Getto FM community radio, Nairobi, Kenya from Tim Berners-Lee on Vimeo.

I feel that this event was successful for many reasons. First, it was helpful to gather in the same room people from different background, and to have discussions across the combination of expertise areas. At the end, I had a far better understanding of the issues facing organizations like MARP or Sahel Eco, including what they are doing in the field, their needs in terms of information exchange, and so on.  How the Web might help them also became a little more clear.

The second point that impressed me was the positive energy coming out of all the presentations. We heard about stories of community radio and their roles, we heard about the burkina-ntic network, and all the activities of the impressive people from Yam Pukri. We heard about all the projects IICD is running in Mali and Burkina and their impact. Few other people from ICT companies like Softnet-Burkina were also very interesting. In the agroforestry domain, We also heard about the Africa Regreening Initiative, and what innovative farmers are doing and their incredible results. This was really refreshing. In Europe, or western countries in general, it is very rare to read or watch positive stories about Africa. It is always about disaster, starvation, wars, etc. But there are incredible stories, impressive successes, and very enthusiastic organizations and people, and we can see that energy in action, very much like what I witnessed in Kenya, or Uganda when I visited these countries with Tim last november. This is very exciting !

Obviously, this was just a first step, and we have to move from observation to action now. But this visit and this workshop were very positive, and very promising for the future. I will summarize in a future post, the different action areas we identified, and our next steps.

Ps: we also published all the photo and video we took during the whole week.

Stephane

The importance of natural regeneration of trees became even more clear during our visits.  Natural regeneration employs techniques to promote natural growth of trees sprouts by preserving the scare water resources, applying natural fertilizers (like animal manure), stone banding, pruning appropriately, — all techniques that use available resources.  The Web-alliance for Regreening in Africa (W4RA), the Web Foundation’s first project, aims to accelerate significantly the distribution of these techniques from the farmers who know how to do it, to those who do not. Regeneration based on sprouts works better than planting seeds or seedlings.  Without the innovative techniques, the sprouts simply die in the harsh sun of the Sahel.  We hope to give farmers — through novel use of mobile phones, voice, the Web and community radio — more effective access to information on farming techniques, weather, and market prices, and new ways to communicate with other farmers.

The important role of “promoters” was also highlighted last week.  In the US, promoters might be called agricultural extension agents.  Our partner, the Africa Regreening Initiative (ARI) created a network of promoters (like Sophie, left), who now cover about 103 villages in Burkina.  Enabling promoters to make better use of the Web could help them to collaborate with each other, and communicate with farmers — allowing them to cover more territory with more comprehensive information.

As a slight aside… Products from the shea trees (karité, in French) are typical of those being promoted across the Sahel.. The tree is a source of fruit, derived butter, ingredients for medicines and so-called anti-wrinkle creams, and useful wood.  Shea butter is one of the few and growing exports from Burkina.

Below are three short videos from the longer set of clips. The first video here captures the conversation between our tour lead, Chris Reij and Sibiri Sawadogo, one of the innovative farmers.  They discover that they own the same mobile phone, and discuss how Sibiri uses it to support his growing farming enterprise. In the second video, Chris explains the use of two particular agro-forrestry methods: stone banding (place rocks in tight rows perpendicular to the slope of the land to slow water run-off) and zai (digging holes around sprouts of trees, and filling holes with manure to both trap moisture and fertilize). The third video is part of a discussion with Sophie (picture on left), who works with our W4RA partner, the Africa Regreening Initiative. Here, interpreted by Chris, she talks about the availability of wireless Internet in the field, for those with a laptop, a way to charge it and a GPRS modem. The availability of content useful for her job is, however, very scarce.

Key learnings from this day:

• It is possible to grow trees and crops in very dry, near-desert conditions, and using locally-available resources:  a hoe, manure, available rain fall, bands of stones and/or hole to trap the moisture, and sprigs of vegetation that can be nurtured to grow into trees using the aforementioned resources.
• A small minority of farmers have discovered and are employing these techniques.
• The work of groups like the Africa Re-greening Initiative are helping to spread the sharing of knowledge of techniques between the farmers who are practicing them to others who could use the.  Most of this dissemination is through face-to-face visits, which limits the speed at which knowledge can be shared.
• Vast majority of farmers have access to mobile phones and radios.
• The Burkinabé people and our project partners are smart, open, enthusiastic, very friendly and great people to work with.

