Social Innovation for Regreening & Resilience in Low Resource Environments Essay by Wendelien Tuijp & Anna Bon This essay is the authors’ version of a chapter in the book The Connected World – Insights from 100 Academics on How to Build better Connections, edited by Ivar Vermeulen, 2023, VU University […]
We received the sad news that our friend and project partner Yacouba Sawadogo, “the Man who Stopped the Desert” passed away on 3 December 2023. The farmer innovator Yacouba Sawadogo became world famous after the documentary “Man who Stopped the Desert” by Marc Dodd in 2009. Yacouba Sawadogo won became […]
June 2023 – The field of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) generally addresses problems of, and solutions for, the “unconnected people in the world”. Currently, this is close to half of the world’s population, the majority of whom live in poor, remote, often rural, regions of the world, […]
Read this short paper by Zhiheng Yang about China’s strategic response to information colonization. “China has asserted its digital sovereignty, establishing a unique model of decolonisation in the information space. While this approach has accelerated the growth of domestic software giants and fortified national security, concerns over restricted competition, stifling […]
Small indigenous languages of the world are often spoken in regions where literacy rates are low and access to digital services is limited. Whereas voice information services could be useful for low literate speakers of these languages, written and audio data from these languages are hardly available. This paper presents […]
W4RA was interviewed for the Dutch television on 11 November 2022. This short clip was broadcasted on 11 March 2023 in the program “How its done” at RTLZ.
Tamale, 16 February 2023 – today Francis Saa-Dittoh launched officially the Tiballi project at the Nim Avenue Hotel in Tamale, Ghana, in the presence of fifty stakeholders, including farmers and AI/ICT4D experts. About the Tiballi project Can advanced AI methods (ML, NLP) be reconstructed so as to make the Internet […]
The W4RA team, together with partners from the AOPP (Association des Organisations Professionnelles Paysannes) in Mali have just completed a project in the framework of Orange Knowledge Programme to enhance the value chains for cereal seeds in rural areas of the Sahel. This short video shows the highlights of this […]
The longstanding collaboration between the VU Centre for International Cooperation and the Computer Science Department of VU on the research theme ICT for Development – the Digitizing Society in the Global South, has again led, this year again, to a fruitful result. We can harvest seven interesting theses and one […]