There is often that notion that once you have access to the Internet or to other information and communication technologies (ICT), the whole world of information lies rights at your feet, so you only need to pick the best of it. But in contrary, it can become incredibly time consuming to verify information and to make yourself a trusted source. In the field of ICT4D, this issue is particularly important. In many cases people do not have years of experience working with ICTs and have actually learnt them just the auto-didactic way – using the Internet for their own benefit. Let’s take the case of farmers in rural areas of Africa.

Kenya. Photo: © Curt Carnemark / World Bank

Farmers in developing countries

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a colleague, who has been working already for decades in the rural development and agriculture field around the world. We talked about the potentials for ICT in agriculture and in specific farmers. One of the major challenges is neither access nor literacy, but simply trust. Why should a farmer trust an information coming from somewhere as an SMS? Farmers make careful elaborations, before they change certain practices. Information from a website can help, but at the end of the day what counts is the advice of trusted colleagues. So, we have to realize that information through ICTs often have only a small impact.

ICT and agriculture

In the case of agriculture, behavioural change through extension advice is even more difficult to happen through ICTs. For decades, it has been well known that advise has no effect if simply some guides and brochures are sent to farmers. More effective is a participatory process, where farmers learn from each other directly. So why should farmers change practices they have done for years when they get advice through SMS or any other channel? “It needs a lot more than ICTs,” pointed my colleague.

In contrast, market information particularly through mobile phones is more successful because of the price information, which are much easier to trust than a particular advice for the next cultivation. But even in this case, they had to be introduced in groups of trusted people. Otherwise, who would trust a SMS from anywhere? Would you? There have been cases where rumors spread through SMS have even led to violence.

Demystify the Internet in Rural Africa

Take yourself as an example, how many sources do you really read or how many people do you speak to before you can take the information for granted? ICTs allow for incredibly easy publishing and disseminating of information; but the information is still not worth a penny if it is not trusted. Linda Raftree has a great post, where she describes her experiences during ICT training courses in Ghana.

“Another question that surfaced was ‘Is the internet true?’” This led to a great discussion on how information comes from all sides, and that anyone can actually put information online. It’s truth, and anyone can’t believe everything one reads, it’s not regulated, you need to find a few sources and make some judgment calls.”

Although all this information is not new at all, so many ICT approaches forgot exactly about that challenge. The information has to only be delivered somewhere and that should bring change. The problem is that trust is built slowly through social relations and these take a lot longer to grow online.

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There is a wide variety of information and communication technologies, but even more ways to use them to deliver content. Particularly in constraint environments such as rural areas, a whole range of channels are offered to get information to a person needed. In preparation for next week’s ICT observatory 2009 by CTA, Pete Cranston and I came up with examples of such different channels used in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

They can probably be categorized in a different way and more easily. They should show that if one wants to deliver service models around ICTs, they do not necessarily need to be around mobile phones, as the exchange of video CD of farmers shows (Interview of Louise Clark below), although the latter is oundoubtly the most promising tool. I have followed the tweets from the Mobile Web Africa conference and read these fascinating statistics:

• The recently launched SMS service by Google, Grameen, MTN and BROSDI in Uganda for agriculture and tips received over a million queries in the first few weeks although the service charges premium SMS rates. The service offers answers out of search results from specific databases via SMS.
• Google mobile traffic has increased 5 fold since 2007 in Africa. Google search results on mobile use in Africa are the highest in Nigeria, followed by Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire
• It is estimated that South Africa will have 10.1 million mobile web users by the end of 2009.  The popular mobile social network application MXit has already over 5 million users in South Africa.

So here are some categories to differentiate between all the possible different channels. I am sure there are many missing or overlapping. Please add more in the comments.

Channels

Radio

• Broadcasting
• Community Radio
• Feedback through mobile phone: SMS to radio

Basic mobile phones

• Voice
• Voice to text / Text to voice
• Short Message (SMS)

Mid-range mobile phones

• Mobile phones with additional features such as cameras and data transfers.
• Data Transfer through GPRS
• Mobile Application (e.g. Java software)
• Mobile WAP
• Additional features such as camera or bluetooth

Smart phones

• Sensor Rich Application (All Purpose Tool)
• Location based services through Global position system (GPS)
• Social Network Features
• Mobile Web
• Video and Audio recording and sharing

Direct sharing
Many different informal forms of content shared through different technologies.

