Originally posted on the GBI Portal – Page 20

Mozambique gets a slice of SEACOM

The Mozambican Ministry of Science and Technology has signed a 20 year agreement to access international broadband fibre connectivity on the SEACOM network to Europe and onwards to the rest of the world.

SEACOM Chief Executive Officer Mark Simpson (image: mybroadband)

Beneficiaries of the newly acquired capacity include the Mozambique Research and Education Network (MoRENet) and the Government Electronic Network (GovNet), which are government-led projects established to improve online public service access and capability.

The bandwidth will help MoRENet to deliver reliable and cost-effective, high-speed internet traffic to member institutions whilst creating the platform to share education and research content with other Nationwide Research Education Networks (NRENs) around the world.

Similarly, GovNet will be able to better support its mandate to improve eGovernment performance. GovNet currently interconnects government institutions at both central and provincial levels, with an aim to connect all state and government institutions through a single private data communications network.

SEACOM CEO, Mark Simpson, said: “SEACOM is the ideal partner to provide the international connectivity that will complement Mozambique’s extensive broadband data communications networks initiatives. Over the past three years, we have witnessed how the availability of true broadband at lower prices can accelerate educational initiatives and economic development across the region and we look forward to working with the Mozambican government to help Build a truly African Internet.”

Both MoRENet and GovNet form an important part of the Mozambican government’s ICT Policy Implementation Strategy. The policy covers all major areas of Mozambique’s economy and society; tasked with creating an enabling environment for societal upliftment, improved performance of both public and private sectors and most importantly the ultimate eradication of poverty in the country.

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Dr. Evaristo Baquete, said: “The Mozambican government views affordable and high quality data networks as a vital tool to achieve the country’s various developmental goals. SEACOM brought cheaper and faster international connectivity to this country and we believe that they are the partner of choice to continue to bring about positive changes to the country and its people.”

SEACOM believes in a world where the African internet experience is characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets. Today, over a dozen countries across the African continent have access to SEACOM’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

Staff writer

January 31, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

UNESCO Mobile Learning Week Report: 3 Projects for Policy Development

UNESCO released a report last week introducing three exciting new projects that promise to shape how policies are developed for mobile learning programs. Within the year, UNESCO will develop and release a set of policy guidelines, commission and publish ten working papers, and introduce four pilot projects in teacher development in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal.

The report was a summary of project goals as well as an overview of discussions and ideas organized by participants at UNESCO’s first Mobile Learning Week (MLW). The event which was held at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris last month drew approximately 30 experts in mobile learning and 100 participants from the fields of mobile technology and education to discuss the use of mobile technologies in the classroom.

Policy Guidelines:

The most challenging but promising of the three UNESCO initiatives is the development of a set of policy guidelines due to be released by the end of 2012. There are currently many examples of the use of mobile technologies in the classroom but few are supported by – or the result of – effective and sustainable policy-making initiatives. Through discussions between UNESCO, MLW participants, and a growing global community of mobile learning educators and leaders, these new guidelines will be broad enough to encompass different cultural contexts, stakeholders, and technologies so that they can be used by national governments and educators and evolve with new developments in mobile technologies.

Discussions surrounding this topic generated general considerations and challenges including:

Consideration must be given to the perspectives of the stakeholders (mobile network operators, teachers, students, etc.) and their interaction with each other
Guidelines should be flexible and be able to adapt to new technologies and their applications
Costs of internet access and personal-ownership of devices remains a challenge
Efforts should be made to dispel negative views of mobile technologies within the classroom
Lessons should be learned from past examples of successful and unsuccessful projects
Mobile technology should support a well developed curriculum and pedagogy and not become the focus of the content

10 Mobile Learning Working Papers:

To provide research information for the policy guidelines and teacher development projects, UNESCO has commissioned ten working papers: five that will investigate mobile learning policies in the five major world regions (Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and North America) and five that will investigate mobile technologies for teacher development and support. Drafts of the papers were presented and discussed at the MLW.

Photo credit: http://www.redorbit.com

The five papers on mobile learning policies won’t provide an in-depth analysis of each region but should give a general overview and provide examples of policy development. The papers will explore the pervasive lack of mobile learning policies around the world, observing the misconception by some policy makers that mobile technologies are distracting from learning and should be banned in schools. They will also include lessons learned from success stories of initiatives supported by governments and tech-savvy model teachers.

