The exhibition features children’s toys from different regions. From the description on the Leopold museum official page
In this exhibition, the Leopold Museum will be showing over 250 items from the one-of-a-kind toy collection of Austrian ethnologist Dr. Fritz Trupp. The items come from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and they were created from everyday materials by children for their own use.
One thing particularly interesting is how skilled the children get in creating their toys. Often they are made from scrap material which the children just find on the streets - or they even search these materials on waste-yards.
Several of the objects reminded me innovation of the Afrigadget kind of innovations. The picture below shows movie projectors which actually work - with a candle or flash light.
Another interesting aspect is what actually moves and inspired the children to create their toys. The picture below is pretty sad - children building toy weapons, helicopters or chainsaws.
Today was the final day of Development Marketplace 2009, a competitive grant program hosted by the World Bank and supported by them and several other partners.
There were 100 finalists projects with “ideas to save the planet” surrounding the topic climate adaptaion. On the last four days these finalists were competing for 26 grants of up to $ 200 000 to realize their project.
A very striking feature of all the projects was that the solutions offered were brought forward by local people. A lot of projects fostered indigenous, ancestral knowledge to prepare for climate adaptation. As Ed Canton from MIT stated in his interview - many projects are not high tech, but appropriate to the local circumstances.
Some projects also used ICT to achieve their goal. In the following the three winning projects using ICTs are presented:
- Strengthening Disaster Preparedness of Southern Leyte with SMS Technology, Philippines
- African Pastoralists to Play Out Climate Drama on the Airwaves, Nigeria
- Women and Youth Use Reality-Show Format to Tell of Climate Options, India
The organizers of the event put a very strong emphasis to promote the event via web 2.0 and created possibilities for the project teams to take and upload videos, pictures and to stay connected via socialnetworks. There was also a live webcast several hours every day with interviews of participants and experts on climate change.
There was also broadcasted one panel discussion on Thursday which was really interesting to see. Former winners of Development Marketplace competitions described their projects and focused on the aspect of “scaling up” a solution. In the following discussion the participants suggested a different kind of support from donors, which would encourage more people to come up and get started with their ideas - a bigger number of grants with less money, but therefore more training, capacity building and networking.
Other interesting statements in the course of the event included:
Valeria D’Costa - Program Manager infoDev: the rate of access to ICT is growing, but the content doesn’t grow fast enough - infoDev will try to tackle that
Wayan Vota - Inveneo: ICTs are not expensive, people make conscious decisions to use these tools because they are valuable to them
Valeria Merino - Vice President, Ashoka: marketing & dissemination is a central element of scaling up - selling the idea to others
Marianne Fay - Chief Economist, SDN: to be effective, innovation has to tap local knowledge - that’s a big challenge for projects
Mara Bun - Green Cross: we are already globally adapting to climate change, we just have to find these ways and promote them
All in all Development Marketplace was a great opportunity to get a peek on what future strategies to adapt for climate change may look like.
quite a lot has happened - Africa Gathering helped a lot
New partners: Bloomsbury Colleges, London International Development Center (LIDC), African partners - very important as reality check, Novoda - commercial partner, Vetaid - NGO in the field providing a different viewpoint, Google.org, SACIDS, Vodafone
Research funding, government funding (JISC)
Project overview
livestock development - NGOs replacing government services for livestock - rise of community animal helath workers, but they are isolated
mobile possibilities, e.g. an Android platform we are working on now
pilot study in Zanzibar
Undergraduate research team
RVC team of currently 9 students
project on East Coast Fever
Use of phones
collecting data with Google Open Data Kit - collecting many paramaters
recording locations
communication
updating team blog
Advantages of phones
quick upload
XML formatted
paperless
keep in contact
input from world experts
also several technical constraints
Pros vs. Cons
great advantages
but phones are not affordable - financial support?
What do the local vets want?
educational tool & learning resource
record production data
management tool
ruggedness
Mobile opportunities
usage is widespread in Africa already
affordable handsets and tariffs
sample projects: Google.org & Uganda health care
Perspectives on Learning - Where next?
Challenge - how to use mobile phones to support learning?
Can learning be a more engaging process than traditionally?
How to design learning experiences around the mobile device
Why is this important?
user generated content is more accepted - “caring and sharing”
students sharing content
emphasis on mobile learning + Web 2.0
What about an African context?
a lot of things emerging - mobile phone coverage, data collection tools, sms sending tools
mobile is the dominant technology for learning
next project: use mobile devices to produce content locally
Q & A:
If you help animals you help people too - do people understand that message?
There’s an international movement now to see the whole ecosystem - animal and human health - as one
Who are the kind of people you would like to get in touch with here?
People get involved in different ways, just get in touch with us and we’ll find out
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Mira Slavova - MMD4D - Mobile Market Applications in Africa
Interested in markets
What would a visitor from Mars see in social structures on earth?