• CD, USB or IPod (Video, Audio, Text, Image)
• Mobile (Video, Audio, Text, Image)

Indirect access
For people who do not have direct access to mobile phones, computers or the Internet.

• Infopreneur (Use of intermediary to access information)
• Village phone (rent a mobile phone)
• Village Area Networks (VAN)

Rural access
Specific approaches to offer access in rural and remote areas

• Internet Cafe
• Telecentre
• Rural kiosk
• Local networks through Wifi and WiMax

Back at the last KM4DEV conference, I had the chance to interview Louise Clark, who talks about an interesting alternative way of sharing digital content in Nigeria.

Transcription

Hello, Louise. We’re here at the KM4DEV meeting in Brussels, and you have just brought some very interesting experiences from Africa about local content in rural areas.

Yes. I went last month to Benin and Nigeria to work with the African Rice Center. They have a very interesting project of using videos to share information around rice processing technology. The history to this project is that it started in Bangladesh, so the first of the series of videos were made in Bangladesh and showed technologies of how Bangladeshi families were selecting rice and storing their rice seeds.

These videos were brought to Africa to look at the kind of South/South knowledge exchange, and then some videos were made with African farmers in the African context and we distributed the six videos together. I went to Nigeria with some staff from Africa Rice to look at how farmers were using the videos and what was their experience of video for processing. And their experience was great. The feedback that we got was very, very positive.

Farmers, much to our great surprise, has access to video playing equipment. They were using VCD formats. So the extension service had transferred it from DVD to a VCD format. And the farmers were using the videos as part of their group meetings. So when they would get together in one of the farmer’s houses, they would sit down and watch the video together, which we found to be really an innovation in itself, regardless of the innovations that the videos were promoting in terms of better rice processing techniques.

One of the great surprises was the accessibility of this equipment. There was one group that didn’t have its own VCR player, or VCD player, and had bought a laptop to watch the video. I asked them about what else they used the laptop for, but they said just for the video. And they didn’t think that was a waste of money because they now sell their rice for twice the price as they did before.

So that was a really great experience. Now Africa Rice have just released a new video looking more at Pproduction, soil management, crop management, different techniques, which is now being distributed across Africa.

You also told me that they are shared, in Nigeria in your case, these videos are shared between farmers all over the country.

In the Nigerian case, the farmers, there was a really high demand amongst the farmers for their own copy of the video. And that was one of the issues that we discussed, was how we could get better dissemination of the video, creating linkages with small enterprise in terms of making copies of the video for sale. Because all of the farmers reported that they would buy a copy for themselves and watch it in their homes. So we discussed the advantages and the disadvantages. They said the real advantage was that they could watch the videos over and over again. The disadvantage being that there was no extension agent on hand to ask questions.

So this is an interesting new challenge for us as knowledge management people, in terms of how we can improve the two-way flow of communication using a media like video. So the visual impact and the audio impact combined with farmers was very effective, but how can we use this to really encourage communication from the research institute like Africa Rice to the field and the farmers.

So if I have any more, I’ll keep you posted.

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Despite the exciting potentials about new technologies for development and, particularly, the latest hype on mobile phones, it is necessary not to loose out sight of the incredible challenges towards Internet access or extended mobile usage. I have collected over the past months some interesting facts and figures from a variety of people, which show that ICT is still an incredibly scarce resource and can also have contrary effects leading to more poverty.

Reality Check – Computers and Rural Development

Back at the Web4dev conference in February, Grant Cambridge made a very interesting presentation called: Access to Information. Challenges and Obstacles – a Rural African Perspective. Cambridge describes in his presentation the situation in rural South Africa, where:

• There is virtually no access to computers
• There is limited access to knowledge and information
• A child’s potential to learn is directly proportional to the knowledge of the teacher
• Many people have never even typed their names on a keyboard
• Where the edge of your world is as far as you can walk in a day

He describes that even the much better accessible mobile phone involves multiple challenges, such as “People walking up to 3 miles several times per week to recharge battery.” Cambridge works on a robust single or multi-terminal system for rural areas, and concludes in his presentation that access does not imply inclusion.  Check also the others presentations from the web4dev conference.

