Web alliance for Regreening in Africa

Academy Assistants

Julie Ferguson presenting new project

Julie Ferguson presented the interdisciplinary ICT4D research project Knowledge Sharing for the Rural Poor.  This took place at the kick-off of the Network Institute 2014 – Academy Assistants program, at VU IntertainLab. The two selected  Academy Assistants are the students Myrthe van der Wekken (Culture, Organization & Management) and Gossa Lo (Lifestyle Informatics). They will participate in this project through a grant by the Network Institute.

This new research collaboration brings together the expertise from two groups: Computer Science and Organization Science, toward the development of a platform for effective creation and sharing of knowledge, for the rural poor in developing countries.

This research project will be embedded in running research of the Web Alliance for Regreening in Africa (W4RA). W4RA provides useful use cases, personal contacts with end-users in rural areas and availability of local data sharing with farmers from  rural Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, and allows for field work and platform testing in the target areas.

Julie Ferguson, Assistant Professor at VU Organizational Science, and Stefan Schlobach, Assistant Professor at VU Computer Science are the project supervisors. Victor de Boer, Christophe Guéret, Wendelien Tuyp and Anna Bon are team members.

More about this program at the Network Institute’s website.