Rural folk to tap e-medicine
Rural health care providers may soon get diagnostic solutions from the Internet for patients whose situations prove complex to treat. This is expected to be achieved through the tele- medicine techno...

New wireless service comes to Tanzania
In three months Tanzania will be braced with one of the world's fastest, cheapest and most reliable communication technologies. This comes after the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA...

Celtel and the World Bank seal deal in Uganda
MOBILE Telecommunications Company (MTC), the parent company of Celtel International- and IFC - the private sector arm of the World Bank Group- have completed the signing of a loan deal worth $320 mil...

Bottom of pyramid mobile access : Mobile Opportunities
Imagine that you have just lost your job. Suddenly, there is no cash coming in and things are going to be difficult for a while. What will you have to do differently to make ends meet until you can f...

Grameen Foundation unveils new online center to help expand benefits of telecommunications for world's poorest communities
Grameen Foundation recently announced a new online assistance center to help microfinance institutions (MFIs) bring the benefits of telecommunications to poor communities around the world. The Villa...

Quick guide to open educational resources: New Briefing Sheet from infoDev
Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses re-mix, improve and redistribute.

Meet the XO, the One LapTop per Child computer
One Laptop Per Child's XO (commonly referred to as the $100 laptop) is designed to change the world by bringing computing resources to children in the developing world. But the many innovations in th...

$100,000 Commonwealth funding for ICT project in Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago will benefit from a Commonwealth Connects programme to fund a computer refurbishment project that will benefit schools and communities, particularly those in need.

Uganda: All 79 districts to be online by 2010
In a period of three years all Uganda's seventy nine districts of will be online by the year 2010, according to the information and communication technologies minister Dr. Ham Mulira. This follows th...

Options for Terrestrial Connectivity in Sub-Saharan Africa
This report, commissioned by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida), makes an inventory of existing transmission backbones in Sub- Saharan Africa, and discusses issues related to solution...

ICT Update on podcasting: A new way to reach rural communities
Podcasting has been around since 2004 but it is still very much at the experimental stage when it comes to applying it to development efforts. In this issue we highlight some early initiatives from o...

ICTs in teaching in Latin America and the Caribbean
In most cases the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies in education institutions only means giving access to students without any real change in the education programmes.

Microsoft accelerates free access to journals
Information technology company Microsoft will give technical assistance to enhance access to online research for scientists, policymakers and librarians in the developing world. This was announced at...

Ethiopia's high speed hospitals
A pilot for a scheme which will eventually be rolled out all over Africa, set up by Indian technicians and paid for by Indian aid. A diagnosis made real time in two hospitals.

A rich menu for the poor: Food for thought on effective aid policies
In June 2007, the Effectiveness and Quality Department (DEK) published a collection of essays entitled 'A rich menu for the poor - food for thought on effective aid policies'. Each of the thirteen es...

The Least Developed Countries Report 2007: Knowledge, technological learning and innovation for development
The least developed countries (LDCs) are a group of countries (presently 50 States) that have been officially identified by the United Nations as "least developed" in the light of their low income, w...

'$100 laptop' production begins
Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so- called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the...