each word of the SMS; and write SMS using icons with sound support and SMS recomposition from previous SMSs.

It is a Windows phone application which empowers illiterate people to read, compose, send text messages to their contacts, and helps managing contacts in an innovative and funny way through text-to-speech solutions.

The design and development of the app is based on the premise that about 800 million illiterate people are excluded from the benefits of text messaging and most of them reside in rural areas in which mobile phone coverage and ownership is growing rapidly and SMS are cheap or even free. Using a touch screen with simple icons, illiterate users may be able to use their mobile device to navigate through text messages, highlight words from incoming messages, listen to them, and then add them to new messages.

Considering the huge current market size of the users of the application, the developers are very ambitious, optimistic, and believe that their work will lead to the creation of more tools to help illiterate people gain access to information and technology.

Below is the preview of the app:

Illiteracy and Smallholder Farming

A major challenge, I believe, facing the ICTs for Agricultural Development Sector in most developing nations is the high illiteracy levels among the smallholder farmers. As a result, the success of this app will be a success to the ICT4Ag community. It is a laudable initiative which is still at the teething stage and needs a lot of support for improvement.

Several discussions, forums, and debates have been taking place over the years to find alternative models to delivering agricultural information to farmers in the developing nations who cannot read or write. At the same time, with the unprecedented growth of mobile phone among these same group of people, it is a great move to take advantage of the technology. The dominant mode at the moment seems to be SMS or text messaging with its two main limitations – the illiteracy barrier and the amount of information that can be transmitted at a time. EasySMS may be able to reduce the former while the latter still stands.

Designing for Today or Tomorrow?

But my question (as derived from the title of this blog) is – what is our priority? To sustainably address the illiteracy problem by educating our rural folks now, so that they can easily access agricultural information tomorrow or to continue investing in applications that help address the challenge of today’s illiterate farmer in accessing the right information? In other words, how can we modify our ICT4Education programs for long term solutions to the illiteracy problem in the rural farming communities in order to impact ICT4Agriculture programs?

I believe it is time for the ICT4Ed and ICT4Ag communities to begin sharing notes. In order for ICT4Ag applications and projects to have tangible impact on the rural farmers, they must get the basic education necessary to use these apps. While the EasySMS app takes an interesting approach that could eventually create a new breed of “literate” rural folks through the use of these visuals (computer icons) and voice support, we should not forget to catch the future literate farmers while they are young. In doing so, we will be on the path of tackling the information barrier through both short term and long term approaches.

April 23, 2012/by actualize

Humanitarian Assistance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

ICT for Cholera Prevention and Outbreak Management in Haiti

Photo credit: www.vaccinenewsdaily.com

With the rainy season off to an early start in Haiti this spring, can technology help stave off the rising cholera epidemic?

That’s what several international aid and health organizations are considering now that the advantages of ICT — innovation, efficiency, fast-response time — are needed to meet the impending rainy season which promises to bring flooding and ultimately more cases of cholera. Since the earthquake in 2010, more than 530,000 Haitians have fallen ill with cholera, and more than 7,000 have died — staggering numbers when considering the amount of international aid and health projects that have descended upon the country within the past two years. ICT in all of its forms and all that it enables — low-cost mobile devices, open data and access, social media — could improve the response time and efficiency of health initiatives in the cholera crisis if properly implemented.

One example of how ICT is already being utilized to prevent more cases of cholera is a new vaccine campaign by GHESKIO, a health organization based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in collaboration with Partners in Health, a non-profit healthcare organization that is well known for their efforts against the spread of cholera. In order to identify recipients for the vaccines as efficiently and quickly as possible within a country where travel is difficult, community health workers went door-to-door collecting information about the potential recipients via smartphones. The information was then aggregated into a database to locate and distribute the vaccines to the 100,000 chosen recipients — a process that has just begun after a series of delays.

Utilizing mobile technology to combat the spread of cholera is not a new concept to Partners in Health. In a campaign started just last year, community health workers have been using specially programmed phones to help track information about cholera patients in isolated communities throughout Haiti’s Central Plateau – an important step in gathering up-to-date infection data that could prevent more deaths. “Receiving real-time cholera information from community health workers is crucial,” says Cate Oswald, Partner in Health’s Haiti-based program coordinator for community health. “We need accurate and up-to-date reports in order to best prevent more cases and respond to quick spread of the epidemic.”

