Left to Right, Jeff Swindle, Katie Leasor, Tyrone Hall Photo Credit: Laurie Moy

GBI is pleased to welcome the 2011 class of Summer Interns! After a very competative selection process, four interns have been selected for the GBI 2011 Summer Program, which began on May 31. The group represents universities from the DC area as well as Massachusetts and Utah.

Katie Leasor is a M.A. candidate at American University for the International Media program with a focus on using information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in Latin America.  Originally from New Jersey, Katie graduated from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island with a double major in Global Communications and Spanish.  During her time at Roger Williams, Katie studied for a semester at the University of Wollongong in Australia and spent a summer in rural Guatemala, working in an orphanage called Casa Guatemala and a biodiversity conservation center in Petén.  Katie speaks Spanish and will be contributing to the ICT4Democracy and Governance site.

Tyrone Hall Originally from Jamaica, Tyrone has recently completed his MA in International Development and Social Change at Clark University and has been accepted into the PhD Program in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Tyrone has worked as a journalist in Jamaica, Austria, Barbados and the United States and recently won the ACP-EU Innovations in ICT for Agriculture and Rural Development contest after defending his proposal to tackle Jamaica’s two main agricultural challenges: information asymmetrics and praedial larceny. Tyrone speaks French and Spanish and will be contributing to the ICT4Agriculture and ICT4Environment sites.

Jeff Swindle has completed a BS in Sociology at Brigham Young University and will be attending University of Cambridge in the fall to begin an MPhil in Development Studies. Originally from Arizona, Jeff has has traveled extensively studying development and particularly the relationship between rural connectivity and economic development. Jeff just returned from Mexico where he assisted in research for Concero Connect, a Grameen social business that brings high-speed Broadband internet access to rural villages. Jeff speaks both Spanish and Portuguese, and he will be writing for the Connectivity 4 Development and ICT4Education sites.

Shazad Ahmed (not pictured above) is currently studying at George Washington University, working on a Masters of Public Health, focusing on Global Health with an emphasis on design, monitoring and evaluation of programs. He has a BS in Neurobiology from University of Maryland and has studied at Universidad de Granada as well. He speaks Spanish and Bengali and has experience working for global nonprofits and community health projects, and conducting clinical and lab research. Shazad will be writing for the ICT4Health site.

”]”]Governments from across the world are using e-government to deliver timely, accessible information to citizens while increasing the transparency and efficiency of delivering public services.

Sao Paulo, Brazil is now adopting open source e-government software as an early adopter of open government 2.0.

On June 8, 2011 Microsoft will be sponsoring Govcamp Brazil to facilitate the collaborative discussion and create an open learning environment to foster understanding in this emerging field.

E-governance takes the input of many parties, within the governing body, civic society, and needs the participation of private sector to service them. As a result, there has been an the technology of Government 2.0 has been highlighted, rather than the results it enables.

As former U.S. deputy CTO Beth Noveck pointed out, though, there is more to these new tools: “Gov 2.0 is a popular term but puts the emphasis on technology when our goal was to focus on changing how government institutions work for the better.”

Microsoft’s involvement in Brazil’s initiative demonstrates the global company’s exclusive and evolving role in looking outwards, where Government 2.0 and e-government is increasingly more prominent around the world.

Rodrigo Becerra of Microsoft provided this insight on the purpose of the Gov 2.0 camps:

This is a space for creating connections to happen between citizens, organizations, groups and governments that may otherwise not exist. We have done them in Berlin, Mexico City, Colombia, Moscow, Toronto, London, Sydney, Wellington, Boston, India, and we’ll sponsor the Brazil event in the coming month. We specifically have local organization committees running each event, We conduct them in all local language and invite social media, competitors and partners to revel in the discourse to help drive the progress of the Gov 2.0 movement

The open source software represents how the Government of Brazil wants to create a solution where civic society has documentation and support online.

It also generates knowledge networks, shares information, and fosters the growth of domestic technology, as the systems design can be adapted to local Brazilian needs.

Kenya is arguable the epicenter of the worldwide mobile application frenzy. The east-African nation churns out a new top-rated, demand driven application nearly every six months. The latest innovation is iCow,

iPhone screen shot of the iCow app

a voice based mobile information application for diary farmers. Green Dreams Ltd,  the developer, says iCow will help farmers optimally manage livestock breeding.

The earthy app is rapidly winning over agriculturalists and tech enthusiasts. It won first place in the recently held Apps4Africa competition, a U.S funded project. The iCow has also been lauded by the Social Development Network (SODNET) and Biovision Africa Trust.

