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The past 30 days in technology for development

Bolton: "The Glenn Beck of Foreign Policy"

A great clip from BloggingHeads:

PRADEEPGOHIL - Can eBooks Satisfy? Creating Content for ICT-enabled Classrooms

Mobile SMS/MMS Education for all http://SMSEducation.spaces.live.com Ekalavya game ( Mobile SMS/MMS education learning systems) offers a unique leadership development program which pairs needy children from underprivileged backgrounds in city slums and rural villages with university students and working professionals who act as their mentors, role models and tutors. The care, personal attention and encouragement which the children receive from Ekalavya game SMS/MMS education learning systems their mentors, but rarely from their parents and community, helps them realize their potential and take responsibility for their own lives.

Sex, Aid, and Rock & Roll: An August Lite Post

by William Easterly

We’ve complained a lot about celebrity aid campaigns here on Aid Watch, but somebody must like them since they keep happening over and over. Who is the target audience?

The celebrity aid campaign of the past few years has exactly three components:

1. Angelina Jolie
Angelina-130.png

2. Music by U2
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3. Picture of African mother and baby
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Susan Rice articulates a brave new way of approaching global stability

Susan Rice delivered a blockbuster speech titled A New Course in the World, a New Approach at the UN at New York University. Excerpts don't do it justice, but these few graphs articulate an important and profoundly new way of viewing international relations. (NB a link to her full speech is not yet available. I'll post the link as soon as it goes online.)

Richard - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

Tim, I think we may be approaching the time when eBooks will compete with paper on cost. We are not there yet but it is a matter of itme. A lot depends upon one's goals. If scaling quickly to all school-aged children is a priority then we cannot simply wait for the technology to reach the price point that virtually everyone can have access to it. Thus paper and pencil are important transition technologies for many for the next several years. The challenge is more than simply cost, however. We have a lot to learn about how to bring teachers to the point that they are effective with technology and there are huge gaps in content that is effrective.

Announcing 14 Geo Challenge Grant Recipients

When we launched our Geo Challenge Grants project last fall, we hoped our small grants program would provide nonprofits with the impetus and resources they need to take advantage of powerful online mapping tools like Google Earth and Google Maps. We were, without a doubt, not disappointed. In fact, we were overwhelmed by the hundreds of exciting and innovative geospatial applications that poured in from around the world, addressing diverse issues from renewable energy resources to education.

Fake earthquake in Lebanon

But worry not, UN peacekeepers were there:
The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon today wrapped up a two-day large-scale disaster response exercise, responding to a fictitious earthquake in the south of the country.
The dry run, which the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) conducted with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), tested the forces’ combined reaction to an earthquake with a magnitude of six on the Richter scale.

Enabling the inspiration generation

During one of my many epic walks around Palo Alto last week, I stopped and tapped this into my phone:
Note
Let me explain.

In case you thought things in Somalia (still) couldn't get any worse...

...the International Crisis Group warns that something is rotten in the state semi-autonomous region of Puntland.
If its government does not enact meaningful reforms and reach out to all clans, Puntland may break up violently, adding to the chaos in Somalia.

Community Radio and SMS Feedback on Display at Maker Faire Africa

At Maker Faire Africa, Inveneo is demonstrating a real-time SMS-based conference feedback system and a low-power FM radio broadcast using Inveneo systems and Frontline SMS.
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“The Mara will sort itself out”


Kenyan adventure, Day 1 (Sorry I’m skipping the last of Uganda, but it’s nowhere near as interesting. I’ll finish it later)

Let me preface these next few posts by saying that this trip was not planned at all. We realized how hard we’d been working the last couple months, with a lot of it being quite frustrating, and we wanted a vacation, so Marie and I decided to go to Kenya. All we had really worked out was that we wanted to see the wildabeest migration in Massai Mara and go to the coast near Mombasa. We did maybe 2-3 hours of internet research before going.

And a Happy 60th to the Geneva Conventions!

Speaking of anniversaries, on August 12 1949, 64 countries came together in the wake of the worst war the world has ever seen and signed the four Geneva Conventions.

Ban: "We have four months to secure the future of the planet"

There was a tinge of urgency in the Secretary General's remarks to the Global Environment Forum in his native Korea yesterday.  

The gel that would prevent HIV transmission

Picture of generic gel (not the actual molecular condom). Photo credit: Flickr/Darwin Bell

TimKelly - Balancing Content, Technology, and People for Quality Basic Education

There are several trade-offs involved here: ** One is the trade-off between filtered and unlimited access to the resources of the Web, educational and otherwise. I tend towards the unlimited end of the scale but fully acknowledge the need for some degree of filtering, especially for younger children. ** The second trade-off is one of cost, scale and scope. Paper textbooks and good for cost, OK for scale but poor for scope; E-Books are OK for cost, OK for scale and OK for scope; PCs are poor for cost, OK for scale but great for scope.

Happy 20th Birthday, Convention on the Rights of the Child

This year marks the 20th anniversary of  the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  UNICEF is celebrating accordingly with a series of PSAs like the one above (here's one with Ewan McGregor and one with Claudia Schiffer).  To date every country in the world has ratified the agreement, except the United States and, um, Somalia (which has no functioning government.)

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