Agriculture – Integra LLC

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

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Where to Turn When Researching: A Database for Innovative Global Health Initiatives

Photo Credit: Results for Development Institute

While working on a mhealth project that expanded across three countries, I was tasked with researching both the public health and mobile sectors in each country. Having worked on a number of strategic plans to implement mhealth, I knew what technology was being used in the field and the challenges that mobile technology can solve. But I had less knowledge about the public health challenges and the innovative, non-mobile health projects in these nations. In need to fully understand these two areas, I came upon the Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI) website. CHMI has an extensive and straightforward database to research the numerous innovations going on in developing countries. I was able to customize my search and focus on the three nations as well as the health focus (ie maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, chronic diseases, etc) and its technology (ie mobiles, GPS, radio, etc). It gave me knowledge of the specific health challenges in those nations as well as how mobile technology could be leveraged in existing programs and policies.

About CHMI

The origins of CHMI were born out of a study in 2008-2009 entitled “The Role of the Private Sector in Health Systems.” It focused on further understanding how the private sector participated in the health care sector in the developing world. CHMI was created as a continuation of the initial research through funding from the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The goal was to expand on the research in order to support the advancement of health markets. CHMI’s role is to identify and analyze programs and policies that improve private sector health care delivery and financing for the poor. These include mHealth programs, health franchises, health savings programs, consumer education programs, and many more. By developing this database, governments, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs can include their own innovative health programs as well as search for others. To date, there have been 978 completed programs with 117 still in the pipeline, all across 104 countries. As mentioned above, the database allows users to customize their search based on the categories below:

Profile Status (completed or not)
Program Type (type of innovation)
Health Focus
Country
Target Population
Legal Status (private, nonprofit, government, etc)
Target Geography
Reported Results
Source of Funding
Technology Used

Along with researching innovative programs, the database allows users to connect directly with organizations running these programs and provides content about new programs and update others already in it. It is also downloadable so users can play with the data for their research. The ability to discover and develop profiles of the programs has been primarily done by both partner organizations and CHMI staff. But recently third parties with no CHMI affiliation, such as researchers or program managers, have also submitted profiles. By having a community approach, the database has the most up-to-date information and data. CHMI also takes responsibility to verify information with the organizations on the ground when possible. If this is not possible, the CHMI staff tries to be as transparent with this knowledge. This includes rating the quality of the information source. Here is how they break it down:

High: Interview with high-level employee of the organization and/or a site visit.
Medium: High-quality website or contact with a high level employee of the organization, trusted secondary source (e.g., a report published by a collaborating organization)
Low: Secondary online sources or other publicly available resources

In the end, CHMI wants to increase the information available about recent health innovations, assist donors/investors in identifying new models to fund, give policymakers greater knowledge about designing health policies, connect implementers in order to share lessons and knowledge, and provide data and impact evaluations submitted by partners or third parties.

With information about innovations in development (mostly around mobile technology) spread throughout the internet, CHMI has taken the reigns to promote and show the ground-breaking health market innovations. The partnership approach and focus on gathering the most accurate information gives the CHMI an extensive and trustworthy database of knowledge for practitioners, policy makers, and donors to learn the most innovative approaches.

If you have any questions or would like to include an innovative health program in the database, please contact CHMI at chmi@resultsfordevelopment.org.

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

Agriculture, Democracy & Governance, Environment, Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Citizens’ Participation Refreshed in Ecuador

How should we engage the disenfranchised? The organization “Participación Ciudadana” is addressing this issue, aiming to involve Ecuadorian society in processes of social transformation. The approach is to inform citizens of news who are often forgotten about by the centric-national media. The project, Participación Ciudadana, is an electronic newspaper produced by regional news agencies in the provinces of Azuay, Guayas, Imbabura and Manabí. The newspaper is published online, featuring topics on politics, jurisdiction, legislation, elections, citizenry, the diaspora, and Latin America.

Participación Ciudadana allows the public to participate in the newspaper, accepting written articles, videos, forum discussions, and online surveys to stir debate in a society that struggles to find space for open criticism. The newspaper is deemed successful with its wide-range of readers seeking local information. A special feature that is popular is the live-streaming debates between experts and stakeholders on government policies.

Further steps are being made to keep the newspaper sustainable, by selling advertising space and seeking support from donors.

April 14, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Alerta MINSA: The First mHealth Project in Latin America

Photo Credit: rcrwireless.com

In the news and blogosphere on ICT4D, there is a heavy focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, mostly because mobile phones have exploded across the continent. But we have missed many of the innovations that are going on in Latin American and the Caribbean. In an effort to reach back to the history of mHealth, I was able to connect with one of the first individuals to work in mhealth, even before the term mhealth had been coined – Ernesto Gozzer, currently working as a Researcher and STC with the World Health Organization and is an Associate Professor at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.

While he could not confirm that the project was the first in the world, Alerta MINSA was the first in Latin America. Originally launched on February 6^th, 2001 in the Cañete Town Hall Auditorium (in the southern part of Lima), Ernesto admitted they had no idea they were pioneering mhealth. “We thought we were helping to improve the health information systems for critical health issues. The aim was using available technology to connect the unconnected, to help to reduce the digital divide.”

