I’m leaving Uganda tomorrow. We, Michael, Charlene, and I finished our work over the last two weeks — had final meetings with people in Kampala, set ourselves up for future partnerships and project development work. And now we return to the states with ideas, contacts, and the need to write for more grants.
We will potentially [...]
I’ve spent some days in the last week or so visiting with organizations that run “food security” programs. “Food security” is a term that refers to a variety of services that includes food aid (giving food rations to people) and often other services like agriculture education, market strengthening, health and nutrition education. For our project, [...]
The east African coast was, until last week or so, without fiber optic connection to the net. What that meant: connecting to the internet at a decent speed from East Africa had to be done using satellite connections and so was remarkably expensive. Add to that the fact that there’s not a lot of capital [...]
Some other groups working on capacity building. Kaushal recommended a few more groups to look into who are focused on IT capacity building in developing economies. Turns out Kasima and Alex will be coming to Uganda to work, in part, with Samasource, helping with trainings, I think in Lira (a few hours drive [...]
A group based in Uganda, includes the AppLab/Google/MTN banana wilt/Community Knowledge Worker initiative. Some posts here about that project and other ICT projects for smallholder farmers; also include other general research about ag development in Ug and the potential for information technologies to assist.
http://www.agcommons.org/
On a farm on Sat, I saw a really innovative way of creating a gas cookstove in a house. This farm is owned by David and Jen — David is the CKW coordinator, Jen his wife, a geography teacher in a local school. They also have a farm on which they raise crops, cows, goats, [...]
I’m investigating the CKW (community knowledge worker) pilot program run by AppLab (Grameen) in partnership with Google, Appfrica, MTN. The program, currently underway in two districts Mbale (far east), and Bushenyi (far west), involves identifying farmer-leaders and training them to be information hubs in their communities. CKWs are given java enabled nokias and trained to [...]
My work this summer is to find potential partners in Uganda with whom to develop technological projects to help with agricultural development. I think it was assumed we’d be developing the ICT parts in Berkeley over the next year. We are working in loose partnership with AppLab with the notion that we might have a [...]
Another meeting with AppLab, this time including Eric Cantor and Whitney Gantt. I’m feeling optimistic about the field research part of this summer. We’ll all head in different directions to try to learn more about the ways that farmers farm, learn, communicate, live; to study the implementation of government and ngo ag development [...]
Visited Chimp Island (http://www.ngambaisland.org/) today, in the middle of Lake Victoria. We rode a speedy boat to the island, crossing the equator, arriving on Chimp Island to view a feeding of the 40+ chimps who live there. All were rescued from captivity – some as babies, some as adults – and now reside [...]