| Abstract |
The Web alliance for Regreening in Africa (W4RA) is an initiative to improve knowledge sharing in rural areas in Africa. It is a networked community involving ICT professionals, computer scientists, NGOs, community radio stations, experts in sustainable land management and farmers in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. Our aim is develop innovative ICT services to support rural communities and their regreening activities in the Sahel. W4RA follows the Living Lab approach of building user communities and involving end-users actively in the development of innovative technologies.
In this talk we present two Living Lab experiments.
Mr. Jiri (Mr. Tree): a mobile app for monitoring tree population in rural environments. The Android app support agro-forestry evaluation of on-farm trees. Mr.Jiri speeds up and simplifies the current time-consuming manual tree identification allowing instant recording of digital pictures, and storing scientific and local names of trees. Aggregated statistical information can be exported from the device in the form of an Excel file to a desktop computer for further analysis.
Mr. Sanji (Mr. Rain): a web application for monitoring and predicting rain fall in the Sahara. Combining on weather predictions, such as Global Forecast System (GFS) and local weather forecast and local observation and (historical) knowledge, every raindrop can be used in agro-forestry.
Both experiments are still running in Mali and Burkina Faso. Combining cool technology for warm countries not only delivers knowledge about ICT4D but also recognition from the scientific field. |