Hi, I hadn't heard of the TerraNet initiative -- very cool. You may also be interested in [url=http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11751167]Da…] in South Africa. Héléne Martin [url=www.applab.org]www.applab.org[/url]

Dr. Jayanta Chatterjee, [quote=Jayanta Chatterjee]What are the latest applications/solutions tried out elsewhere or in other reserach labs for similar projects?[/quote] This sounds somewhat similar to what IBM is working on with [url=http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kuma… World Wide Telecom Web[/url]. Their vision is to have tagging, threads and so on but I'm not sure how much of it has been implemented. We had attempted to look at ICT interventions in agriculture in a systematic way and came up with a tree of sorts to categorize select example projects. Here's a snippet of it linked to the full image if you are interested: [url=http://www.grameenfoundation.applab.org/section/farmer-income-issue-tree] [img]http://www.grameenfoundation.applab.org/uploads/treesnippet.jpg[/img][/…] It only focuses on income generation which definitely paints an incomplete picture but I feel it does gives a good sense of what has been done so far. I believe that the future of ICT for rural regions is figuring out how to scale these exiting examples. I agree with what many of you have said about the private sector. If we can collectively get corporations to pick up on some of these ideas (eChoupal style), things will move very quickly. Héléne Martin [url=www.applab.org]www.applab.org[/url]

Apologies for the double post -- I shouldn't have hit refresh and now can't delete it! I'll take this opportunity to acknowledge that "getting the private sector to pick up on these ideas," as I said, is no trivial matter. As a number of you have noted, profit-driven multinationals are unlikely to be particularly interested in rural communities. That being said, what we've found in working with MTN in Uganda is that they are very receptive to providing resources to experiment with ideas that could expand their market share. The Village Phone replication across Africa really demonstrates this -- telecoms probably wouldn't have ventured in that direction themselves but they have been receptive to business model suggestions and partnerships. Héléne Martin [url=www.applab.org]www.applab.org[/url]

Hi, Christian's suggestion of using mobile phones for evaluation is such a great one! I think tools like [url=http://www.frontlinesms.com/]FrontlineSMS[/url] or eventually [url=http://www.openrosa.org/index.php/javarosa]JavaROSA[/url] will make this fairly easy for projects of all size to engage in. I am wondering whether any of you have turned to organizations specializing in doing assessment such as [url=http://poverty-action.org/]IPA[/url]? Thanks, Héléne Martin [url=www.applab.org]www.applab.org[/url]

Hello, [url=http://www.farmafrica.org.uk/documents/212.PDF]Here[/url] is a very interesting paper on the effect of mobile telephony on animal health services in Kenya. Check out page 23 for outcomes. Héléne Martin www.applab.org

Hi Andy, Your project sounds very interesting indeed. Can you please link us to documents about it? Where are you piloting this? Do you have plans for scaling? Thanks, Héléne Martin [email protected] www.applab.org

Hi, Interesting question about mobile phones becoming a form of rural radio. I think there's definitely potential for similar reach, but I think the content will necessarily be different because of length restrictions on SMSs and because people don't like listening to recordings. I also feel that since mobile phones have the potential to be two-way, it'd be a shame to only use them as a blasting system, much like radio. I definitely don't think they replace radio, but I think they can significantly enhance it by allowing people to contribute to shows and the like. Christian, I agree with you that a lot can be done on "dumb" phones and even more so that a lot of mobile innovation is African. That being said, who knows what will happen once more sophisticated phones with GPS and video capabilities come into the hands of the young man who made the car alarm, right? Héléne Martin [email protected]

Hi, I noticed a post or two mentioning the power of the mobile phone to bring communities together and help them organize either into cooperatives or other kinds of groups. Are you aware of projects specifically aiming to do this? One project I find rather unique and very interesting in its application to cooperatives is [url=http://www.digitalicslatino.org/]DigitalICS[/url] developed by Yael Schwartzman and Tapan Parikh (Berkeley). It's a mobile phone based data gathering system that bring efficiency to the quality requirement enforcing and organic certification process. What do people think about this? Would it work well in the areas you are familiar with? They estimate that the co-op they have been working with will be making savings of over $4000 a year. Héléne Martin [email protected] [url=www.applab.org]www.applab.org[/url]

Hi Josh, I'm sorry to say that I don't actually know about the current status of DrumNet. But I CCed you on an e-mail to them and will report to the forum if anything useful comes up. =) Robert, Thanks so much for pointing me to Infotrade. It seems like a very promising project. Héléne Martin [email protected]

Hello, This is such an important question. I'm aware of a lot of anecdotal evidence or hand-wavy arguments, but maybe we could use this question to try to collect resources providing strong evidence and rigorous analysis of the social and economic benefits of mobile phones for rural areas. I think Jenny Aker's paper [url=http://are.berkeley.edu/~aker/cell.pdf]"Does Digital Provide or Divide? The Impact of Cell Phones on Grain Markets in Niger"[/url] is a great example of this and would like to see more like it. Héléne Martin [email protected]