Category Archives: ICT4D
Intervention or Collaboration ? Rethinking modes of knowledge production in ICT4D
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 […]
Mathieu Ouedraogo wins UNCCD’s 2019 Land for Life Award
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 […]
Student projects: Digital Divide and Social Inclusion of Homeless People
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 […]
AOPP and W4RA’s TMT project on Food Security and Seed Knowledge Systems
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. This project is made possible through a recent grant from Nuffic in the OKP NFP-TMT-RC program, for which we are very thankful. […]
ICT4D in the Field 2019 – Community Service Learning by VU & UNIMAS
The annual project-based field course “ICT for Development In The Field” will be given this year for the second time, coordinated by VU together with UNIMAS, the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. This course offers master students Information Science, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence a unique experience, as it involves close collaboration with local rural and often […]
New student project: Nine Principles for Digital Development — how are they used in practice?
For several decades ICT4D practitioners over the world — funded by international development donor agencies or private funds — have tried to empower disadvantaged communities by providing them with ICT solutions. However, this has not not always worked out successfully. Often, technologies have been deployed for the “poor” without knowing their needs or assessing their […]
Digital Development: Elements of a Critical ICT4D Theory and Praxis
In recent years, critical research literature in ICT4D has grown. It is widely accepted that theory is to inform practice. However, the inverse directionality, practice informs theory, is much less present in ICT4D, including in critical research. In this paper, we discuss ways how ICT4D research and theory may be better informed by practice — […]
BannaTree, an application to support banana farmers in rural Sarawak
A group of students from VU Amsterdam and UNIMAS, Sarawak, have carried out an ICT4D in the Field project in June 2018. The goal of this project was to build an information system that supports the work of banana contract farmers in rural Sarawak. To do so, the students did a context analysis followed by […]
Appong: an application to help Gula Apong producers in Sarawak
Appong is the name of an application that helps increase sales of Gula Apong, a traditional sugar product, produced by smallholder farmers in Sarawak, Malaysia. The application was designed and built by a mixed team of master students from VU Amsterdam and UNIMAS: Giorgi, Judith, Kuan and Chris, in the framework of an educational ICT4D […]