Cindy Shiner
16 February 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
What will an equally connected Africa mean for the developed world?
All of this will be enormously beneficial for Africa's overall development and for its capacity as a partner in providing global public goods. I think that what we'll see is that Africa becomes a more reliable partner in trade, in becoming part of global production networks, in tourism, in cooperation on urgent [matters] such as disease surveillance and sharing meteorological data and other information that is extremely important for global information systems and global hazard management.
Another thing that all of this can do is revolutionize how development assistance works. You can't very easily distribute aid to 10,000 communities separately and so we tended [in the past] to go through national governments. But now with IT systems one can actually have much more sophisticated aid delivery and monitoring systems with a lot more decentralization. And we know when aid reaches the local level it is far more effective and far better monitored. So I think we're going to see from a rich IT system a whole new platform for development cooperation as well.
Can you tell us about the ICT component of the Earth Institute's Millennium Villages Project in Africa?
[The project] covers about half a million people in a dozen countries.
We have a partnership with Ericsson where the company, with incredible generosity and effectiveness, is putting mobile connectivity in all the Millennium Villages. Wherever it's up to regulatory approvals and standards, and technologically possible, Ericsson is providing not only cell phone coverage with the local service providers but also wireless Internet connectivity.
On that basis we're rolling out a large number of interventions in the villages, in public health, in schools, in mobile banking and agricultural finance that will be made a lot easier by the presence of the phones. We're doing some special initiatives with the use of the phones both for training and then empowering community health workers in public health delivery. This is quite a core part of the Millennium Village strategy at this point.
Recently Ericsson completed the connectivity to one of our most remote sites, which is a camel herder and sheep and goat herder village in Kenya, towards the Somali border in a very arid region. Nobody ever in history had made a phone call from this place. Now there is not only phone connectivity, but there is wireless Internet and already a number of small businesses that are being empowered or being enabled by the fact that there is this connectivity.
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Very interesting article, Thank you. notebook memory
We're very excited about Africa's cellular revolution as well!
Nathan Eagle's txteagle program is one initiative that we, here at ALTA, are very excited to see growing!
http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2009/02/18/beyond-txt-crowdsourcing-wi th-txteagle/
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Active Discussions: New Technology Sweeps Africa