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!

 

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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 […]

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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 […]

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W4RA team visits Radio Sikidolo: key user of our voice system in Mali

Members of the W4RA team and partners from AOPP visited Radio Sikidolo in Konobougou, Mali. Radio Sikidolo and W4RA have worked together on the co-creation of the Foroba Blon radio/mobbile voice-based system  since 2012. Adama Tessougué, director  of Radio Sikidolo and key-user of the Foroba Blon system want to use this system to collect reports […]

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Evaluating sustainability of ICT4D services using e3value

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VU offers elective field-based ICT4D course for master students CS, IS and AI

In June 2018 a new elective VU master course “ICT for Development in the Field” will be given for the first time on location, in Sarawak, Malaysia, jointly with the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS). The 6 ECTS course is open for master students of Information Sciences, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. ICT4D is the study […]

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5th International Symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”

– Collocated with the 10th ACM Web Science Conference – The Web is the biggest open public space for information, communication and knowledge sharing for billions on the planet. However, it is not (yet) accessible for over half of the world population, mostly in the Global South. This symposium addresses the ensuing issues, in other […]

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African Traditional Medicine and the World Wide Semantic Web

African Traditional Medicine (ATM) is widely used in Africa. According to the World Health Organization. African Traditional Medicine plays a crucial role in Sub-Saharan Africa as the first line health system for ca. 80% of the population, thanks to its accessibility, affordability and embeddedness in local tradition. Researchers from the Université deBordeaux and VU: Gayo Diallo […]

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A new “Voice Service Development Kit” by André Baart

Building ICTs to connect the unconnected people in e.g. rural Africa, is challenging due to the language and literacy gap. Voice-based ICT systems have proven useful, e.g. for meteo services or market information. However, in general they are much more complicated to build that text-based systems, for ICT and Web developers. To make this easier […]

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Amadou Tangara joins Tree Aid

W4RA member Amadou Tangara is now Tree Aid’s Country Manager for Mali. This is what the international NGO Tree Aid wrote about his new position: (on 8 December 2017): “Amadou has long experience of agroforestry projects and was the winner of the African Innovation for a Sustainable Development prize for implementing Radio Marché, a voice-based […]

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