Tag Archive for: mobile

As cellular networks continue to expand throughout the developing world, mobile base stations are increasingly located in rural areas that are often difficult to reach and not connected to electrical grids. As a result, an estimated 640,000 base stations around the world are off-grid. Diesel generators power most of these, but other options exist. This article is the first in a series looking at the relationship between mobile networks and energy. In this entry we take a look at the issues of diesel power and near term possibilities for greener, more sustainable options. Read more

USAID Report

A key recommendation by a USAID report that was released in June and titled “Emerging Technology and Practice for Conservation Communications in Africa” is for international development agencies to institutionalize good practice in the use of ICTs for Conservation. The report noted that while the conservation community has a wealth of experience in harnessing ICTs and communications among its many members, the distribution of this expertise is uneven.

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First Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet Report from Akamai

Photo Credit: Akamai http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

The broadband revolution is proceeding apace across the globe as internet speed and adoption have increased at faster paces.  The Akamai company recently released its First Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report which discusses important global broadband statistics like internet penetration rates, mobile connection speeds, regional and global connection speeds, and broadband adoption among many others.  The report, in addition to providing invaluable insight into global trends in broadband, also underscores the role broadband and mobile technologies can play in the future of development.

Thanks to an ever-increasing demand for connectivity in both developed and emerging economies the world has seen a dramatic rise.  Broadband speed has increased to such an extend that Akamai has redefined what it calls “high-broadband.”  Previously, any connection at speeds of 2Mbps or higher was defined as broadband, but now Akamai will consider connections of 4Mbps has broadband and connections of 10Mbps has high broadband.

For the first quarter of 2012, the report points out a series of trends:

  • A 6 percent global increase in the number of unique IP addresses to over 666 million in between fourth quarter 2011
  • A global average of peak connection speed of 13.5 Mbps
  • A global average connection speed of 2.6Mbps
  • A global average mobile connection speed range between 32.2 Mbps and 2.2 Mbps
  • A doubling in global mobile data traffic between the first quarters of 2011 and 2012
  • A global increase in adoption of high broadband
These statistics are certainly promising, especially when considered within the context of the increasingly important role broadband and mobile broadband can play in process of development.  The global doubling of mobile broadband certainly lends itself to the existing forecasts of the increasing prominence and importance of smartphones in many developing countries as price wars continue to drive down device prices.  All this, when added with the World Bank’s recent Maximizing Mobile report on  harnessing mobile for development, adds up to a future full of potential, fueled by broadband.
As we move forward it is important that we remember these technologies are only as good as their connection.  Many developing countries still have a pronounced rural/urban digital divide in both access and connectivity.  If the potential of these technologies can be fully realized, it is crucial that policy makers commit reducing these gaps.

 

Photo Credit: The Economist

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 researcher, Dr. Shukri Ahmed a Senior Economist, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the concept of crop insurance has a long history from Asia with the leadership of India. However, due to the challenges associated with insurance in general and access to credit to smallholder farmers, the idea somehow waned. But according to Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4), there is overwhelming evidence that uninsured risk can drive people into poverty and destitution, especially those in low-wealth agricultural and pastoralist households. There is therefore a re-emergence of insurance for smallholder farmers across the globe.

The speaker gave a detailed background to the study in Ethiopia and the importance of partnership in the design and implementation of the study. The difference, however, with this new approach to crop insurance for smallholder farmers is the use of index (indices) to support the insurance service, and intervention against emergency situation. But at the same time the study is targeting farmers that are relatively better off and who are already engaged in the market but are not investing in insurance due to the anticipated risks. The outcome of the pilot study is expected to help protect the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, who are vulnerable to severe and catastrophic weather risks particularly drought, enhance their access to agricultural inputs, and enable the development of ex-ante market based risk management mechanism which can be scalable in Ethiopia.