The additional five papers will examine professional development for teachers using mobile technologies in the classroom as well as how professional development can be delivered through mobile technology to teachers across the five regions. These papers will observe how mobile technologies are being used already, how they can be used in the future, and explore the use of mobile technologies with other educational tools and resources.

4 Teacher Development Pilot Projects:

Finally, UNESCO will launch four pilot projects to explore how mobile technologies can be used to provide support and professional development for teachers in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal. Though the projects are still in the planning stages, MLW participants were able to provide input to important questions such as “What guidelines and understandings should steer the projects? What does the organization need to do, address, and keep in mind to best ensure the projects it launches are successful?”

To learn more about the MLW participant’s comments and ideas about these new projects and mobile learning policy development, see the full report here.

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Twitter to block tweets

Micro blogging service and social media website Twitter revealed yesterday that they now have the ability to block certain Tweets from other users across the world. While certain Tweets may be perfectly legal in some countries, Twitter will begin to restrict Tweets in specific countries where content may be contentious.

Twitter now has the ability to block certain Tweets from other users (image: Bartelme Designs)

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” Twitter wrote on their blog.

As an example, the company said that Tweets with “pro-Nazi content” will not be visible in France and Germany, where it is banned – but will be visible to the rest of the world.

The announcement comes in stark contrast to a blog post last year during the Arab uprisings, when Twitter said it won’t censor Tweets.

“We do not remove Tweets on the basis of their content. Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”

Charlie Fripp – Acting online editor

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Environment, Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Water

Mobile Apps, Texting for Water Access

mw4d launches new site

mw4d, a research initiative that uses mobile technology for water management in Africa launched a new website in January. mw4d is based within the Oxford Water Futures Program at the University of Oxford. The site highlights projects and resources for innovative mobile applications that “help achieve water security and reduce poverty” in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

Currently mw4d has three main projects:

Smart Handpumps

Smart Rivers

Mobile Water Payments

These projects allow for the monitoring of water use patterns, proper allocation of resources, and sustainability of water supply services. Please check out their resources for exciting projects worldwide.

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Health, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Utilizing Mobile Money in Healthcare

Photo Credit: OpenIDEO

According to article released this week by Uganda Online, hospitals in Uganda are now accepting mobile money to pay for health expenses. While there are eight mobile providers in Uganda, four are providing mobile money services to their customers – MTN’s MobileMoney, Airtel’s ZAP, UTL’s M-Sente and Warid Pesa – with Orange Uganda planning on releasing their version of the service soon. In the article, a picture clearly shows that the hospital (Case Clinic) allows for mobile payments from MTN and Airtel. Other companies in Uganda are allowing for mobile payments – DStv (satellite TV provider), NWSC (water and sewerage) and Umeme (energy provider).

Utilizing mobile money in the health sector is nothing new. M-PESA in Tanzania has been used by the CCBRT Hospital to pay for patients’ bus ticket from rural areas to the hospital’s location in Dar es Salaam (the capital city). In Kenya, Changamka allows individuals to save and pay for health services by combining a medial smart card with M-PESA. In the Philippines, Smart Communications has partner with PhilHealth, a national insurance provider, to allow customers to pay their premiums via mobile money. This list continues as money mobile is being further employed in the health sector which includes insurance, vouchers program, and conditional cash transfers. The ability to save and pay via mobile money for health issues creates insurance for individuals and families that do not have access to typical insurance products. Mobile money has also been leveraged to pay nurses and community health workers serving in rural areas which helps with worker retention and decreases tardiness.

In the mHealth sector, this is a clear sign that innovative solutions can be shaped around current mobile products and services. Once mobile money has been established in countries, this opens doors for new businesses to be developed around the mobile money platform. The examples above show the need and desire for products that create the ability to both save and pay for health service. While the Ugandan example is not a revolutionary app (or killer app), it provides a necessary product so individuals and families can receive curial medical services. In this case, the ‘killerness’ of the service to using mobile money in the health care system is that it fits both the needs and infrastructure of Uganda, include accepting payments from multiple mobile providers.

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Activists concerned as ITU conference adjourns

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders has issued a statement urging member states of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) agency of the United Nations to protect freedom of information as they begin a plenipotentiary conference in Geneva yesterday.

Reporters Without Borders has called upon the agency to sanction any countries that use censorship (image: stock.xchng)

Reporters Without Borders has called upon the agency to sanction any countries that use censorship or violate the freedom of information.

Observers expect ITU member states to adopt a series of important decisions about the agency’s future and the protection of freedom of information globally.

