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 […]
AOPP and the W4RA team will continue collaboration on the topic of Food Security in rural Mali, focusing on the information and knowledge sharing, which is necessary to improve value chains for seeds. Lack of information and means to communicate hamper the socio-economic condition of many small farmers in the Sahel. They do not have […]
Despite the fact that more than 70% of Africa’s population depends on agriculture for basic life needs, and in Africa’s drylands rain-fed agriculture is widespread, reliable meteorological data about rainfall and weather forecasts — in Europe timely and accurate — is often not available for African farmers. Recent studies in rural areas of Burkina Faso and Ghana have […]
The tree loss is a severe problem affecting rural communities in West Africa’s drylands. Trees here have a positive influence on local soil conditions, biodiversity richness, water tables, food for fodder, and provide agricultural value to the people due to harvest of tree products. Unfortunately, trees are still being cut, often by people from outside […]
Our friend and partner Yacouba Sawadogo, the Man who Stopped the Desert, has received the prestigeous international Right Livelihood Award for his great achievements in African Regreening Initiatives and farmer innovation. See a Yacouba Sawadogo is one of the innovative farmers of the Yatenga district, who participates in our “Meteo Data Services for Innovative Farmers […]
Good drinking water is essential for all. However, in e.g. rural Africa the quality of water, for example from wells is not always reliable. Lab water testing and existing tools are expensive and time consuming. Allard Oelen developed a low-cost sensor kit, for the rural context of rural Africa. The IoT sensor measures a number […]
Amsterdam, 19 June 2018 – The Kasadaka “talking box” platform, the winning concept, is a platform to develop voice-based technologies for those who are not connected to the Internet, cannot not read and write, and speak underresourced languages. Kasadaka has been developed to allow development of specific, context-sensitive content, in a collaborative way, in the […]
The fifth International Symposium ” Perspectives on ICT4D”, took place at VU on 27th May 2018. This year the Symposium was not a public event, as the past few years, as it was collocated with the ACM Web Science Conference 2018, as one of the 7 pre-conference workshops. This year’s theme was “The Web and […]