Saa Dittoh, Anna Bon, Nasse Ouedraogo, Sibiri Sawadogo, Chris Reij, Steve Bratt, Wendelien Tuyp, George Sadowsky, Hans Akkermans, Stephane Boyera, Jean Kabore

Leveraging the Web, mobile phones, community radio and local expertise, W4RA will expand the collection and sharing of knowledge on how to grow trees and crops in the desert using local ideas and tools.  A handful of innovative farmers possess this knowledge now.  The Web Foundation train local experts to spread this knowledge to thousands of farmers across the Sahel and beyond. Farmers, families,  communities and the environment will benefit.

Photo by Anna Bon

Stephane Boyera, George Sadowsky and I will be meeting with our new W4RA partners (VU University, Africa Regreening Initiative)  in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso to make field visits, gather with technology and agriculture experts, and then refine the project plan.  The problem to be solved begins with the fact that a very, very small minority of ingenious, typically uneducated, farmers in the African Sahel have figured out how to grow plants and trees in near-desert conditions.  They use little more than the materials they have at hand to do so (hoe, rocks, manure and sprigs of native vegetation, natural rainfall, etc.). Yacouba Sawadogo is one such genius, with whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet.  You’ll enjoy viewing the trailer for a great documentary that 1080 Films is completing on Yacouba, titled: The Man Who Stopped the Desert.

The W4RA project aims to train local developers to build Web- and mobile-based platforms, so that they can help to accelerate significantly the rate at which hundreds of thousands of farmers and others in the agricultural ecosystem are able to leverage the knowledge of people like Yacouba.  Additional information related to harvesting, utilizing, selling crops could also be of value.  Sharing of such knowledge is very slow now — largely via word of mouth.

This project has a chance to test key aspects of the Web Foundation’s philosophy:

• Creating locally-generated, valuable content, rather than imposing external knowledge and solutions,
• Using the Web to accelerate and scale-up the reach of valuable services to help people who  need it,
• Testing concepts for voice and mobile Web interfaces to resources across the real Web,
• Training  local experts to develop Web systems, rather than providing systems developed from the outside.

Steph and I will provide reports from the trip, and from the project as it gets underway.  Stay tuned.

Many wonderful Web services have been leveraged to address the Haiti disaster. I’ve listed some below which are having a measurable impact (please add more!). What is clear is that the Web is becoming an incredibly powerful tool to help minimize the suffering that results from situations like this. Flickr, YouTube, CNN’s iReport, and Twitter give a voice to those on the ground and in turn help to raise global awareness. Ushahidi , Sahana, and Openstreetmap use crowd-sourced contributions to aggregate and disseminate real-time information to organizations involved in relief efforts. This data can be matched with updated aerial views from GeoEye on Google Earth to provide up-to-date visual intelligence. Red Cross, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and many others use their websites to mobilize global giving and volunteerism. A vast network of blogs, online media channels, and high-traffic websites (like Craigslist, Huffington Post, Global Giving and Facebook’s Disaster Relief page) connect people to relevant resources. Google Groups/Docs, Skype, and wikis are adopted as turnkey solutions that facilitate broad, real-time collaboration and organization among relief groups large and small. Google People Finder and Family News Network of the ICRC help loved ones reunite or report missing persons. All of this translates to a much broader, more integrated, and less redundant response that more effectively matches support to the needs of the victims.

As Gordon Brown said in a recent TED talk, “I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.”

