Summary
- Project: Empowering Youth in the Inner Cities
- Summary: Teach youth in the most economically-challenged neighborhoods of major cities to develop Web applications, with focus on browser and voice applications on desktop and mobile platforms
- Partners: Web Foundation, Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI)
- Status: The Web Foundation and CDI founder Rodrigo Baggio are developing a proposal for a pilot program as described below. It is hoped that development of the pilot could start in 2010.
- Funding: The Web Foundation and CDI are starting talks with prospective supporters.
The Story
Challenge/Opportunity:
Only a quarter of the world today is able to use the Web, and benefits from its power. Among the three quarters of the population on the outside, a vast majority of people are living with only few dollars a day, are fighting daily for their basic needs, and haven’t access to life-critical services.
For those people, the Web could be a way to improve their future, and their lives. It is critical to enable young people — the future generations — living in the most deprived communities to have access to this digital opportunity, and to use the power of the Web to enrich their lives and communities. CDI understands this situation first-hand, through their network of close to 800 community centers throughout Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and expanding to other countries.
Expected Outcomes
- Empowering youth through training on development of content and services on the Web, using desktop computers and mobiles devices
- Through youth who continue Web development, increasing the number of services, the usage and benefits of the Web for those populations that could benefit from it significantly
The Web Foundation Efforts:
The Foundation will work with local domain experts and information technologists to:
- Make preliminary studies on existing tools and materials for authoring Web content for Mobile phones, and their relevance in the Bottom-of-the-pyramid context (infrastructure, handsets, …)
- Investigate tools and materials to generate Web content in different languages of the world, particularly in Arabic, which is the spoken language in one of the targeted regions of the project
- Develop training material on Web and mobile Web technologies
- Define and execute monitoring and assessment plan
Proposed Project Phases:
1. Study
- identifying tools for mobile web browsing and authoring
- exploring languages issue: Arabic content
- evaluating infrastructure and handset in targeted countries/communities
2. Pilot
- developing training content on mobile technologies+localization (Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, English, other)
- training trainers
- delivering courses in 5 pilot centers (Latin America, Middle East, one developed country inner-city), integrating feedback on content, tools,…
- assessing impact
3. Replication
- disseminating training content and how to use it
- creating community of trainers