Social media has also played a large role in detecting and tracking the incidence of cholera outbreaks. A study released in January by the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reported that Twitter actually provided data that was faster and more accurate in some cases than traditional methods in tracking the cholera epidemic. Not only does social media provide a fast response time, it “is cost-effective, rapid, and can be used to reach populations that otherwise wouldn’t have access to traditional healthcare or would not seek it”, said Rumi Chunara, a research fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School in the US, and lead author of the study.

Image from haiti.mphise.net

HealthMap, an automated electronic information system for monitoring, organizing, and visualizing reports of global disease outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious diseases, has been an important tool in helping inform Partners in Health and other health organizations about the spread of cholera in Haiti. Not only does HealthMap track the spread of cholera, it also identifies new safe water installations, health facilities, cholera treatment centers, and emergency shelters.

April 15, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Addressing the Digital Divide in Latin American and Caribbean Schools

Photo credit: Katie Marney/The McGill Daily

Are schools in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) network ready? If so, what does it mean for improving the equity and quality of education in that part of the world?

This is a complicated question, no doubt, and one that is going to be asked more frequently with the introduction of the new Broadband Partnership of the Americas which promises to provide connectivity to schools that generally have been considered disconnected from the rest of the world. Moreover, this question seemingly ignores the unique cultural context and infrastructure of each country within the LAC region. Providing internet access in schools is just one important variable in a complex equation that the Information and Communication Technology for Education (ICT4E) community struggles to understand when attempting to integrate technology into the classroom. Does connectivity + ICT devices + digital content = better education? Many would vehemently argue no when considering differences in quality and methods of delivery.

But the LAC region on the whole appears to have a different equation altogether and one that seemingly receives less attention than other “developing” parts of the world, such as parts of Africa that tend to be the testing ground for many new ICT4E initiatives. When Latin America is mentioned in the ICT4E community, many often think of recent projects like OLPC deployments in Peru or Seeds of Empowerment’s initiatives in Argentina and Uruguay. But these are mainly device-based programs and, without increased internet coverage in the region, many of the valuable open educational resources and distance learning opportunities available through internet access remain out of reach.

Internet Access in Schools from the World Economic Forum

According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) new 2012 Global Information Technology Report, a comprehensive assessment of the preparedness of economies to leverage the networked economy, LAC’s Internet access in schools ranks well below its developed neighbors (see map on the right). This is just one of many factors, along with education quality, level of adult literacy, and rate of secondary education enrollment, that the WEF considers when determining the “network readiness” of a country.

“Network readiness”, as defined by a complex framework which translates into the Network Readiness Index, is comprised of four subindexes that measure the environment for ICT; the readiness of a society to use ICT; the actual usage of all main stakeholders; and, finally, the impacts that ICT generates in the economy and society. The report found that LAC’s network readiness ranking is lagging far behind “developed” countries for a number of reasons:

“Although the region is vast and heterogeneous, three shared reasons for this lag can be identified: these countries all exhibit an insufficient investment in developing their ICT infrastructure, a weak skill base in the population because of poor educational systems that hinder society’s capacity to make an effective use of these technologies, and unfavorable business conditions that do not support the spur of entrepreneurship and innovation. Addressing these weaknesses will be crucial for improving the region’s competitiveness and shifting its economies toward more knowledge-based activities.”

Network Readiness Index from the World Economic Forum

Addressing the weaknesses in the educational systems throughout the LAC region creates a complicated question when considering the role that ICT4E plays: How can technology be used effectively to improve an education system if the current system’s weaknesses and lack of technology expertise prevent technology from being integrated into the classrooms in the first place? Obviously, a country’s network readiness — or even ICT4E readiness — is complex and addressing it requires a multifaceted approach. For schools in the LAC region, improving internet access and expanding broadband technologies will address at least one aspect of the digital divide in education.