Although there is a great deal being done through the Web, there is so much more value that could be derived from it if we continue to work on several fronts:

1. Governments must work to put all public data available on the open Web, and in machine-readable formats. This is starting to happen in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere. The benefit will be that organizations involved in relief efforts will be able to access detailed information about the area’s existing infrastructure and demographics before having to respond, and to share and merge data from the many diverse organizations involved during a response to a disaster;

2. Tools like VoiceXML must be developed further and adopted, so that Web services become usable by the billions who have access to simple mobile phones but are unable to use the Web because of barriers like illiteracy; and,

3. NGOs and governments must come together with the technical community to learn about the available Web tools, and to agree on standards such as is happening at the W3C Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group

Taking these steps will not stop these kinds of disasters from occurring, but they could greatly improve humanity’s ability to prepare for and respond to them and therefore minimize the amount of suffering.

I invite readers to cite other Websites and tools not mentioned in this article, share stories about how you have seen the Web having an impact in the relief effort going on in Haiti, and what else you feel could be accomplished with the Web in responding to future disasters.

Please also consider donating to the charities active in Haiti if you haven’t already.

I’m starting to investigate the business side of ICT4D projects. Identifying the business model is (or should be!) obviously a critical dimension for most ICT4D projects. Indeed, that’s the study of how to make services at least self-sustainable, or to provide revenue to the provider.

Identifying the cost is the easier part. There are different kinds of costs.  Globally you can split them in two major categories, related to the development, deployment and bootstrapping costs, and to the operation of the services. IMHO, it is also relatively easy to find donors funds and grants to cover the development/bootstrapping costs, as far as the proposal identifies the operation costs, and provide a model to cover them. Evaluating these costs is not the issue and there are some hints in the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development roadmap, but how to cover them is the right question. There are two sides to consider, the business side, and the technological side, which is the implementation of the business side through the technology used in the project.

Concerning the business side, i believe we can split the investigation in two parts:

• Commercial Models
• Non-commercial Models

Commercial Models

What I call a commercial model is a model which has the goal to get money, directly and indirectly, out of the service operation. Direct models are those where users pay for the service directly. Indirect models are those where the money comes from a third party (not the users).

Concerning the direct model case, the tricky questions are to know first if people are willing to pay for the service. Does the service, in essence, provide a real, valuable impact to people so that they are willing to pay for it? Then how much does the service help them or save in terms of time/money? Identifying the net gain, and thus defining the right price, related also to the disposable income is critical.

Concerning the indirect model case, there are different options. The most common one is advertisement. They are all kinds of possible options for ads, in all technologies: ring back tones, SMS banners, Web banners, etc. But who is paying for these ads? How? Is there  risk of collusion between the ads and the service itself? Is there an example of someone successfully or unsuccessfully implementing such a model in an ICT4D project? There are options other than ads such as using the customers’ network to make surveys, or to sell information about e.g. customers interests and search terms and so on. Here again, for me, this is more intellectual discussions than concrete examples.

Non-Commercial Models

What I call a non-commercial model is a model where the integration of an ICT service has the objective to increase the efficiency or the coverage of a particular non-ICT activity, typically the provision of a public service such as agriculture extension or education. In such case, the principle is to demonstrate how the operational costs can produce more efficient services based on similar costs already existing. These non-commercial models are the ones that have to be considered when developing pilots which aims is to be adopted by public authorities, and which goal is to deliver public services. How to measure efficiency of a particular service, how to measure the impact per $ invested in two different cases are not easy questions.

User Costs and technical implementations

In all cases, it is critical to take also into account the costs induced at the user level. Typically, the cost of sending SMS, or placing a phone call, or using data services. In case of non-commercial models, where the aim is to provide public services, there are technical solutions to cover these costs for some technologies (a free phone number, call-back…) and some regulatory solutions too.

On another side, it is also critical to understand how the technological choices impact the relevance of the different business models. In direct commercial models, it should be transparent, or at least very easy for the user to pay for the service. In indirect models, it should also be easy for entrepreneurs to get the money back, without too much hurdles, and requirements for advanced business deals with big companies (like e.g. mobile operator).

Here again, these aspects (user costs, technical implementations) are partly covered in the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development roadmap.

