Let’s take a break from the more negative posts of the past few days to congratulate the members of NetHope who recently won Intel’s INSPIRE•EMPOWER Challenge.1 Catholic Relief Services’ Great Lakes Cassava Initiative (GLCI):
… a pilot project using laptops to help cassava farmers increase food availability and incomes. Millions of families in East and Central Africa rely on cassava as a primary food source, but two virulent diseases are wiping out fields across the region. GLCI aims to educate 1.15 million farmers in six countries about these diseases and provide them with disease-resistant cassava plants. The laptops will facilitate information exchange among farmers, field agents and project managers; support remote distribution of training modules; and improve disease monitoring through automatic data transfers.
and WinRock International’s2 Rural Livelihood Enhancement:
… to deliver information and communication technology (ICT) services to rural communities in Nepal. To address the lack of grid electricity, the project will utilize renewable power from micro-hydro stations and solar photovoltaic panels. The goal of the project is to bring about economic development and improve access to energy, education, employment and information in remote areas. The ICT service centers will serve as computer labs for students and will be open to the public during off-school hours to provide services to the community.
Both of these projects take the right approach – looking at an existing problem from the perspective of the affected communities and applying technology to solve that problem, rather than taking a technology and trying to find a problem to apply it to. Congratulations to both organisations, and good luck with the projects!
- Not strictly humanitarian, but NetHope gets a free ride on this blog. [↩]
- Another interesting article about WinRock’s work at Ken’s blog – by Gary Garriot, a legend in the development tech sector. [↩]