Meanwhile, Iranian media personnel and activists have organized a demonstration outside of the ITS Geneva headquarters to call upon the agency to hold the Iranian government accountable.

The Iranian government has announced plans to establish a system whereby telecommunications in the entire country would be entirely filtered and cut off from international networks.

According to Reporters Without Borders, instances of Internet censorship took place in a total of 68 countries in 2011, including China, Cuba and Libya, who all stand as ITU member states.

“We call on the ITU, during this decisive conference, to firmly condemn countries that do not respect the fundamental principles of the free flow of information,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“We also call on the ITU, as part of its work, to set up a commission to monitor freedom of information violations by member states. The development of ICTs throughout the world should be vehicle of democracy. The ITU must not be the accomplice of regimes that obstruct the flow of news and information on their telecommunications networks,” they continued in a press release published Tuesday.

Freedom of information has been a point of global debate in recent weeks as United States legislators debated two bills that would have severely limited Internet freedoms. After an international campaign was launched against the bills, they were side-lined by legislators.

Sarah Sheffer

January 26, 2012/by actualize

Economic Growth & Trade, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Pan-Caribbean CodeSprint : Development and Open Data

Competitive pressure could enable a culture of innovation that drives economic growth in the Caribbean, a region with debt profiles akin to Southern Europe’s. St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica and Barbados are among the 10 most indebted countries, as per Debt to GDP ratios. But tiny populations and relatively cash rich sectors such as tourism and mining, which are controlled by a few, puts all Caribbean countries, with the exception of two (Haiti and Guyana), into the middle and high income brackets.This broad economic tag renders these mostly fragile and heavily indebted economies ineligible for some kinds of multilateral and bilateral support, such as concessional financing and debt relief, given to other poor countries with similar socio-economic dynamics.However, the region is increasingly pinning its economic fortunes on the potent mixture of its cultural stock, tech capacity and youth. So committed to this process are some stakeholders that in 2010 Jamaica’s Ministry of Agriculture collaborated with the Kingston-based Mona School of Business (MSB)at the University of the West Indies (UWI) to make better use of agriculture data.MSB, already a stakeholder in the IDRC’s# Caribbean Open Institute, didn’t just go the route of traditional business intelligence analysis, it worked with the Ministry to mobilize an open data initiative that would maximize mileage from the data through the creation of value-added software apps and enabling the innovation process through public access to the data.

Four screen shots from a mobile application for farmers

Photo credit: AgroAssist

One outcome is the AgroAssistant, a mobile app built on the Android platform. This recently piloted app will aid Rural Agricultural Development Agency (RADA) Field Officers to remotely access farmer and farm information as well as identify crop production figures and prices islandwide. So significant is the potential for the app to be used to sort copious data into meaningful bits, that Matthew McNaughton(@mamcnaughton), one of the developers, says the depth of information collected about farmers, their output trends and profiles, could revolutionize the way local banks assess the credit risk of small farmers. This is arguable a watershed moment for many engaged in the business of microcredit for agriculture, as established assets-based methods of denoting credit worthiness impedes access to capital for expansion in a region where the average farmer is on the cusp of retirement (age 45) with few assets, if any, that they can afford to risk.

The wave of enthusiasm surrounding the initial agriculture open data initiative led to the formation of SlashRoots, a pan-Caribbean developer conference and community. Though launched just last February, SlashRoots(@slash_roots) is now a leader in the Caribbean’s ICT4D and Open Data for regional development space. SlashRoots’ iconic status isn’t by chance, according to the convenors, the name is a product of the merger of two powerful tech products with a cultural twist: Slash is taken from the once premier web hub for tech savvy folks, SlashDot; and Roots doubles in honour of the super user folder on a Linux machine and a contemporary Caribbean cultural expression of pride.

At inception, SlashRoots, in collaboration with MSB and support from IDRC, held a wildly successful conference that attracted nearly 450 persons and 45 developers from across the region—even John Wonderlich of the DC-based Sunlight Foundation, a tech gov watchdog, was in attendance.

The MSB agriculture initiative is only one of several IDRC-funded projects in the Caribbean Open Institute Initiative. Others include mFisheries in Trinidad and Tobago, which is being implemented by Caribbean ICT Research Programme at the Department of Engineering, UWI St Augustine, and the technology policy work of Fundacion Taiguey in the Domincan Republic. But the region’s open data for development thrust doesn’t end there, on January 26-27, the administrators of these three projects will host the Caribbean Open Data Conference dubbed “Developing Caribbean”.