To summarize, I’m realizing these days that while this is topic that is discussed in all the conferences and discussions I’m participating in, I cannot find valuable literature references, or project examples that could help me compiling a list of options with cases to illustrate them. In this post, i tried to develop a skeleton of a resource that could be helpful, lots of questions, and ideas, but no real meat, no methodology or examples. It is for now an empty skeleton, and it is at a level where all the discussions are happening today IMHO. What’s needed is illustration, cases, studies. I’m sure some of you have done studies in this scope, or are running projects in which you considered this question. I would be happy to get feedback, either publicly here, or privately (boyera[at]webfoundation.org), and start developing this work from field experience.

Steph

I believe that there are different angles under which to consider this question.
The easiest one is the concept of ‘bridging the digital divide’. I already developed a bit my view in a previous post “Connectivity == social and economic Development ?” . It is pretty obvious to me that just providing an Internet-connected computer to someone in a rural village might not have a direct positive effect: without addressing the barriers (textual illiteracy, digital illiteracy, languages, etc.), the Web, despite its trillions of resources, has been largely developed so far by westerners for westerners. Locally relevant information and services in Africa, in South-East Asia or in Latin America are largely non-existent. Locally-relevant information is best able to help people, more than Baywatch. In my little experience in this domain, I have the impression that major development agencies have finally shifted their focus and are now looking at services and content more than bridging the digital divide.

The second interesting question in this article is the debate concerning mobile vs. TV vs. radio vs. the Web. We have to refine what the Web is first. We tried to explain that in our ‘Why the Web’ section. It is important to make a distinction between the Web as a global space of linked information, and ‘browsing the Web’, which is using a browser to access information on the Web.
In the above-mentioned article, people are considering ‘browsing the Web’, and more specifically ‘browsing the Web from a computer’. On that topic, I’m convinced that it will take decades, if at all, before Web browsing on a computer will have an impact on development.

On another hand, the potential of the Web as a source of linked information is huge, especially if the Web of linked information can leverage mobile, TV, radio etc. Let’s start with mobile. I have a hard time understanding how we could oppose mobile and the Web. A mobile phone is an incredible device, with an incredible number of options to offer services and information to its owner: SMS, mobile browsing, USSD, voice services etc. One might consider that this is different world, different silos. In my view, it is potentially different channels to interact with Web content. Each of these technologies is far more powerful when coupled to the Web. Few examples from different domains:

• Twitter: the simplicity of SMS and the reach of the Web
• bulk SMS services: an way to develop and deploy SMS and SMS services through the Web at an affordable costs
• Ushahidi: using the Web and mobile for crowdsourced event monitoring

There are many examples that demonstrates how the integration on the Web enhances the capabilities of the original technology. It is the same for voice services (see the post I wrote on VoiceXML and voice for development)

In general, I think that TV, Radio, Mobile are useful to people, and are able to improve their lives, and to help them in their development if these media are able to deliver locally relevant information. This obviously explains for instance the development of community radio, and, to a smaller extend, community TV. However, it is a challenge to gather, and make available these information and services. This is where the Web has a pivotal role to play:

• It is a huge source of existing information
• It is a way to connect people, e.g. those with needs with those with expertise
• It is a technology that makes it easy and cheap for anyone to author and deploy content and services

In summary, I’m not sure this debate on which media rules is really useful. I’m sure there is agreement on the fact that information has the power to improve people lives in rural areas and in underprivileged communities. What is good is what’s available and accessible to people today (e.g. SMS might be available but not accessible for illiterate people). Sometimes it is radio, sometimes it is TV, sometimes SMS, sometimes Voice services, sometimes mobile Web browsing, sometimes a mix of few channels. The point is to empower those who have information, or who understand what would be useful for their family/community/district/country for them to be able to author and deploy content services on the most appropriate channel(s).

I think here again the power and the simplicity of the Web, its ability to enable people to become authors is obvious. One of our major focuses at the Web Foundation is now to make it easier for people to couple the power of the Web and the different delivery channels (more specifically in our programs: mobile, voice, radio). Make it easier means, making people:

• Being aware of the opportunity
• Having the expertise
• Using simple tools
• Witnessing shining examples that demonstrate the power of mixing the Web with traditional media

Steph