In an article for APC, which asks, “Is there still a need for telecentres now that there are mobile phones?” Ian Howard argues by highlighting the huge challenges for access in rural areas and the problems leaving it all up to mobile providers.

“The development of autonomous infrastructure is still required in order to meet the needs of rural communities. These new mobile-phone infrastructures are largely poised as oligopolies, protected from the threat of new entrants by high licensing fees and reserved frequency allotments.”

Ednah Karamagi underlines in her article Web 2.0 in rural areas – myth or practical? That “connectivity in many of the districts is very limited or even non-existent,” and continues, “In fact, most people in these areas [rural areas] don’t even know how to use it [Internet], let alone how it can be applied to improve their livelihoods. Computers are still perceived as white elephants – they are for the literate.”

But the importance and possibilities of ICT has drastically changed with mobile phones as Ben White shows in his research in Uganda, where, for example, a student spends around 40% of his income on mobile phone credit.

Steve Song also makes an observation about the usage of mobile phones in Kenya, from the latest findings of the ResearchICTAfrica initiative:

Recent research from ResearchICTAfrica reveals that Kenyans are spending incredible amounts on mobile communication as a proportion of income. Here’s how it breaks down. The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication. For the bottom 75% of the population, that figure goes up to 63.6%. In terms of total individual income, the average Kenyan spends 16.7% of their income on mobile communication. That figure rises to 26.6% when looking at the bottom 75% of the population. These figures are astounding. It highlights the fact that Africans are paying for mobile communication in spite of how expensive it is, not because of how affordable it is.

Song concluded that it “emphasises how critical access to mobile communication is for people,” but Kathleen Diga shows in her study about Mobile Cell Phones and Poverty Reduction that mobile phone usages can lead also to more poverty and create new divides:

According to the findings, the challenges which rural households face include making sacrifices such as travel expenses and store-bought food budgets in order to pay the costs of mobile phone services.  Findings also show that gender inequality through exacerbated asset control and mobile phone inexperience drive further digital divide in Katote, Uganda.

Crystal Watley, from Voices of Africa, highlighted some more challenges around women and mobile usage on the mobile active mailing list:

Here in Kenya, mobile phones have added great value to the lives of the citizens from the deep villages to the urban centers. But there are a few negative consequences in family relationships. 1) Cell phones make it easier to cheat on your spouse 2) Cell phones GIVE away the secrets of the spouses that were already cheating thus causing household tension and domestic violence. 3) African men tend to be very jealous and often use mobile phones as a way to control their women monitoring every message and call. 4) Violence and jealousy is also caused between those who own phones and those who do not. Or between those with different model phones. Theft is rampant. 5) Kenyans do not understand calling courtesy and can sometimes call at all sorts of hours.

Unfortunately, there are only few studies on the concrete benefit of ICTs and, for example, in the case of mobile phones, the fishery example is often recited, where one can read many pros and cons. However, the mobile phone has an impact, as Watley points out, on the positive and negative.  Another interesting attempt to portray the changes of mobile phones in daily life was done by a new documentary from my friends at ICT4D.at.

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High bandwidth access expands worldwide, finally in Africa too, but in many places the connectivity does not allow for an easy Internet usability, let alone the use of many tools for publishing own content and interacting easily with other users. Aside from many other challenges, one important to remark is the lack of low bandwidth application. This might be one of the reasons of why particular localization of many languages is progressing slowly. More importantly, the need for high bandwidth access for most current websites creates new divides.

Some examples

• Checking up a profile on Facebook or at least access the log in page, which has alone almost 800kb! In a cybercafe, where you have to pay fees per minute, it may take up to 3 minutes with a dial up modem connection.

• Video or audio upload is almost impossible with a low bandwidth connection and can cost you a lot when your tariff is measured in volume instead of time.

• This blog is based on WordPress, which is a great open source tool, but unfortunately not made for a dial up connections. If you want to publish a new post on WordPress (2.7.1), you have to download over 750kb first.

Unfortunately even the free and open source community has little activity around low bandwidth solutions.

