Blog

I had the pleasure of participating in and being a lunch table discussion leader for the recent ICT4AG conference here is Washington D.C. As I’ve reflected on the various presentations and coffee break conversations it seems that we can imagine what might be the next generation of ICT4AG or more broadly ICT4D. Currently there are numerous applications/functionalities but they are not synced with each other. So perhaps the next generation will be a comprehensive mHub type of platform that is multi-sectoral (e.g. agriculture, health, education, etc.) and multi-functional.  This is an expansion of what was a formal outcome of another ICT4AG conference in Kigali, Rwanda in November 2013.  That conference  imagined that the next generation of ICT4AG would be a comprehensive platform(s) that includes multiple agriculture functionalities that align with each other. Such type of comprehensive platform for multi-sectoral and economically viable mobile money and mobile solution functionalities for rural communities will be a manifestation of the vision in the Gates Annual Letter 2015 that “the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history.”  If we accept this notion of an eventual aggregation of all these wonderful ICT/mobile... Read More