Freedom Fone’s Technical Director, Brenda Burrell, is currently at the W3C workshop in Maputo: Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development.
The workshop has organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), particularly the Mobile Web Initiative, and its Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group.
As the organisers put it. “There are today more than half of the population living with less than 3$ a day, and lacking all kind of services (health, education, government…). The incredible growth of the mobile penetration rate last few years is providing a new hope. The potential of simple ICT services on mobiles to improve people’s income has indeed been largely demonstrated. The aim of this workshop is to explore how to leverage these success stories and create an enabling environment that would drive the appearance of numerous services all over the Developing World.”
Yesterday, Brenda presented a paper on Freedom Fone. This paper gives some useful background information about the project, but more importantly discusses where the project is at to date, and some of the challenges we’ve faced so far.
Brenda is joined by a variety of practitioners and researchers in the field of mobile phones for social development. Have a look at the workshop agenda for links to other papers which may be of interest.