Where are the low bandwidth solutions?
One really great initiative is Maneno, which not only tries to provide a low bandwidth blogging solution in Africa, but also focuses on offering multilingual options emphasising on various African languages such as Bamanankan and Swahili, beside French, English, Arabic and Portuguese. I got in contact with Maneno recently and their team ensured me that their system is designed as low as 13 kb without images and 33 kb including images.

Another one is Dgroups, a community platform based on emails. I am currently working on a project for IICD, which has over 50.000 members worldwide. Dgroups has just been newly launched and it now offers the administration of groups solely by email.

Twitter can make a difference as it lets you send and receive messages via mobile phone. But, unfortunately, Twitter gave up its free SMS service a while ago. I asked one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey, at the e-stats conference when the free service is coming back, to which he replied ‘on mid year.’ This leaves the question, ‘what can be said in 140 characters?’ Quite a lot when you look at the Mobile Voices project just featured by the Netsquared N2Y2 challenge.

But one thing is for sure, just because you only have low bandwidth connection, does not mean you want to see dull, text based websites. There are various ways to make websites look appealing and still reduce the data size considerable. Aptivate has excellent Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth.

What is the difference with mobile phones?
Low-bandwidth is a big topic for mobile phones as 3G is not everywhere available; in Africa it is only available in big cities.  In many cases all information exchange is limited to SMS exchange solutions. There are  different solutions that need to deal with the heavy loaded web. One such is the Opera mini browser, which  tries to compress data as much as possible, compressing up to 90% according to a presentation at the W3C Maputo meeting.

UPDATE

There was an interesting discussion on the KM4DEV mailing list and here is a summary of key points.

UPDATE 2

Jonathan Goshier has a great and critical blog post around this topic and emphasis the importance of local services: Web 2.0 Services Shutting Out Developing Countries

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As an outcome from the virtual forum on mobile phones by FAO – where I experienced a great exchange with mobile phone practitioners worldwide – I was interviewed by the e-agriculture.org forum. During the interview, I tried to summarize my observations and discussions around mobile  phones for development from the recent months. I have published the interview below:

Describe to us the programme on ICTs, especially the use of mobile phones for rural development, which you are working for. Why do you find mobile phones to be particularly interesting in your line of work?
C.K.: I worked for a project on “knowledge systems in rural areas” for GTZ. I look at the topic from different angles such as knowledge sharing, networking and social change and try to identify new potentials. I don’t glance at mobile phones from an economical point of view only, but consider them as means for different areas in social development. For example activists around human rights are the most innovative users of mobile telephone technology for their causes. The interesting thing about mobile phones is that they are so different from all the other ICTs. First of all this all-purpose tool is in the ownership by a majority of Africans across the continent and its users have created creative extra usages for mobile phones. Second it is a different approach compared to conventional ICT4D projects, which relied often on huge funding and did not focus enough on the users’ perspective. But Mobiles are available for low costs and already are adapted for many purposes.

What positive impacts could you achieve for agriculture, food security and/or rural development? How, in your opinion, can we empower local farmers to really benefit from this application?
C.K.: Mobile phones are such a powerful tool because they fill a gap of prior limited means of communication. We have just started to use the various potential of mobile phones. At first, mobile phones have particularly connected rural with urban areas. Nowadays we witness new forms of information delivery and exchange particular with rural areas for agriculture or health, never before possible like that. There are great examples in Africa of local adapted mobile software solutions (e.g. EPROM) orientated on community needs and dealing with technical constraints. Promising is also the formation of own language spaces and innovative voice recognition solutions to address the illiteracy challenge.

Did it also cause a change in working or living habits or even of the whole culture for the locals? Could you give examples, please?
C.K.: Mobile phones are a communication break through. The interesting question is: What will people make out of it? There are already fascinating examples, how mobile phone users invent on forms to use it particular for business. But the impact of mobile phone usage is not analyzed well enough so far. Studies only focus on some areas such as the famous fishery example. Although it is obvious that the mobile phone has changed a lot in societies, therefore an analysis of local adaptation in different cultural contexts is necessary. Apart from all the possible characteristics of mobile phones for rural development they are still strongest with ordinary communication. Like in Europe in the beginning of integrating mobiles into the everyday life, people want to call their family and friends to talk to them in the first run. Very promising are social mobile applications, which will be very interesting in the next future. What happens if you can deliver information to each mobile phone, but also let users interact in networks or with the web. There are fascinating examples such as Ushahidi or the Freedom Fone. But also money transfers via mobiles are revolutionary. In countries where less than 10% of the people have bank accounts using air time as a way of paying and transferring money has a huge impact on society.