More information about ICT4E policies in LAC:

A database of ICT for education policies around the world — including the LAC region — from the GESCI
Public policies for the information society: a shared vision? from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

April 14, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Workforce Development, Youth Development

USAID’s EQUIP3 Introduces Youth ICT Employment Training & Placement Toolkit

Photo Credit: www.camara.ie

USAID’s Educational Quality Improvement Program 3 (EQUIP3) has released a new digital toolkit that will empower local partners to successfully implement youth employability programs. The Youth ICT Employment Training & Placement Toolkit provides guidance and support to partner institutions in the design of these programs and presents profiles of jobs in three sectors — ICT, health, and agriculture — which were identified as growth industries with a high potential for employing youth in Africa.

EQUIP3, a program led by the Education Development Center (EDC), partnered with the International Youth Foundation (IYF) to assess the labor markets, consult with numerous stakeholders in Kenya and Rwanda, and identify viable youth livelihood opportunities in the three sectors. By gathering quantitative and qualitative information on the needs, interests, and capacities of employers, youth, and others, these assessments identified specific ICT-related occupations that offer significant entry-level employment or entrepreneurial opportunities for disadvantaged youth in the target countries.

The Kenya and Rwanda country assessments found numerous employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for youth who have basic to advanced ICT skills, such as in hardware maintenance and repair, network maintenance, multimedia production, and database management. Through these findings, the development team identified the agriculture and health sectors as those which ICT skills have the most potential. In the agricultural sector, for instance, youth can use ICT skills to increase the efficiency of farms, shops, and suppliers. In the health sector, opportunities for youth exist in supporting health management information systems, among other opportunities.

The toolkit can be accessed online, in PDF, or in printed form for those without access to the Internet. Each sector profile provides program managers with detailed information on how to establish training programs that will impart to youth the skills required to secure formal employment or to start their own businesses.

Each profile includes:

A brief job description
The employment outlook
The “big picture” training considerations (recommended training location, target beneficiaries, average length of course, maximum class size)
Desired training outcomes
Student prerequisites for training (e.g. English level, critical thinking skills, basic numeracy skills)
Qualifications to look for in trainers
Specific curriculum and resources
The technology resources needed to provide training
Optimal instructional methodologies
Internship and job placement strategies
Additional resources, including links to online resources

The development team worked with NGOs and the government in each country to identify the needs of out-of-school youth, investigate job opportunities in the private sector, and identify pre-existing training materials. The research and consideration for country context that has gone into the design of the toolkit has made it a promising resource in providing youth with the skills necessary to participate in the emerging job market of technology-based positions. Moreover, the development team designed the toolkit to be able to evolve with the emergence of new open source resources and different ICT-related employment opportunities within the three sectors’ value chains to enhance the curriculum and ensure the project’s sustainability.

And this is just the beginning — consider it the 1.0 version of this training resource. The development team is looking to expand the toolkit to encompass other sectors and are already investigating examples of ICT usage in Senegal, Kenya, and Rwanda.

April 10, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Wikidata: Breaking Down Language Barriers for Students Around the World

Image from Wikipedia

Over the last decade, Wikipedia has become as ubiquitous a research tool for the modern American student as the encyclopedia was for their parents — though even that has changed now that the Encyclopedia Britannica has gone completely digital. But Wikipedia has remained largely inaccessible for students in remote corners of the world where English, German, French and Dutch are not spoken — languages that receive the most Wikipedia coverage.

Wikidata, a new project from the Wikimedia Foundation, plans to change that by creating a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike, making updating and translating processes easier and more efficient. Through this new project, Wikipedia will provide data in all of the languages of other Wikimedia projects. Announced in February at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, the new project promises to be groundbreaking in both its approach and scope of its audience:

“Wikidata is a simple and smart idea, and an ingenious next step in the evolution of Wikipedia,” said Dr. Mark Greaves, Vice President of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “It will transform the way that encyclopedia data is published, made available, and used by a global audience. Wikidata will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world.”

Photo Credit: www.thehindu.com

And that’s including parts of the world that have long been left out of Wikipedia coverage because of language barriers and the digital divide. Though the project is still in its initial stages, the first phase of the project will take place over the next several months as the development team creates one Wikidata page for each Wikipedia entry for over 280 supported languages. By using a unified data management system, data entered in any language will immediately be available in all other languages and editing in any language will be possible and encouraged by the projects completion, slated for March 2013.