Dr. Shukri Ahmed, Senior Economist at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Unbanked or Branchless Services

Adding another concept to an already very complex issue that tries to combine weather, insurance, credit/finance, and smallholder farming, should be carefully considered. But the key question is whether mobile technologies can play a catalytic role in this entire complex system?

Among the reasons for choosing a given area for the pilot study, include availability of Nyala Bank branches, the vulnerability of yields to drought, the availability of nearby weather stations, and the willingness of cooperatives in the area to purchase the new product. As the pilot study progresses, the possibility of scaling the project across the country is high. But what will be the implications for the absence of banks in the rural farming communities in a country that has an approximately one bank loan per 1000 adults? Can Mobile Banking help understand why smallholder farmers under-investment in agriculture?

A success story of mobile banking by  the Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited (DBBL) in Bangladesh was recently highlighted by the GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked. Interestingly, the story pointed out how DBBL learnt from Kenya’s famous mobile money program M-PESA. Kilimo Salama (KS) is an innovative index-based insurance product that insures farmers’ inputs (seeds, fertilizer, pesticides), and outputs (crop harvests), in the event of drought or excessive rainfall. It uses weather stations to collect data and implements SMS-based mobile technologies to administer and distribute the payouts. Mobile technologies will not only help with the financial transactions such as seen in Kilimo Salama’s case but also in support of the weather stations for timely and accurate decision making for pay-outs.

My conversation with Dr Shukri about the possibility of integrating mobile money into the project to address the challenge of absence of banks in rural Ethiopia, revealed the huge untapped market for Mobile Banking in that country. However, the success of such services depends on a convincing business case for both the banks and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). Most importantly, however, is the state of telecommunication infrastructure and regulation in the country. These need to be in place for services and applications to thrive. With this huge investment

Outside Ethiopia, I believe it is time for African countries to take advantage of the increasing mobile phone penetrations in the continent beyond social networking to general development applications such as for agriculture, health, education, and rural development.

To listen to the audio recording of the event, visit Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Cover Page of the World Bank Report

Photo Credit: The World Bank

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 has, however, changed the history forever. According to the World Bank report Information and Communications for Development 2012: Maximizing Mobile, close to 6 billion mobile phones are in use today, a jump from less than 1 billion subscriptions in 2003. About 77% of the 6 billion subscriptions is located in the developing nations in which 70% of the world’s poor whose main source of income and employment comes from the agricultural sector.

Agricultural Technologies and the Future In her 1991 paper “Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in American Agriculture,” Deborah Fitzgerald, Professor of the History of Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT, argued that the history of agricultural technology is in a very nascent stage of development, and it is difficult to predict the outlines of a more orderly, systematic future. Barely 20 years after her observation, the developments in mobile technology for agriculture have confirmed her argument. Little is known about any prediction of the current growth of mobile technologies, especially in the world’s poorest regions. It is also becoming more difficult to predict what the market will look like in the next decade given the fast pace at which the technology is growing.  

So Why This Sudden Spurt? The 2nd chapter of the World Bank report referenced above titled “Mobilizing the Agricultural Value Chain” has identified a number of factors that are driving the increased adoption of mobile phones for agriculture in the developing nations:

  • Improved accessibility and affordability through expansion of mobile networks.
  • Increased capacity or bandwidth availability on mobile networks as the technology evolves.
  • Increasing data-enabled mobile devices with increasing affordability.
  • Innovative development of remote wireless sensors and identification technologies.
  • Increasing availability of specialized mobile services targeted to specific agricultural functions.

These and other factors, such as wide ownership of mobile phones, instant and convenient service delivery, increasing functions, and falling prices of mobile handsets, will continue to drive its adoption.    

