In the framework of the W4RA research program to tackle Global Challenges and bridge the Digital Divide, five students Information Science set out to map the contours of digital exclusion within our own urban, wealthy, and highly connected context. Carlbandro Edoga and Marc Hegeman examined the obstacles homeless people face in urban areas of the […]
Edited by Anna Bon, Mónica Pini, and Hans Akkermans – written by 38 collaborating authors from Latin America and Europe. “Inclusive education is the endeavor to ensure access to quality education for all – independent of social and economic status, family wealth, geographical location, race, ethnicity, gender, age, culture, or language. This is a longstanding […]
Over the past decades information system developers and knowledge engineers in ICT projects in wealthy regions of the world have come to realize that technical work can only be successful when situated in a broader organizational context. However, for low-resource environments (such as for example rural Africa), where contextual embedding is even more demanding given […]
As full partners in the TO-INN project, VU participated in the meeting in Quito. The delegation this time was only one person: Anna Bon from the Centre of International Cooperation. From 7 – 10 July 2019 another plenary meeting was help in Quito, for all partners of the TO-INN project. Aim of this penultimate meeting […]
19 June 2019 — Mathieu Ouedraogo, president of Réseau MARP, NGO in Burkina Faso and long-term team member and partner of W4RA and VU Amsterdam, has won the prestigious Land for Life Award, issued by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). We congratulate Mathieu with all his achievements, over many decades, to support […]
Amsterdam 23 May 2019 – The annual symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”, organized by Victor de Boer and Anna Bon, was focused this year on transdisciplinarity — collaboration between academics and non-academics — in search of solutions for the Global Challenges of our Age. The theme was reflected in the talks by the speakers: André Baart, from […]
The Symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D” gathers a broad community of researchers and practitioners to discuss and reflect on barriers and paradigms that can improve information sharing for billions of people in the world. With this event we want to facilitate a reflective debate that should include the people at the “other” side of the digital […]
Blog by Aron van Groningen, master student Information Science at VU doing his master research field work in communities (kampungs) in Sarawak, Malaysia. Hi all! here’s a little story about my ICT4D in the field work for my master thesis and what I am doing in Sarawak, Malaysia Education is a big problem in […]
For her master research in Artificial Intelligence, Gossa Lô uses Computational Linguistics Techniques and Deep Learning to generate narratives in West African style. Storytelling is a powerful form of communication, that has the ability to pass down information, knowledge and tradition, while captivating and involving an audience with personal experiences and emotions, and in a broader sense […]
From 10 to 13 of March 2019 the third plenary meeting of the TO-INN network of Latin American and European Universities took place in Mexico City. This was hosted by the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, one of the two the Mexican partners in this project. Dra. Rosa Maria, the rector of this university welcomed us all, […]
Blockchain technologies have received much interest the past few years, as an innovative way of ICT-based commerce. Its decentralized nature, the lack of a “middleman”, or central bank are interesting features. But is this technoology also promising for low resource environment, e.g. rural Mali? Can blockchain for example provide a new payment channel as an […]
