Helge Fahrnberger is not just a well-known Austrian blogger, he is also involved in Laafi - an initiative dedicated to financing and supporting health-related projects in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world.

He is inviting to this year’s Laafi-Fest - an African summer party at the area of the University for Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

It’s this Saturday (20 September, 16:00) so if you’re somewhere around, just drop by - the fotos of the last years look like it’s fun. And it’s for a good cause of course - the profit will be used for Laafi.

Just recently I saw a TED-Talk on self-organized children learning by  Sugata Mitra which impressed me deeply.

He talks about his “Hole in the wall” experiment where he tested the skills of children in India to teach themselves without supervision by adults. He put a computer and a keyboard in a slum area and just waited what will happen.

The outcomes were amazing, as these children tought each other English and basic computer skills within few day. Just because they were interested in this new device, they figured out quickly how to use it. As they needed English for surfing the internet, they just learned it

I would have never expected that and I’m sure if you see it you’ll be suprised of the incredible abilities of children as well. He repeated the experiment several times in various parts of India and had similar results, so it was not just coincidence.

Check it out

Florian was reporting about Google before and there is more and more to report about Google and Africa. I am especially interested in this move because I daily work with Google Web Toolkit and Google App Engine. I hope this projects will also move into LDCs soon.

Google is providing the 26th country home page in Sub-Saharan Africa: Mozambique

As part of our ongoing commitment to Africa, we look forward to enabling more people to access the internet in their local language, and have better access to local content. [Says Divon Lan here]

This is a series which should provide an idea of ICT usage in lesser developed countries (LDCs). The pictures are from the FlickR group Images FOR Africa.

This one was taken by Federica Olivieri in Zimbabwe in 2006.

Just a quick point to the blog post “Web2fordev one year after - a critical review” on crisscrossed.net.

Christian Kreutz of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ- German Technical Cooperation) writes about the lacking impact of new technologies on development work.

But if I look back at what has happened in the development field during the last year, I have to say that frankly I am quite disappointed about how little has been happening. I expected the disruptive potential to be more exploited. [from here]

ICT4D is not a magic bullet after all. It still requires a lot of work, like convincing the people to use it where it makes sense.

Make sure you read the comments, too.

When browsing through ICT4D news today I several times came across Google investments or projects so I thought I’ll present some of those in short. Hat tip to PSDBlog for pointing.

• O3b - Other 3 Billion

Google partners with HSBC Bank and the Liberty Global cable company in this project, trying to provide internet access for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the whole world with a network of satellites.

From their homepage:

At O3b Networks, our mission is to make the Internet accessible and affordable to everyone on the planet. We will enrich lives and ensure equal and fair access to information through ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity to the world’s content and applications. … The Internet has become the world’s information exchange and everyone should have the opportunity to be participating. [homepage]

Lovely claim and great idea - but there’s also criticism as the founder and CEO already had some bad experiences with trying to bring internet to Africa.

Link to a NY Times about the project article here.

• Putting news paper archives online

From the NY Times again:

Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites, the company said Monday. [snippet from here]

This means that maybe soon the archives of newspapers are searchable on the web for free. This is great in the context of ICT4D, as in lesser developed countries often there exist few facilities to search for information - and free information in the internet is accessible at least for some people. Just referring to the discussion about Open Access.

• Chrome

As widely covered, Google launched their own web browser these days. Now I found an interesting blog post on Herald Tribune, claiming that Chrome is particuarly applicable for internet access in lesser developed countries, due to its focus on the web as the platform.

Think about computer users in the developing world. Many use Internet cafes rather than having computers in their homes, and those cafes typically don’t have the latest machines. Their models run with slower processors and clogged connections on smaller screens. For them, a slimmed-down browser could be a godsend: fewer images to load, less drive space used and the convenience of those Web-based applications. [from here]

As I didn’t read so much about Chrome yet, I wasn’t aware of that, but in generally I support the idea.

Every device which gives the user the possibility to store, process or provide data on another platform than the own slow and unreliable one, is lowering the barrier to access this data.

Through this blog post at Next Billion, a site

about how business drives positive social and environmental change in low-income communities [from here]

I recently found out about the project Kiva.

It’s a social network where everyone can login and basically start start giving microcredits to people all over the world.

The idea of microcredits is a Nobel-Prize winning form of giving credits to the poorest of the poor to enable them to change their living conditions. They are required to have a business plan to get the loan and sometimes they even have to attend business seminars, so that they can start to run a sustainable business.

The interest rate is not very high and through the initial project of Muhammad Yunus helped a lot of people in Bangladesh to free themselves from extreme poverty.

Now there have appeared several institution who give microcredits, but often the capital is missing.

Kiva solves this problem by democratizing the capital giving, allowing everyone to invest in a new business. It is possible to view the profiles of the entrepreneurs in lesser developed countries over the Kiva platform and to track their forthcomings.

Here is a link to an interview with the founder of Kiva - Premal Shah, he explains the idea very comprehensive. Watching it made me want to contribute to the idea myself.

This one is another article about Kiva in Newsweek. It displays the idea on the example of Dan Zuckerman, who lives in Tajikistan and gives microcredits there. Furthermore it’s about how Wikis make his work easier, connecting him with other people working with Kiva-loans.

Go ICT4D! Go Web 2.0!

Check it out

Snipped from Creative Commons blog:

The most frequently used audio and video formats on the web are not open (they’re software patent encumbered), which has hindered the development of free and open source media tools. Open audio and video formats face a tough chicken and egg problem: not interesting to publishers if not supported in software, and not interesting to software developers if not much published open format audio and video.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/9335

Economist.com is covering a story about how the mobile web will influence social change in developing countries. The story is providing lots of numbers about China and other LDCs. It is also mentioning M-Pesa, which we introduced before here and there. Apparently W3C founded a group which will provide models and standards for such applications.

For the W3C, M-PESA and its ilk are harbingers of far more sophisticated services to come. If mobile banking is possible using a simple system of text messages, imagine what might be possible with full web access. But it will require standards to ensure that services and devices are compatible. [Snip taken from here]

[Image taken from here]

An interesting meeting I regrettably miss right now is the IPID ICT4D Post Gratuate Symposium 2008 at Joensuu University, Finland. It took place yesterday and today (8. & 9.9.) and members of the IPID network (International Network of Post Graduate Students in the area of ICT4D) from all over the world introduce their research questions and what they found out by now.

I am myself a member of the IPID network, I got to know the people of Spidercentre who partly organize it almost two years ago when I did an exchange year in Stockholm. They are closely associated to the University of Stockholm and to SIDA and already ran many interesting projects. They also provide a newsletter covering important facts and dates on ICT4D. Only the events they organized so far, I always missed.

Hopefully I find time for the next meeting, I really want to get to know other people in this field.

Anyway, for this meeting Ismael Peña-López undertakes the task of posting summaries of the participants’ presentations, so I get a nice overview - thanks.