What are the challenges you are facing in your projects? Technically, socially, economically, …
C.K.: Everybody is so enthusiastic about mobile phones for development and, of course, I am too, but you also have to be a little bit critical. There is quite a hype around mobile phones. There is a lot of experimentation happening and too little exchange of experiences. The technology itself can’t solve problems. Mobile phones are only the means that you can use to improve rural peoples livelihoods through the best fit for each situation. I do believe that there is also the danger of forgetting some important lessons learnt from many ICT4D projects, which failed for a lot of reasons. One was the lack of sustainability, and another, that mobile phones can only be a mean to an end. And of course, there are many challenges that the use of mobile phone faces: high costs, illiteracy and in many cases, mobile phones projects still have to prove the benefit for users. There are for example problems concerning gender. In some countries women have difficulties to get access to mobile phones or can’t communicate independently. Also the tremendous costs have an impact on the people. Some substitute a whole meal for mobile phone credit. In study in Africa some mobile phone users became even poorer.

What are your predictions for the future?
C.K.: We have only started to tap upon the potential of this all-purpose tool. It will be interesting to see the role of development organization. There are potentials to use it in different approaches in development projects, but also to improve their own work. The open source water and sanitation initiative lets mobile African reporters evaluate their projects. It is obvious that access to the Internet will happen in Africa in the future mainly through mobile phones. But it will be a challenge to deal with the constraints of little mobile phone screen. Nevertheless the ubiquitous connection through mobile phones has many advantages and particular in rural areas offer a linkage with urban areas not possible before. It will be interesting to analyze these implications. Rural areas suddenly have new instruments to broadcast from or analyze their environment. The mobile phone can be already a sensor rich tool with GPS, to measure the velocity or to analyze blood and detect diseases. It will empower mobile phone users to embrace it for all kind daily needed purposes and for social change. The mobile becomes a research tool to give its user the capacity to collect and share information. Open information repositories can be created for development work. One outcome is increasing transparency. Mobile phones can be the key for collectively contributing to new information systems and receiving all sorts of information. The future for mobile phones will be in this kind of data exchange or network exchange to empower people with knowledge, like Nokia’s weather updates in local languages. Surely, some form of data exchange has to work for that, which still inhibits several challenges. But this form of information exchange and networking will happen – whatever technology is behind it. Tools for information exchange solely relying on SMS prove this is possible for all phones.

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I had the honour to be the editor of a new cover publication by the Deutsche Gesellschaft for Technische Zusammenarbeit (German Technical Cooperation). This is one of many pieces the sector project “Knowledge System in Rural Areas” has published in recent years, which I can highly recommend. One is a bulletin on knowledge management in developing institutions and projects. With the recent publication we tried to summarize latest developments and what has happened since the web2fordev conference. We tried to get very different perspectives on the topic and I am glad we could win great authors. Once again thank you for your contributions!

Web 2.0 solutions offer people in rural areas a platform for networking and knowledge exchange. This brochure provides a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It serves as a practice-oriented introduction to the theme and discusses both the potentials and the possible limits to the participatory web.

Download publication

Table of Content

• Participatory Web – New Potentials for ICT in Rural Areas (Annemarie Matthess, Christian Kreutz)
• NABUUR: Effective Online Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer (Rolf Kleef, Raul Caceres)
• Innovation, Interaction, Information: Using the Social Web (Peter Ballantyne)
  in Agricultural Development
• Empowering Farmers in India Using the Kisan Blog (Runa Sarkar, Debahsis Pattanaik)
• Web 2.0 in Ecuador: Enhancing Citizenship (Paula Carrión)
• Farmer-led Documentation (Dorine Rüter, Anne Piepenstock)
• Potential of Mobile: Cambodian Farmers Turn to their Phones (Ken Banks, Christian Kreutz)
• The Knowledge Sharing Kit: CGIAR’s Wiki Approach (Gerry Toomey)