The website describes the event as “the first regional Conference and Software Developer Competition of its kind, focused on Open Data and Social development. It uniquely combines a conference with the thrill [and competitive nature of] a code sprint, with the social objectives of government, NGOs and Civil Society”. The “Developing Caribbean” event is apart of a larger open data movement in Latin America, which also included the inaugural Developing Latin America event organized by Ciudadano Inteligente, an technology NGO in Chile, on December 3rd and 4th of last year.

The Conference and Codesprint will span three countries (Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago), with virtual sites for developers recently added in Barbados, Belize, Cuba and Guyana. Over the two days teams of developers will be building apps to solve prominent social problems in the areas of Agriculture & Fisheries, Regional Trade and Tourism. The ideas for the apps are being crowdsourced by the organizers from practitioners, NGO, government and other stakeholders to culminate with a potent combination of social expertise and technical wizardy over the two days of the conference.

Follow @DevCaribbean for details about the conference and the emerging Caribbean open data policy framework.

January 26, 2012/by actualize

Basic Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Higher Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Microsoft to bridge digital divide through African school partnership

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it was partnering with the British Council in Africa to deliver their Africa Digital Schools Project aimed at assisting in “bridging the digital divide”, in six African countries.

The aim is to bring new technology to African schools as part of a boosting of education experiences through Microsoft’s technology (image: Education In Africa)

Called “BADILIKO,” the Swahili word for change, the aim is to bring new technology to African schools as part of a boosting of education experiences through Microsoft’s technology.

According to a statement, each company contributed $1-million as well as technical expertise to accelerate the implementation of this innovative project that seeks to embed ICT in learning.

Microsoft and the British Council stressed that the Africa Digital Schools Project will “enrich e-learning while improving ICT skills among teachers and students to boost their competitiveness in a global village.”

The $2-million seed money availed byMicrosoft and British Council will be spent on the establishment of eighty digital hubs across the six sub-Saharan countries.

It is hoped that 100,000 learners will be provided with digital tools which they will utilize to boost academic work and social skills that benefit the wider community.

Mark Matunga, the Microsoft Regional Education Manager, East and Southern Africa, says that greater uptake of ICT in learning dovetails with the software giant’s vision of bridging digital divide in Africa.

”Educators should embrace technology to pass knowledge to students and boost their aptitude in relevant areas of study. We are encouraging more teachers to be trained in ICT skills.”

Janan Yussif

January 26, 2012/by actualize

Connectivity, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Telecom Egypt to create Egypt’s first virtual mobile network

Telecom Egypt’s new CEO Tarek Aboualam has announced that the company is waiting for approval from the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority to establish Egypt’s first virtual mobile network.

Telecom Egypt hopes to create the country’s first virtual mobile network (image: Gadgets Arabia)

He also announced that the company lost EGP 100 million due to cable smuggling and the illegal transfer of international calls. In response to this, the company has embarked on restructuring its administrative and regulatory structure to address these issues.

The company has also been waiting for the establishment of a new government in Egypt following last year’s uprising in order to bid for the country’s fourth mobile phone license. The predominantly landline operator has been struggling in recent years to maintain revenue levels as mobile phones take over the country.

TE has also faced strikes and internal power struggles in recent months, culminating in a shake-up of top management, including the top CEO position.

Sarah Sheffer

January 26, 2012/by actualize

Connectivity, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Equitorial Guinea launches new telecom company

Equitorial Guinea has a new telecommunications company, as Guinea Ecuatorial Comunicaciones Sociedad Anonima (GECOMSA) aims to increase the country’s growing telecom needs.

Equitorial Guinea has a new telecommunications company (image: stock.xchng)

According to a statement from the newly launched operator, the “effort by the government to overcome the sector’s limitations” was the main push for the new operator.

Currently, the country has two telecom operators, GETESA and Hits.

During the launch of GECOMSA, Maria del Mar Bindang Eneme, GECOMSA Director, said that the telecommunications company’s main goal is to improve and guarantee mobile telecommunications as well as Internet services for its subscribers.

“GECOMSA is a great addition to Equatorial Guinea’s telecommunications sector as we have experienced some shortcomings,” said President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. “It will expand and improve our communications’ reach and take us to a new level of telecommunications.”

GECOMSA is a joint venture between the government of Equatorial Guinea, which has a 51 percent stake, and China, with 49 percent.

David Eto

January 26, 2012/by actualize