Using Information and Communication Technology to Support Women\u27s Entrepreneurship in Central and West Asia

Key Points • In several Central and West Asian countries, women are less likely to become entrepreneurs, and their businesses are more likely to be informal, stay small, generate less revenue, and employ fewer people. • Information and communication technology (ICT) tools not only improve business performance but can also be used to overcome challenges specific to women entrepreneurs—time and mobility constraints; access to formal financial services, information, skills, and personalized advice; and participation in business networks. • However, lack of ICT skills, lower purchasing power, and cultural barriers hinder women entrepreneurs from accessing and using ICT. • Governments, financial service providers, and business development service providers have room to more effectively leverage ICT to serve women entrepreneurs. • Women represent an unmet market opportunity for the private sector, opening up public–private partnership options to develop sustainable initiatives and services

Early experience of mobile telephony: A comparison of two villages in Papua New Guinea

This paper examines social change following the recent introduction of mobile telephony into rural communities in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It presents the findings of substantial fieldwork conducted in 2009, and suggests ways in which the new technology is already changing people’s lives and relationships. The paper identifies the roles of mobile telephones in two communities, the changes taking place, and how villagers are responding to them. Comparison of the two villages is strategic as it highlights similarities in perceptions of mobile phones in these two very different settings. An ethnographic approach is adopted, situated within an interpretative methodology. Data collection methods include semi-structured interviews, orally-administered surveys and participant observation. The theoretical lens is focused on the ‘communicative ecology’ concept, which stems from the communication research tradition. This research is significant as it addresses changes currently occurring in the communication methods of whole communities

Mobile Value Added Services: A Business Growth Opportunity for Women Entrepreneurs

Examines the potential for mobile value-added services adoption by women entrepreneurs in Egypt, Nigeria, and Indonesia in expanding their micro businesses; challenges, such as access to digital channels; and the need for services tailored to women

New ways of mediating learning: Investigating the implications of adopting Open Educational Resources for tertiary education at an institution in the United Kingdom as compared to one in South Africa

Access to education is not freely available to all. Open Educational Resources (OERs) have the potential to change the playing field in terms of an individual's right to education. The Open University in the United Kingdom was founded almost forty years ago on the principle of 'open' access with no entry requirements necessary. The University develops innovative high quality multiple media distance-learning courses. In a new venture called OpenLearn, The Open University is making its course materials freely available worldwide on the Web as OERs ( see http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn). How might other institutions make use of these distance-learning materials? The paper starts by discussing the different contexts wherein two institutions operate and the inequalities that exist between them. One institution is a university based in South Africa and the other is a college located in the United Kingdom. Both institutions, however, deliver distance-learning courses. The second part of the paper discusses preliminary findings when OERs are considered for tertiary education at these two institutions. The findings emphasise some of the opportunities and challenges that exist if these two institutions adopt OERs

2010 Population and Housing Census Report: Millennium Development Goals in Ghana

According to the 2010 Population and Housing Census (PHC) report, Ghana?s population stood at 24,658,823 at the time of the 2010 census. The country has ten administrative regions and 170 districts. Ghana has one of the highest GDP per capita in West Africa and is ranked as a Lower-Middle Economy by the World Bank. The country has a diverse and rich resource base with gold, cocoa, timber, diamond, bauxite, and manganese being the most important source of foreign trade. In 2007, an oilfield which could contain up to 3 billion barrels of light oil was discovered. Although oil and gas exploration in Ghana dates back to a century, it is this latest discovery and many more afterward that have catapulted the country to be counted among the league of oil producing countries across the globe. Yet, in spite of the abundance of natural resources, a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. However, the country has made considerable progress in reducing poverty over the last two decades. Successive nationally representative living standards surveys conducted between 1992 and 2006 (respectively, GLSS3 in 1991/2, GLSS4 in 1998/9 and GLSS5 in 2005/6) suggest that monetary poverty (measured by the level of per capita consumption) has significantly reduced. The number of poor went down from 7.9 million people (or 52 percent of the population at that time) in 1992 to 6.3 million people in 2006 (or 29 percent of the population at that time). With the rapid economic growth since the last survey in 2006, it is likely there is a further poverty reduction. Structurally, Ghana?s economy has undergone some significant transformation over the last couple of years. Ghana?s economy which until 2006 was dominated by agriculture is now led by service accounting for about 51% of national output. Agriculture accounts for about 30% (although about 55% of employed are engaged in the sector) while industry trail with only 19% of total national output. The informal economy accounts for about 86% of total employment while gold and cocoa remain the leading export earnings. This is expected to change with the commencement of oil production in commercial quantities in 2010