Rural areas in developing countries are confronted by many challenges when it comes to information access and participation in knowledge networks. Since its beginnings, the potential of knowledge sharing throughout the Internet has had high hopes, but it has not fulfilled its promises yet. Obvious challenges are low connectivity particularly in rural areas, low literacy rate, lack of media competence to use the web and well function models to provide and target information. Newer technologies such as interactive web tools and the mobile phone offer promising ways to achieve a more inclusive Internet and use the web to learn from each other. Throughout the last years organisations and projects have started experimenting with the “read and write web” and achieved new approaches to use information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). Different to traditional ICT projects, this approach focuses on the users, it is their engagement and creativity that makes the networking and learning effort vibrant.

Two major questions persist: Where and under which conditions can these ICT’s be best used for highest impact? And, how can ICT’s really be used for a more effectively knowledge sharing and learning? One key lessons learnt of the sector project “knowledge systems in rural areas” was that ICT is one of many instruments to share knowledge particularly in the local context. There are various ways to exchange local or indigenous knowledge, so the instrument of selection has to be best fit in the respective local context. ICT might often not be the best choice and certainly can only be a mean and not the end itself, ideally embedded into an existent system of knowledge transfer according to identified needs and opportunities. In September 2007 GTZ held together with IICD, CTA, CGIAR and FAO the web2fordev conference to explore the potential of the participatory web and bring together some of these experiences. This publication attempts to describe these latest trends and experiences around newest technologies and the network effects for a new ingenuity to improve living conditions.

One such example is Nabuur, a global neighbourhood, which shows new grassroots networks for development presenting innovative models of cooperation worldwide. Rolf Kleef and Raul Caceres describe how solely webbased collaboration can work even with remotely villages in Africa and how they achieved an effective online peer-to-peer knowledge transfer impact. Peter Ballantyne takes in his article a greater look at new emerging forms of cooperation between development institutions worldwide. The social web helps to transcend organisations’ boundaries, makes information resources transparent and gives spaces for innovation for better agricultural development. The social web can be described as people interlinked and interacting with engaging content in a conversational and participatory manner via the Internet (Wikipedia). Ballantyne also compiles a list of all the different examples from a number of organisations’ developments using these interactive web tool impacts.

That is followed by pioneering examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America to use ICT’s for rural development. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur describes its many year experiences to empower farmers through blogging. Debashis Pattanaik and Runa Sarkar describe their efforts to bridge the agriculture research in India with daily needs of farmers. The Kisan Blog has contributed in restoring experiences of rural farmers in India. Another such example is Radio La Luna, which uses different media forms to strengthen the collective memory of Ecuadorian society on key moments in its social struggle through rescuing, digitising, systematising and disseminating documents of various types about main events in recent Ecuadorian history. This engaging approach makes them one of the most visited websites in the country.

But not in any case the implementation and usage of Web 2.0 tools work that easily and might not be the appropriate solution. Dorine Rüter and Anne Piepenstock present a project around farmer-led documentation (FLD), which highlights an alternative way of sharing cultivation practices through digital media. FLD extends existing knowledge sharing forms through digital media to highlight local knowledge and make it explicit for a larger audience.

The last practical examples present the increasing potential of mobile phones on the example of decentralized SMS based information exchange. It shows how Cambodian farmers can benefit from such a free and open source solution to make their mobile tools for better transparency and, lastly, improve their incomes. Ken Banks also shows how local software and hardware solutions are particularly for mobile phones’ key in the future, because theirs are developed around real needs and made to work in environments with little or no connectivity.

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Next week starts a two-week-long virtual forum on mobile telephony in rural areas, put together by the FAO through the e-agriculture initiative. The forum brings together people from all around the world to dicuss the potential of mobile phones particularly for rural development, but probably also various other topics around this all-purpose tool. I have been invited to join as one of the subject matters experts – not so sure what exactly this means, but I am looking forward to discussing the topic during the next two weeks on the virtual forum. If you are interested please join the dicussion.

