Author Archive
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In 2007, Peru announced it would distribute tens of thousands of XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child to children in rural schools across the country, and expanded the program every year since. Almost 1 million laptops later, the program is now the largest XO deployment in the world and one of the most faithful…
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Open your wallet right now. Most likely, you have a debit card, a credit card, a health insurance card, and access to the massive financial infrastructure that these three cards represent. The ability to store, save, use, and borrow money anywhere in almost limitless fashion, without worry about amount, theft, or even making change. Add…
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Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA are all the rage in International development these days, but what do they really mean for the national development of countries we attempt to help? Menekse Gencer of mPay Connect will lead us in a discussion of mobile financial services, the full gamut of finance that is now…
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In theory, making information open and available leads to more transparent decisions of governments, aid agencies, corporations and other such institutions because stakeholders at different levels push for accountability and better governance. That is why civil society actors have been working on transparency, accountability and good governance for years. Now new actors on the scene…
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Back when Bill Gates was young, he had multiple opportunities to geek out – he had access to computers at home and at school – but he would sneak out of his house to go the library. Why? Because he loved the wealth of knowledge, curated and guided by libraries.
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Access to information has been part of the development discussion since the Internet arrived. Previously, many saw community telecenters as the way to bring technology to the developing world. Yet telecenters are not sustainable without donor funding and the concept of public access hasn’t kept pace with advancing technology.
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Fail Faire DC 2011 is a celebration of failure. We will have great speakers with fun, fast, Ignite-style presentations of their professional failures. Audience participation is not only encouraged, it is mandatory! We are all peers and none of us is perfect. Expect much laughter as we navel-gaze at where we have all gone wrong…
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We all lust for iPhones, iPads, and the like, and yearn for the day the developing world can use the same cool gadgets we geek on. But did you realize that iPads could be used in remote areas today? That rural coffee farmers in Mexico, Peru, and Tanzania are enriching themselves and their communities through…
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A new form of capitalism is arising that recognizes our ability to direct the power and efficiency of market systems toward social impact, leading to a more balanced set of “returns”. This social capital market is real and growing, and has real impact on emerging economies. But does it impact ICT4D? How can technology companies…
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Last month, the M&E for ICT4D Technology Salon noted that we lacked quality tools to measure outcomes. We all intuitively know that ICT could be the basis for great M&E tools, but what about taking that feeling into action?
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No one ever fails in ICT4D. Isn’t that amazing! Technologies come and go quickly – bye, bye PDA’s, Windows Vista, and soon Nokia – yet in ICT4D, each project has impact and we never fail. We just have lessons learned. In fact, can you name a single technology program that has publicly stated that it…
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Everyone talks about measurement and evaluation (M&E) like it matters. Yet, few of us do it well or even at all with ICT projects. So why should we measure and evaluate? How can we go about it? And what are the industry best practices, applied to the uniqueness of ICT? Our goal is to explore…
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Local Internet Service Providers woefully under served rural communities in Haiti before the 2010 earthquake. ISPs said that broadband infrastructure was too expensive to deploy and there were too few customers to make the investment profitable. Using traditional sales models and technology, they were right. Then the earthquake happened. During the humanitarian relief phase, Inveneo…
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You’re staring down a new Request for Proposal and you know the goals can be achieved quicker, cheaper, and more effectively with the help of a software solution. You want to include your killer app in the proposal but you’re a development expert not a hacker. Where to start?
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Let us start by agreeing that technology has great promise in increasing the economic empowerment of youth in the developing world. We all believe it. But what is that promise in reality? Which technologies hold greater promise? What innovations work? That was the issue we discussed at the Technology Salon on Youth Economic Empowerment with…
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Today’s youth population is the largest in the history of the world, and 90% of these young people live in developing countries. The global youth unemployment rate is the highest on record, and we’re seeing discontent and disenfranchisement play out on the news each day. In fact, the revolution in Tunisia started with an under-employed…
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According to Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF), authored by Vital Wave Consulting and sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, the 73% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia who do not have a mobile phone represent $13 billion per year in incremental revenue for mobile…
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Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting, put forth a startling proposition in a previous Technology Salon. She described a new ICT4D paradigm: Women + Mobile Phones + mServices = Economic Development. She believes that combining the traditional role of women in the family and the power of services delivered through the mobile phone (mServices)…
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We all want to add the technology sizzle to our proposals. Nothing wins an RFP these days like “e” this or “m” that. Yet ICT projects are complicated, and hasty technology additions in proposals often leave implementers struggling to achieve project milestones after the contract is won.
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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has a proud history of transforming development through science & technology. As part of the ambitious reform effort, USAID Forward, USAID is developing a set of Grand Challenges for Development, a framework to focus the Agency and development community on key barriers that limit breakthrough development progress….