The World Bank - Working for a world free of poverty

Syndicate content
A blog about Governance and Development for All

About us

Welcome

This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

Information and Communication Technologies

Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation: From Pilots to Scaled-up Implementation

Submitted by Alfredo on Mon, 2009-09-14 08:29

On Wednesday, September 16, the World Bank's e-Development Thematic Group will host the workshop "Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation. From Pilots to Scale-up Implementation."  The workshop features six sessions that will touch on the transformative role that mobile technology can play in five thematic sessions, including governance.  We have blogged before about examples and the potential of mobile phones for advancing the governance agenda in the development community, so the workshop will be an interesting opportunity to continue this dialogue.

You can follow the event via live webcast.  You can register for the webcast here.  Below you can find more details about the event. 

 

Empowering citizens to report crime via SMS... what else can they do with mobiles?

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-08-07 16:27

In a previous entry, I blogged about how mobile technology has been used to address some governance issues.  Crime denunciation was among the activities mentioned in which mobiles have empowered people by giving them a tool to report crime and violence outbreaks as they happen. 

Because a video is worth more than a thousand words, I'll share with you the case of CiviRep, an application that will allow citizens of Caracas to report crime via SMS.  Very similar to Ushahidi's platform, CiviRep aims at capturing on-the-go feedback from citizens to then map it with the help of Google Maps (see here Ushahidi's original example in Kenya).

 

CiviRep Team Video Spring 2009 from nextlab on Vimeo.