The iCow will help farmers efficaciously track a cow’s estrus cycle, manage nutrition and breeding, which will enable them to yield more milk and calves—the two indicators of a cow’s economic value. This demand-drive and culturally appropriate technology complements the ubiquitous cellphone to address key agricultural challenges. Chief among these challenges are: Poor record keeping; outmoded and hard to acquire and comprehend calendars, including the cardboard wheel system; and the gaping information vacuum.

The iCow app address these problems. It will deliver prompt farmers about their cow’s nutrition, illness and diseases, vaccinations, milk hygiene, milking technologies and techniques. This will be done via a series of voice prompts and SMS messages that will be sent to the farmer throughout the cow cycle. Critically, the voice-based nature of this application combats the problem of literacy, a major impediment to ICT4D.

The iCow is Green Dreams’ most recent plugin for the flagship app, Mkulima Farmer Information Service and Helpline (Mkulima FISH), which is being developed.

The emergence of IBM’s Spoken Web, a mobile innovation that eliminates literacy as a precursor to access the internet, is a game-changer in the ICT for Agriculture sector.

Unlike other efforts to bridge the global information divide, even people with limited to no functional literacy skills will find Spoken Web user-friendly. With nearly 800 million functional illiterates around the world, the inability to read remains a major impediment to the use of ICT4D. This is most acute in the most remote parts of the developing world where livelihoods and agriculture are inextricably linked.

The mobile innovation is essentially a world wide network of VoiceSites joined to make the Spoken Web. Its most essential hardware is a telephone, which people use to browse VoiceSites by saying keywords, also known as VoiLinks.

This rapidly progressing network of voice recordings is predicated on a system called VoiGem, which simplifies the process of creating voice-based applications. VoiGem is unique compared to existing interactive voice response technology because it allows users to create their own VoiceSites that consists of voice pages (VoiceXML files) that may be linked. Each page is identified by the user’s phone number. This identification mode allows the user to easily edit VoiceSites and pages from their phone.

The mobile-centric nature of this development reflects a global trend and complements a development need, particularly for agriculture. Although small scale farmers, scattered across some of the most far-flung places around the globe, make up a large portion of the 5 billion people without access to the internet and computers, a growing number of these people own cellphones. In fact, farmers constitute a strong contingent among the 3 in 4 people worldwide who own mobiles. Although only a fifth of those with mobile subscriptions worldwide have access to mobile broadband services, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers”.

As more farmers join the growing legion of wired folks, they will have faster and more reliable opportunities to access and share information. This development will reduce information asymmetries, structure and strengthen agricultural markets by bringing the internet to parts of the world where small scale farmers, consumers, middlemen and traders have limited knowledge about where to access and trade food.

The technology is also culturally appropriate given the oral nature of many cultures in the developing world. Farmers will also have the opportunity to efficaciously share valuable indigenous farming retentions.

As with most things, the Spoken Web also comes with challenges. Chief among the challenges is that though voice-recognition technology can match search terms against a previously processed index of recorded voice sites, it presents cumbersome results. However, the technology is being refined to be more precise. Precision is especially important because farmers and other end-users will not be able to retain all the information found on lengthy voice pages/sites, and they may not have the literacy skills to jot down points. Interestingly though, the Spoken Web comes with a fast-forward feature that enables the user to listen as if they were skim-reading.

Despite these challenges, the technology has been successfully piloted in eight Indian villages. It is now a central part of farming and health-care delivery in four Indian states, parts of Thailand and Brazil.

U.S leadership on global food security will get a major boost for the fiscal year 2011. This follows strong bipartisan support from Congress for a $1.15 billion budget to tackle food security issues around the world. Last week, USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah announced that nearly $1 billion will go towards Feed the Future, a global initiative launched by President Obama in 2009 to tackle hunger through sustained and endogenous multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Dr. Raj said, “$90 million will be spent on strengthening our nutrition programming”. Since the world food crisis in 2008, which caused riots in several countries and toppled governments, food security and agriculture grew in prominence on the international agenda.

He says, pending congressional approval, the agency will contribute $100 million to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a joint multilateral trust fund established in partnership with the World Bank, to address food security and agriculture globally. Since its conception in 2009, the fund attracted nearly $1 billion  from donors, and allocated over $330 million to eight countries.

Conflict, natural disasters and the slow integration of ICT into agricultural policy remains a major impediment to food security and  the improvement of livelihoods. Nearly 2 billion people worldwide are unable to grow or get enough food to eat. Most of those affected by chronic food security problems live in rustic areas, where they have limited information about where to access and trade food, in the least developed countries.

The World Bank has warned that the problem is likely to become even more intractable in the next two decades. According to the Bank’s report, Reengaging in Agricultural Water Management: Challenges and Options, “by 2030 food demand will double as world population increases by an additional two billion people. The increase in food demand will come mostly from developing countries.” The publication says improved food security depends on increased agricultural productivity and improved water management across the developing world.