Looking into the Future of Mobile Innovations for Agriculture

Photo Credit: American Public Health Association

According to USAID, innovations must lead to substantial (not incremental) improvements  in addressing development challenges. But this does not seem to be the case in the mobile agricultural sector. The role of mobile agricultural projects in addressing development challenges in the developing nations is yet to be empirically tested in most countries. Anecdotal results have been reported here and there, but there is little to cite about any substantial impact on agriculture and rural development. An interesting trend with the mobile innovations for agriculture pointed out by the report is that, the applications are usually designed locally and for specific target markets, with localized content specific to the languages, crop types, and farming methods. It continues that while these local designs may offer exciting opportunities for local content and applications development, they may also limit the economies of scale realizable from expanding from pilot programs into mass markets, potentially hindering the spread of new and promising applications and services. So while development practitioners are careful not to repeat the traditional “technology transfer” approach in the ICTs for development sector, they are also faced with the limitations of scalability of the locally developed mobile applications for agriculture.  

Is Reverse Innovation a Possible Solution to Limited Scaling of Locally Developed Mobile Apps? The local app development market in the emerging economies is being boosted by the proliferation of Technology Hubs & Parks in these countries. But what are the approaches to development of applications within these hubs? How can we learn from the past challenges with technology transfer and the current scaling limitations of locally developed apps for agriculture? The concept of reverse innovation developed by Vijay Govindarajan, and Chris Trimble and explained in details with practical applications in their book, “Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere”,  could bring these two challenges together. A key component of the concept is about building Local Growth Teams (LGTs). Within the mobile agricultural sector, LGTs comprising of ICT developers, marketing specialists, and content developers in the emerging economies with strong link with global market could be developed. This will ensure that locally developed ICTs apps with inexpensive models and limited infrastructure to meet the needs of developing nations, can be easily repackaged as low-cost innovative goods for Western buyers. This could address the scaling challenge brought up by the report and at the same time limit the traditional diffusion of technologies from the developed to developing nations.  

Oversights: Mobile Solutions for R&D and Data Collection? I would like to recap my recent work on “Mapping ICTs Along the Agricultural Value Chain” for USAID’s Global Broadband and Innovations (GBI) program. Two key components of the value chain, which seem to be overlooked, are ICTs for agricultural research and development (R&D), and ICTs for data collection to inform monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Firstly, mobile technologies for agricultural R&D are emerging, but due to the traditional under-estimation and under-investment in agricultural R&D in developing countries, little attention is being paid to its potential. There is huge potential in the use of mobile technologies to support the work of agricultural researchers, agricultural science students, extension staffs, and farmers to facilitate access to scientific knowledge and exchange of information between and among these actors. Unfortunately, this has been overlooked by this important report. Secondly, mobile technologies are being used along the agricultural value chain for data collection in order to inform policy and decision-making. The report did mention briefly the importance of mobile in agricultural data collection, for example the work of Grameen Foundations Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) program in Uganda and the Reuters Market Light (RML) in India. But in addition to these programs, there are host of new mobile applications that are being used in this area that need to be acknowledged. Examples include iFormBuilder, EpiSurveyor, Open data Kit, among others. These new mobile applications are essential for the work of extension staff – both public and private to facilitate their work. Most importantly, timely and accurate data through these applications will lead to actions that will benefit the smallholder farmer in a number of ways, thereby increasing their productivity.

Conclusion The growth of mobile technologies for agriculture has outpaced the speed of past technological developments within the sector. While the invention of tractors in the 1800’s was acclaimed a significant breakthrough for agriculture, not even the green revolution in the 1900’s can be compared to the extensiveness and intensiveness of mobile technologies for agriculture. The World Bank report reference in this post has done excellent job by carefully selecting experts in the field of ICTs for development to delve into a number of cases worth following. Specifically on the second chapter that deals with mobile technologies and agriculture, I believe practitioners, researchers, technology developers, policy makers, and users of agriculture and mobile technologies should look critically into the recommendations given at the end – business models, ICT skills and the supporting infrastructure to insure the growth and sustenance of the revolution.

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.

mEducation Alliance logoFor 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).

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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:

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