The initial development of Wikidata is being funded in part by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through its Science program, both of which see enormous potential for Wikidata and the role it will play in creating common formats for online data:

“It is important for science,” said Chris Mentzel, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation science program officer. “Wikidata will both provide an important data service on top of Wikipedia, and also be an easy-to-use, downloadable software tool for researchers, to help them manage and gain value from the increasing volume and complexity of scientific data.”

Wikipedia’s development team is not new to revolutionary ideas and raising standards. Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, was quoted several years ago for his vision of “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” For students in parts of the world where online educational resources in their native language are far and few between, Wikidata promises to take one step closer to this goal.

April 4, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Where is the NEPAD e-School Initiative Now?

Image from ypia.org.za

Many in the aid and ICT4E community know NEPAD — the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) — and probably remember the launch of the e-School Initative, first announced during the Africa Summit of the World Economic Forum in June 2003. As part of the overarching objective of the NEPAD program to enhance Africa’s growth, development and participation in the global economy, the e-School component involves a complex implementation strategy involving a multi-country, multi-stakeholder, and multi-stage approach to introduce ICT use and support to 600,000 schools across Africa. But now, close to ten years after the initiative was first introduced, what progress has it made?

That’s what participants and leaders of the NEPAD e-School Initiative discussed when they gathered in Accra, Ghana earlier this week for the two-day NEPAD e-School Regional ECOWAS Conference. Reverend Emmanuel Dadebo, Head of the Teacher Education Division of Ghana Education Service, led the discussion and press event, emphasizing the project’s need for a business plan that promotes private sector investment by introducing a new Private Public Partnership (PPP) model.

The conference comes after five years of discussion and debate concerning the key findings made during the initial phase of the e-School Initiative — the “NEPAD e-Schools Demo”. The purpose of the Demo was to accrue a body of knowledge, based on real-life experiences of implementing ICT in schools across the African continent, in order to inform the rollout of the NEPAD e-Schools Initiative. The program was implemented in six schools in each of 16 countries across Africa through partnerships that involved private sector consortia, the country government and the NEPAD e-Africa Commission (eAC), which is responsible for the development and implementation of the NEPAD ICT program.

Photo Credit: computersforcharities.co.uk

Though various stakeholders and members of the aid community consider the Demo successful in some ways, like introducing ICT hubs into rural communities, most agree that it remains unsustainable in its current form. A report released by infoDev and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) back in 2007 entitiled “The NEPAD e-Schools Demonstration Project: A Work in Progress”, highlights the realization of this challenge within the early stages of the Demo and stressed the need for dialogue between all stakeholders:

“The expectations that implementation of the Demo would occur within a few months of it being announced in the participating countries, and, that a Business Plan would be developed to address sustainability and future rollout, were not met, and explanations for the delays were not effectively communicated. The disappointment and cynicism that resulted in some of the participating countries underlines the oft-learned rule of project management: Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!”

Like many development projects of this kind, and on such a large scale, lessons like these take time to learn and often come from trial and error. Shafika Isaacs, the founding executive director of SchoolNet Africa and a member of the monitoring and evaluation team for the report concluded saying this:

“Never before has there really been a program that mobilised national government participation and leadership at the official continental level in the way the NEPAD e-Schools vision has. Further, it has brought the private sector into partnerships that, while experiencing growing pains, has mobilised resources in a way that few other projects have been able to do. And there is much yet to learn about doing this in an optimal way.”

Exactly how much has been learned between 2007 and now, has yet to be seen. Several news articles have claimed that the program has already benefited several schools in Ghana and according to a statement given in Accra at the e-Schools conference, Ghana will launch the next phase of NEPAD e-Schools later this year. The program’s methods of monitoring and evaluating these benefits and ensuring effectiveness and transparency are unclear. However, with more buy-in from the private sector and the introduction of a new business model, it’s clear that some progress is being made and a more sustainable future for the e-Schools Initiative could be within reach.

March 30, 2012/by actualize

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