In the west - interconnected communities and companies
In Africa, a lot of enclosed societies, not interconnected
More and more penetration in Africa due to the business models
Former child soldier in Sudan - “forced to be a war child”
Puts his fight into the music
It’s hard telling the story but somebody has to do it - for the people who have no voice
The different ethnies and religions are no problem, the oild and the fertile land is a problem - everybody wants it
NGOs right now are only buying time, the aid has to change to fix Sudan again
empower the young people
more education
Telling his story - how he was cast away from home, recruited, trained for being a child soldier in a refugee camp, and the long and painful journey of his escape
Right now - trying to raise money for a school in his village to give the young people a chance
Notes from the Africa Gathering London - “sharing ideas about positive change” - an event about business, IT, social causes and Africa.
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Ed Scotcher - Introduction
Africa Gathering is already in place almost a year and has grown into this event - giving space for people to present their projects which might not be that big, but still innovative and important
The money which is made is going to a prize for a project which is presented
Mariéme Jamme
We are the leading platform in London today to share ideas about Africa and innovation
Africa is a great continent, a lot of things happen there, we are here to find out how to improve our continent
The oneVillageFoundation is an international foundation aiming at promoting the use of
“Information Communication Technology (ICT) to address World Urgent Issues, by providing a platform for an integrated approach to sustainable development” [from the oneVilageFoundation homepage]
It was founded in the US and currently operates also in Ghana, Nigeria and Taiwan.
Recently me and ICT4D.at fellow Worlali Senyo went to Winneba, Ghana, to meet the people behind oneVillageFoundation Ghana and to look at their projects.
Winneba is the main base of the oneVillageFoundation in Ghana, they have a building with offices and computer rooms there. Jacob Odame and Kafui Prebbie welcomed us and gave a short presentation of the projects which oneVillageFoundation is currently supporting, and the objectives of oneVillageFoundation Ghana in general.
In Winneba the foundation provides computer classes, an internet cafe, acts as local partner for appropriate technology company Inveneo and has a NComputing sample solution set up. The latter two help a lot in their efforts to give consulting for other organizations who want to introduce ICT solutions.
The computer room is built with the already mentioned NComputing device, a tiny and almost no energy consuming device which allows to split up the computing power of one PC to up to four workplaces - with monitor, mouse and keyboard each. This basically allows everyone to open up an internet cafe or easily equip a computer room with low equipment and energy costs. Due to the low power consumption it’s also possible to easily implement a backup power source as well as to minimize the cooling efforts - things which are of critical importance in a country like Ghana.
Another way the organization serves the surrounding communities is by sharing their internet conection with them. This is done with the German software Freifunk which allows to easily create large mesh networks by utilizing antennas and commonly available routers. This way only one participant of the network has to offer the conncetion to the intenet to make everybody profit. The same works in some cities in Austria with the initiative Funkfeuer.
oneVillageFoundation Ghana is also part of several international projects, such as the Wireless Africa initiative aiming at promoting Community Owned Information Networks or the EU-initiated Digital World Forum focusing on the use of ICT to leverage economic development in Africa and Latin America.
After a short walk through oneVillageFoundation’s facilities we had a discussion on how to get cheap internet to as many people as possible in Ghana - also mentioning several former UNDP efforts, the recent foundation of the Ghana Network Operators Group (ghNOG) which is a “forum for the exchange of technical information to ensure stability of the Internet Services in Ghana” and the Ghana Connect initiative.
It was inspiring to see the innovative and highly appropriate installations oneVillageFoundation implemented. Also I am curious if their solutions will spread over Ghana in the future, increasing internet access by simple means. Thumbs up for Kafui, Jacob and their co-workers who do a good job serving a lot of people.
It was already the 7th workshop we covered on our blog, Twitter and social media since we started our partnership with eTG, and the topic was especially interesting for us - considering the unique role of mobile phones in developing countries nowadays.
The workshop was split in six parts, each having as leitmotif a certain sector where mobile services are used.
The speakers came from various sectors - the World Bank, private and public sector, the academia and practicioners in the field.
Many of them claimed what I also already heard in several other conferences - the technology is there, now we have to focus on applications and business models. Although several successful projects were presented, there were general complaints that often such projects don’t bypass the “pilot” stage and don’t achieve sustainability. The topic of scaling projects to reach more audience and higher impact was also mentioned several times. More evaluation on impact and sharing information on failures of projects was identified as two ways to overcome this problem. Also the concept of private-public partnerships and searching strong, committed partners for implementing mobile solutions was put forward once more.
More detailed information can be found in the blog posts linked above and on Twitter. Under the hashtag #mobile09 the lively online discussion surrounding the event can be followed - several contributors gave this event quite a drive. The comments there had a more critical viewpoint on mobile phones as the big solution for all problems.
What was interesting for me personally was that obviously there is no real large scale project out there which is profitable so far. M-Pesa is the only one which scratches the border but also has trouble creating revenue. Impressive non-profit examples where projects which used mobile phones for delivering services to the poor and as enhancements in education.
So all in all the event gave a feeling that there is potential for more to come in the mobile sector and several great examples were given - but the “killer application” is obviously still to come, or maybe there’s even no need for it, because it’s so easy to set up an own, localized application.
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Oliver Marlow - The Hub, Tilt
