App/Software

Wilson Cusack from Trade Co. in the U.S. will develop an SMS-based platform to provide information on market prices and facilitate trade for small-scale farmers in developing countries. The platform will maintain user anonymity, and also handle payments thereby promoting the use of mobile money. It will also enable the arrangement of transportation of goods, and provide a database for monitoring agricultural production and markets. He will further develop the platform for pilot-testing by 100 farmers in Ghana.

Tyler Radford from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in the U.S. will partner with the local tech community in Uganda to develop web- and phone-based applications that enable individuals to locate their nearest financial services such as an ATM or mobile money provider, and help financial service providers identify the best locations to expand access across developing countries.

Julia Reichelstein of EFL Global Ltd in Bermuda will promote access to financial services for poor communities by producing a psychometric test for distribution by SMS that can identify dependable new customers and evaluate the risk of lending to them. Individuals in developing countries that would benefit from credit to break out of poverty and in turn boost economic growth are often unable to access financial services largely due to their lack of credit history.

Michael Kane and colleagues from Yale University in the U.S. will create document clustering software incorporated into a web interface to enable clinical researchers to better search through the published literature on both human and veterinary medicine, to promote new discoveries for treating disease. Online biomedical literature and genetics databases carry large amounts of information on animal and human health.

Henry Baffoe of the Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services in Ghana will develop an integrated system using existing technologies to gain feedback from smallholder farmers on agricultural projects that can then be analyzed by stakeholders. His team will recruit farmers from a district in Ghana, map their locations using GPS, record the type of farm, and launch an Instant Voice Response (IVR) platform, which collects responses to surveys by recording voice messages sent by mobile phone.