I am glad to be able to participate in this interesting forum on mobile phone topics. From the ICT4D perspective, I believe mobile phones have a great potential for various reasons. However, I think mobile phones for development are in the midst of a hype, and some enthusiasts hope mobiles would be the solution to everything. But I do believe that there is also the danger of forgetting some important lessons learnt from many ICT4D projects, which failed for a lot of reasons. One was the lack of sustainability, and another, that mobile phones can only be a mean to an end. And of course, there are many challenges that the use of mobile phone faces: high costs, illiteracy and in many cases, mobile phones projects still have to prove the benefit for users. Do not get me wrong, I am very enthusiastic about the contributions of mobile phones to social change, but mainly because equally to the social web, it is the users themselves who drive the innovation. They apply, hack and adapt existing technologies for their own needs.

Here is a little descriptive text for the virtual forum. I am sure many interesting topics around mobile phones will be discussed. Particularly, rural areas are in my opinion interesting because mobile phones make them reachable like never before, being it for communication or data exhange.

Mobile phones are the success story of bridging the rural digital divide, bringing tangible economic benefits and acting as agents of social mobilization through improved communication. But what are the real challenges that face reaching rural areas, and what are some of today’s most beneficial applications that can help these rural communities, specifically regarding agriculture development?

This Forum will examine the challenges that rural communities face in enhancing the benefits of mobile telephony, and look at some examples of interesting initiatives and good outcomes from around the globe.

Virtual forums website

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Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to blog during the web2fordev conference. Organization work was more than what I expected, and of course there were so many interesting people to talk to around, I just couldn’t let go. Favourably, we got about 50 blog posts mainly from our journalists, who came from different African countries, and who of course did a great job reporting. Now some sessions can be watched completely over video (unfortunately only Internet explorer though). The week started with an interesting web taster day, and went through many more topics ending the week, yesterday, with a farmer led documentation workshop from Dorine Rüter. Interesting cases were presented, of how farmers in Africa use digital cameras to document and create awareness of their problems in order to help each other. Let me now summarize impressions from theses days at the FAO in Rome.

Inclusion
Seen by many people just as a technology, the web2fordev conference proved to me -once again- that people are more minded and complying when gathered together for so-called web2.0. The conference–even with the official and formal character it has within the FAO headquarter–got a neat unconference character; as the the director of FAO communication said at the end, “This halls have not seen this kind of event before.” It was a good mixture of people from many different backgrounds. There could have been more activists and pioneers in my opinion, but the conference fortunately attracted many people from all around the world.

Patience
Through the days, I felt again that we are still at the bottom or ground work of the using web2.0 for development. Many participants had just started experimenting with blogs, etc. by themselves, and had an understandable difficulty to grasp web2.0 in all its dimensions. Therefore, some discussions went not as deep as I wished, but the different perspectives were valuable. There was often a mixture of scepticism and enthusiasm. Will wikis make sense one day? How much trust do we need to place on wikis , and can we even establish that only virtually? Where is the audience for blogs and how can I filter all that information? That way, on one side, participants helped each other to make sense of all these tools, and on the other, sophisticated database RSS models were presented by Thierry Helmer or Thomas Metz. I wonder how can we cope with the challenge of having so many tools developed in such a short time? Many people are certainly not disposed or cannot follow.

Web2.0 in the field
The conference showed me clearly that a lot has been done in and between organizations. That is where the potential and the easiest implementation lies. There are a few projects in developing countries that have not yet implemented web2.0, but unless obvious challenges are not bridged, it will be difficult to implement more. It was, therefore, helpful and quite realistic to hear from Moses Kisembo and Kado Muir that blogs and wikis are not seldom light-years away from what is needed in Uganda or Nigeria. Nevertheless, bloggers such as Prince Deh from Ginks show how important this pioneer work can be. One high hope at the conference, which was often mentioned, was the mobile phone. Some presentations had in my opinion more of traditional web approach, but there were also many exceptional interesting cases such as Brosdi .org, which is supported by Bellanet. Market information systems and knowledge sharing via questions and answers (e.g. audioblogging from India) were the strongest examples in terms of rural development. One major success factor was that it has a benefit for the community, and in that way they are willing to contribute.

Please check the web2fordev blog for more information. There have been 50 posts written around the conference. Nynke Kruiderink and I give a little interview on tagging.

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