Mobile telephony in Africa opens opportunitiesThe widespread availability of mobile phones is creating great opportunities for new services. This could prompt a second wave of mobile-led economic growth, eventually bringing the benefits of the Internet and the World Wide Web to under-privileged communities. Yet, a few important barriers still exist. Firstly, the World Wide Web still lacks specific content, which would be relevant to people in underprivileged communities. Only the availability of locally relevant content is an incentive for people to access the Web. Secondly, access barriers to the Web exist, such as illiteracy, language barriers, and technical obstacles.

Open and Wider Access: W4RA will improve voice-based access to content and mobile ICT services by building a toolbox for the development of voice services that will be made available to local communities and entrepreneurs as Open Source.

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The Web alliance for Regreening in Africa

There is a widespread agreement that ICTservices, especially mobile ones, have the potential to play a major role in furthering social and rural development in developing economies such as Africa. Market penetration and rural community adoption of basic mobile telephony and services have been extremely rapid in recent years. This is opening up lots of new opportunities, but in order to realize the full potential of mobile ICT services, however, important challenges and obstacles must be overcome. This is what the W4RA project sets out to do.

Integration of Local Community Radios and ICT: Among its features and functionalities, the toolbox will enable the bridge with local community radios, by offering a Web archiving option and off-line individual voice access, thereby making broadcast audio content widely available to people, independently of radio programming schedules.

Mobile ICT services: the business case and their adaptability to the local context The sustainability of mobile ICT services depends on the business case for them. In turn, the business case depends on the local context in which the services are to function and conversely, how adaptable these services are to the local context. That and how this can be achieved can only be shown by on-the-ground implementation action within the local context and locally impactful issues.

The success of these re-greening activities in Africa lies in the rapid exchange and spread of local knowledge amongst large numbers of farmers. Knowledge about how to effectively and sustainably manage the lands, how to preserve trees and enhance soil fertility and how to improve crops and herds is very important for the people in these rural communities, whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and livestock. In an average village in Burkina Faso up to 98% of the households today have mobile phones and own a radio. The radio is another great source of information, broadcasting programs for farmers in local languages. Combining existing radio content with novel ways for voice-based access and other mobile ICT services (as W4RA will do) makes it possible to increase the speed of information and knowledge sharing between rural communities in a demand-driven way. Also here, this provides a solid and sustainable business case for mobile ICT services.