I participated in a very informative event this week in Washington DC where a researcher was sharing his experience on “Weather-Index based Crop Insurance for Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia”. As I listened to the discussion as an agricultural information specialist, my concern was what is the role of mobile technologies in this? According to the [...]

There is no doubt that the current surge in mobile innovations for agricultural development is defying the normal progressive growth of agricultural technologies over the past decades. For centuries, innovations in agricultural technologies have been progressively slow. The emergent of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their innovative use to support agricultural extension and advisory services [...]

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 [...]

If education quality is largely dependent on the teaching capacity of educators, wouldn’t integrating video instruction from expert teachers into low-resource schools’ curricula seem like a good idea? Digital StudyHall (DSH), a program that has pioneered Facilitated Video Instruction for primary school education in low-resource settings since 2005, might seem revolutionary to the improvement of [...]

With International Women’s Day this week on March 8th, several prominent aid and research organizations working in the developing world are releasing some fascinating new reports that explore how ICTs and gender impact each other.  Creating a startling picture of the realities of gender disparities within an already gaping digital divide, the reports identify a [...]

  How should we engage youth in discussing climate change and how it affects our lives? Climate EduXchange, a partnership between TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) and Dell Inc, wishes to do just that in India. TERI has for a long time been involved in educating youth on environmental issues through its Youth Education [...]

Green Prakriya, a joint initiative of Digital Empowerment Foundation and Association for Progressive Communication, was formed to address India’s “tremendous economic growth owing to the influx of the information and communication technology revolution.” With this advancement, a wave of e-waste ensues. The initiative works as an eco-web platform that acts as a green ICT knowledge [...]

Within the last month, there have been multiple new examples of mobile phones being leveraged to expand financial services in developing nations. With the popularity and quick success of M-PESA in Kenya, there was a push to copy the model in other developing countries. But it has been realized that the M-PESA model cannot be [...]

Over 500 000 rural farmers in India can now access free daily market information and weather services on their cell phones with the help of Intuit Fasal platform, an SMS based mobile service. Fasal begun as an experiment after it was recognized that rural farmers in Karnataka, India lack price information in relevant multiple markets; have [...]

NB: This is my personal analysis of contributions to question three from the forum. This post is the third in series of six, analyzing each of the six forum questions that were discussed. Following the first two discussions on partnerships and scale, the third discussion was based on justifying a business case for investing in [...]