Alerta MINSA stands for Alert Ministry of Health and was initially funded by InfoDev. The tool allowed for disease surveillance to send via text messages and through the internet. The information is then consolidated in a database. Alerts can then be sent when thresholds have been surpassed as well as automated reports and compiling data in tables, graphs, and maps in dashboards. Currently Alerta is the “official disease surveillance system” of the Peruvian Air Force, Navy, and Army. It also has been used in other countries including Ecuador, Panama, Tanzania, Rwanda, Colombia, and Paraguay.

My favorite idea that Ernesto talked about was the following: “So, this was not a pilot but what I call a local innovation that expanded beyond borders.” I love this quote because an innovative solution was created to solve a specific problem using mobile phones. Instead of it being the sexy thing to do, it was done out of necessity. The developers use the power of mobile phones to provide a solution to a problem. This is an important lesson that has been mentioned before in the mhealth space. Start with the problem first and then develop a solution around it. This is as true today as it was 11 years ago.

April 14, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

AGRONET: Connecting small producers to information in Colombia

Photo Credit: Agronet-Colombia

AGRONET, a National Agricultural Information and Communication Network was developed with the goal to connect small producers in Colombia and reduce the digital divide through public private partnerships and growing broadband penetration in rural municipalities.

A Government of Colombia’s initiative under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in collaboration with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The main aim is to provide information and knowledge on new techniques for sustainable food security and for the diversification of crops in order to improve productivity and opportunities in the market. While the network is aimed at policy makers, other stakeholders in the agricultural chain including small producers are expected to benefit through the platform.

Agronet platform helps in standardizing and integrating resources to offer value-added information and communication services for the agricultural sector using modern and traditional ICTs. The platform also has alliances with several actors in order to integrate other systems of information into the network and expand the content offered.

In order to serve producers with relevant and targeted information, Agronet has developed user profiles of all users based on needs assessment and users’ particular productive activities. Taking advantage of the penetration of mobile technologies in the rural users, new agricultural innovations – technologies and methods are introduced to producers systemically through SMS. Producers receive updates on Agronet’s platform, including changes in its databases and other news and events pertinent to agriculture.

Agronet offers a dedicated space for the agribusiness to view supply and demand, and to publish notices of products and services related to agriculture and agribusiness. The platform also has a digital library, policy documents related to agriculture and food security and other statistical bulletins for students, researchers and policy makers within the agricultural field. Agronet also gives its users the opportunity to train virtually from online courses available on the website. The platform also allows small producers to search for credit information for their farm inputs, market for their produce, and information of other stakeholders.

Over the medium term, Agronet plans to provide a greater wealth of content and information services to producers by adding capacity in digital television. For more information, visit Agronet.

April 14, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Environment, Land Management, Natural Resources Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Ukraine to Launch New Environmental Monitoring System

The Ukrainian minister of ecology introduced a proposal to implement a new satellite environmental monitoring system to the country’s president the first week of April. This is a major step for Ukraine in independently setting its environmental protection agenda and integrating ICTs for sustainable development. The satellite, which offers better resolution, will be used to monitor illegal forest cutting, natural resource development, industrial and other hazardous leaks, uncontrolled emissions of garbage dumping, etc.

April 9, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Another App for Smallholder Farmers: M-Farm

Photo Credit: M-Farm

M-Farm is an award winning mobile solution for agribusinesses and farmers currently being piloted in Kenya. It is an SMS and web-based application focused on improving weaknesses in the value chain. It is a transparency tool for Kenyan farmers to get information pertaining to the retail price of their products, buy their farm inputs directly from manufacturers at favorable prices, and find buyers for their produce.

Why M-Farm?

The M-Farm solution was developed based on the marketing challenges of rural farmers in Kenya. Smallholder farmers unaware of the market of the various commodities, produce in excess and are faced with the problem of getting the worth of their produce. Poor information on farm inputs and lack of access to these inputs such as fertilizer, seed, agrochemicals and other equipments are huge obstacles to increasing farmers’ productivity. The inability of the farmers to transport their produce to regional markets after harvesting also leads to the exploitation by middlemen who offer meager prices for the produce, and even delay payments for the commodities.

M-Farmers’ Approach

The M-Farm solution aims at giving farmers a voice by connecting them with each other in a virtual space for access to affordable farm inputs and also be able to sell their produce collectively. Specifically, the solution works through:

Price Information: M-Farm enables farmers to inquire current market prices of different crops from different regions and/or specific markets
Group Buying: M-Farm is able to aggregates farmers needs/orders and connect them with farm input suppliers
Group Selling: M-Farm enables farmers to sell collectively and connect them with a ready market thereby increasing their productivity.

M-Farms’ Solution

The M-Farmer solution has taken advantage of the on-going phenomenal growth of mobile technology across Africa. With access to the Internet yet to have impact on rural farming in these areas, M-Farm has adopted an SMS-based solution for achieving its goal.

Farmers in Kenya simply SMS the number 3535 to get information pertaining to the retail price of their produce, buy their farm inputs directly from manufacturers at favorable prices, and find buyers for their produce. Also, M-Farm has a contract with a local exporter, who buys the produce directly from the farmers using their mobile devices thereby minimizing the transportation challenge. This gives farmers access to a reliable and guaranteed market that enjoys stable year-round prices while eliminating middlemen and lowering transaction costs.

Below is a 2-minute clip on the winning of M-Farm’s IPO48 competition featuring Jamila Abass, a co-founder and CEO of MFarm Ltd (K) and other team members.

Access to M-Farm is by subscription with a free 30-day trial for users. For more information on M-Farm, visit here.

April 9, 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

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