Using ODL and ICT to develop the skills of the unreached: a contribution to the ADEA triennial of the Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning

Innovation in technology is occurring at rapid pace thus shrinking the distances and making information and knowledge more than ever accessible to everyone irrespective of where the person resides. This paper consists of four main articles. The first one deals with technological trends. The second one focuses on the deployment and use of open and distance education mode in rural areas by documenting initiatives that embrace information and communication technologies (ICTs). Due to challenges faced in rural areas only a few success stories/cases currently exist and some of these are cited in this article. The challenges faced in the deployment of ICT enhanced ODL have been highlighted as well as the potential of developing and delivering effective and relevant ODL programmes in rural areas in order to ensure that issues of educational equity and social exclusion rural communities are adequately addressed. ICTs in ODL are perhaps the greatest tool to date for self-education and value addition to any community’s development efforts, yet poor rural communities particularly in Africa do not have the necessary awareness, skills or facilities to enable themselves to develop using ICTs. Inadequate ICT infrastructures in rural areas remain a major source for the digital divide in Africa and for under-performance of distance learners. The third one analyses the support provided to ODL learners who often encounter difficulties in completing their studies through the distance education mode due to loneliness, uncertainties and de-motivation. ICT has not been able to sufficiently support distance learners in overcoming those obstacles efficiently. An investigation regarding those learning supports has been conducted in ten distance learning institutions, along with an intensive literature review with the aim of understanding the high percentage of dropout rates of distant learners. The learners’ interactions have been scrutinized through content analysis of their synchronous exchanges, during a completely online course. After taking into account the limited technical and human resources in Africa, a technological virtual environment along with a pedagogical framework has been proposed with the aim of giving adequate educational support to them. The fourth article has explored The Open University (UK) and its efforts to use new technologies to deliver online courses to difficult-to- reach learners in prison environments. The case study analysed here is an international course (called, B201- Business Organisations and their environments) which also touches an African cohort of learners. The implications for designing and delivering online ODL to the complex unreachable environments of prisons anywhere, and particularly in Africa, have been discussed

New media practices in India: bridging past and future, markets and development

This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in India, focusing on the country’s youth's use of mobile phones and the Internet, as well as new media prosumption. One particular feature of the Indian case is the confluence of commercial exploitation of new media technologies and their application for development purposes in initiatives that aim to bring these technologies to marginalized segments of the Indian population. Technology usage in turn is shaped by the socioeconomic location of the user, especially in regards to gender and caste. The potential of new media technologies to subvert such social stratifications and associated norms has inspired much public debate, which is often carried out on the Internet, giving rise to an online public sphere. In all of the writings reviewed here, the tension surrounding new media technologies as a meeting place of the old and the new in India is paramount

Self-reported “communication technology” usage in patients attending a cardiology outpatient clinic in a remote regional hospital

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Information and communication Technology and Poverty: An Asian Perspective

The emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in particular the Internet, has generated new enthusiasms about the development prospects for poor economies. Many now think that new technologies can provide a faster route to better livelihoods and improved quality of life than the one afforded by the standard process of industrialization. The opposing view holds that the focus on ICTs will detract attention from the more fundamental task of addressing the basic problems of economic developmentICT; poverty; growth