Africa Gathering London – Saturday, presentations 3
Notes from the Africa Gathering London – “sharing ideas about positive change” – an event about business, IT, social causes and Africa.
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Noemia Bacar – ICT in Mocambique
How are doing with ICT as a woman in Mocambique?
- I am very proud to be the leader of the ICT unit of KPMG in Mocambique
- Only few women are in this field
How is KPMG doing today in Mocambique?
- KPMG is the longest established consulting company in Mocambique – since 1990
- in 2007 a new line of service – IT advisors
- new product and new market – helping clients developing new businesses, implementation reviews
Africa has got a continuity problem – how are you dealing with that in Mocambique?
- companies are often not ready for this
- we are trying to convince companies that it’s important to mitigate risks
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Nick Short & Andrew Hagner & Niall Winters – Royal Veterinary College
Map of the last six months
- quite a lot has happened – Africa Gathering helped a lot
- New partners: Bloomsbury Colleges, London International Development Center (LIDC), African partners – very important as reality check, Novoda – commercial partner, Vetaid – NGO in the field providing a different viewpoint, Google.org, SACIDS, Vodafone
- Research funding, government funding (JISC)
Project overview
- livestock development – NGOs replacing government services for livestock – rise of community animal helath workers, but they are isolated
- mobile possibilities, e.g. an Android platform we are working on now
- pilot study in Zanzibar
Undergraduate research team
- RVC team of currently 9 students
- project on East Coast Fever
Use of phones
- collecting data with Google Open Data Kit – collecting many paramaters
- recording locations
- communication
- updating team blog
Advantages of phones
- quick upload
- XML formatted
- paperless
- keep in contact
- input from world experts
- also several technical constraints
Pros vs. Cons
- great advantages
- but phones are not affordable – financial support?
- educational tool & learning resource
- record production data
- management tool
- ruggedness
Mobile opportunities
- usage is widespread in Africa already
- affordable handsets and tariffs
- sample projects: Google.org & Uganda health care
Perspectives on Learning – Where next?
Challenge – how to use mobile phones to support learning?
- Can learning be a more engaging process than traditionally?
- How to design learning experiences around the mobile device
Why is this important?
- user generated content is more accepted – “caring and sharing”
- students sharing content
- emphasis on mobile learning + Web 2.0
What about an African context?
- a lot of things emerging – mobile phone coverage, data collection tools, sms sending tools
- mobile is the dominant technology for learning
- next project: use mobile devices to produce content locally
Q & A:
If you help animals you help people too – do people understand that message?
- There’s an international movement now to see the whole ecosystem – animal and human health – as one
Who are the kind of people you would like to get in touch with here?
- People get involved in different ways, just get in touch with us and we’ll find out
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Mira Slavova – MMD4D – Mobile Market Applications in Africa
Interested in markets
What would a visitor from Mars see in social structures on earth?
- In the west – interconnected communities and companies
- In Africa, a lot of enclosed societies, not interconnected
More and more penetration in Africa due to the business models
- pay-and-go
impact of mobile phones
- blurring of livelihood and lives
- extending markets
- strengthening households, families, communities, …
significant instances e.g. M-Pesa, TradeNet, Esoko, txtEagle
Liberia: Trade at Hand
- civil war, poor infrastructure, lack of standardisation
- inefficiences in food supply chain, adverse impacts on women
- project: Trade at Hand
- posting and receiving offers per sms
research challenges
- use and social construction of the technology
- impact on markets
- adoption
- business model
innovation challenges
- application development
- literacy
- localisation
Q & A:
Are people already understanding the value of the mobile phone concerning markets?
- Users are very enthusiastic, we are working on educating the user side
Example of Tanzania
- Bus drivers stopped taking passengers but make the middleman for people from the village and the city to trade their offers on demand by order of sms
Emmanuel Jal – Rapper
Former child soldier in Sudan – “forced to be a war child”
Puts his fight into the music
It’s hard telling the story but somebody has to do it – for the people who have no voice
The different ethnies and religions are no problem, the oild and the fertile land is a problem – everybody wants it
NGOs right now are only buying time, the aid has to change to fix Sudan again
- empower the young people
- more education
Telling his story – how he was cast away from home, recruited, trained for being a child soldier in a refugee camp, and the long and painful journey of his escape
Right now – trying to raise money for a school in his village to give the young people a chance
Link to Emmanuel Jal’s charity
Q & A:
Have you done workshops with musicians to share the experience
- I do stuff at schools with the kids, they could be the next leaders so I try to teach them how to be good leaders
How much have you raised for the school so far and how much is your aim?
- Aim: 1 000 000 $ from 1 000 000 people
Africa Gathering London – Saturday, presentations 3
was published on 10.10.2009 by Florian Sturm. It files under global
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