André Baart wins High Potential Award in Amsterdam Innovation Contest

Amsterdam, 19 June 2018  – The Kasadaka “talking box” platform, the winning concept, is a platform to develop voice-based technologies for  those who are not connected to the Internet, cannot not read and write, and speak underresourced languages. Kasadaka has been developed to allow development of specific, context-sensitive content, in a collaborative way, in the […]

AndréWinsHighPotentialAward
Pictures and phones

VU Student blog “ICT4D in the Field”, Sarawak Malaysia

Hi all! We have been here for two weeks now. Our projects concern banana farmers, Gula Apong producers and children of Kampung (village) Pinggan Jaya. To get to know the context, we met banana farmers, the owner of a banana chips factory and children and women that live in Kampung Pinggan Jaya, which is only […]

A student impression of the ICT4D Symposium

By Judith Schermer, student ICT4D master course @VU 2018 On the 27th of May, the fifth annual symposium on Perspectives on ICT for Development (ICT4D) was held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This essay summarizes the subjects that were discussed and the presentations that were held. ICT4D is aimed at how the benefits of ICT […]

Look back at the Symposium “The Web and The Digital Divide”

The fifth International Symposium ” Perspectives on ICT4D”,  took place at VU on 27th May 2018. This year the Symposium was not a public event, as the past few years, as it was collocated with the ACM Web Science Conference 2018, as one of the 7 pre-conference workshops. This year’s theme was “The Web and […]

Hotpot

ICT4D in the Field, master course by VU and UNIMAS about to start

In 2017, VU and UNIMAS (the University of Malaysia in Sarawak) started a collaboration project in the field of ICT4D research and education. At VU, researchers from the Network Institute, in the research program W4RA, have developed methods to build information systems in low-resource, low-tech environments, based on collaboration, iteration, adaptation. This methodology has been […]

Kasadaka project nominated for Amsterdam Science and Innovation Award 2018

Tha Kasadaka project, that was developed by André Baart and colleagues from the W4RA team, extensively tested by students in the VU ICT4D course 2018 and deployed in the field in Mali, at Radio Sikidolo in Konobougou, has been nominated, as one of the five finalists in the Amsterdam Science and Innovation Award 2018.The finale will […]

DSC_0028
Ousseini Kindo

Regreening the Sahel, shown in 3D and virtual reality

How does regreening work? How do farmers improve their lands? How does zaï work? What is farmer-managed natural regeneration? How do you protect young trees? How do you use rain data to improve plan cropping calendars? How do you sell your products on the local market? A short 3D film by Chris van Aart, Wendelien Tuyp, Julien Ouedraogo, with Kagapesgo – Naaba, Ousseni Kindo, Ousseni Zorome, Yacouba Sawadogo, Groupement Maraichais Minima. This clip will also be available as a virtual reality experience of the Sahel. At the Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Turn the image round, and see the full environment. Innovative farmer Ousseni Kindo from Burkina Faso explains in Moore language  how regreening works!

 

W4RA work featured in BBC article

A BBC web article “‘Siri, will talking ever top typing?’ By Padraig Belton features our work done on voice interfaces for farmer information in Northern Ghana. Francis Dittoh talks about the need for specific information for farmers in their own language and discusses ongoing research into our Kasadaka system. Anna Bon talks more about the […]

Screenshot of the bBC article
2018-02-28 13.06.27

Ghana trip Feb 2018

[crosspost from victordeboer.com] As part of the ongoing W4RA efforts, the VU ICT4D team visited West-Africa once more. This time, we visited Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. I personally went to Ghana to talk to external PhD candidate Francis Dittoh and his colleagues at the University of Development Studies (UDS) and the SARI institute in […]