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 […]
Anna Bon
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 […]
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 […]
The unfortunate news reached us that Dorothy Dittoh passed away on 27 October 2017. In 2015 and 2016 Dorothy participated in our W4RA workshops in Walewale, in our field research in Guabuliga community and in our ICT4D symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”. Dorothy is a member of the Dittoh family. Her […]
The W4RA team wants to express our sympathy with the family and relatives of Mady Sidibe, who passed away on September 6, 2017. Mady participated in our W4RA workshops in Ségou and Bamako, Mali in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Mady was one of the people who really made clear to us the importance […]
From 25 August to 1 September 2017, The W4RA team visited UNIMAS in Sarawak. Aim of this visit was to continue and expand research collaboration with UNIMAS in ICT4D. The W4RA team was represented, on this trip, by Prof. Hans Akkermans, Dr. Jaap Gordijn, Anna Bon and Bruno van Moerkerken, […]
The W4RA team at VU is proud to present three new master theses: by Justyna Kleczar (July 2017), Reshmi Sarkar (June 2017) and Jamila Daoudi (May 2017). Justyna Kleczar’s work is on speech technologies for underresourced languages. It comprises a new methodology, including very comprehensive tooling, which facilitates and allows […]
User involvement is key to building sustainable and useful ICTs. Of course that principle also holds for ICTs that have to serve people in a rural setting in Africa. This is an evaluation session of systems built by students of the ICT4D course 2017 at VU. Two key users in […]
In track 5 of the NDDHO event (Nationale Duurzaamheidsdag in het Hoger Onderwijs): “Sustainability and ICT for development (ICT4D)” Presented by Anna Bon, Victor de Boer, Francis Dittoh, André Baart and others 11.15 – VU Hoofgebouw, Auditorium Prototype demos of ICT4D systems for rural Africa: Master students Information Science, Computer Science, Artificial […]
On 18 May 2017, the 4th International Symposium “Perspectives on ICT for Development (ICT4D)” will be hosted by VU Network Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS, the Computer Science Department and VU International Office. This year’s theme is “Sustainability and ICT4D”. Invited speakers from Ghana, […]