The ICT4D Centre at The Development CAFE functions as an academic hub for researchers and development practitioners and students focused on creating solutions that address socio-economic problems in developing nations. This includes, climate change, agriculture, conservation and a host of other development issues.
What is ICT4D?
As a field of research and practice, Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) aims to harness information and communication technologies (ICTs) to achieve economic, social and political goals in low-resource or low-income regions.
ICT4D CENTRE at the Development Cafe
The Centre is a multi-disciplinary environment that seeks to produce new technologies for the developing world, while also studying the ways in which existing and emerging technologies affect and are appropriated by groups of people, particularly in vulnerable communities. We have 4 major units within ICT4D @ DevCAFE, these are:
- IoTs for Development (In partnership with University of Melbourne
- Drones 4 Development
- Wearable Tech for Research and Evaluation and
- Blockchains for Development (Click here to read about this project)
What is our major objective?
The advances in technology particularly in agriculture, conservation, water management and remote sensing have reached far and beyond, yet for the world’s 800 million poor, who live in extreme poverty (World Bank 2017), harnessing these technologies is a distant dream. Technology caters to the demands of customers at a whim and is getting faster by the day, however for those who depend on subsistence livelihoods, the gap is only getting wider.
We at DevCAFE aim to bridge this gap by creating low cost, small scale devices that does the job of high end tech on a smaller scale so, a farmer from Africa or Asia can benefit just as much from technology as their urban counterparts. Particularly in the areas of precision farming, livestock management, conservation agriculture and predictive agriculture. This will help build safety nets and coping mechanisms for vulnerable communities
How do we do it?
To bring about change, we need intentional social innovation. The market for technology is expensive, but we focus on volume, at the moment we are developing technology in a pilot and R&D basis and testing it through our partners in Asia and Africa and document their impacts, including cost effectiveness, once we learn from this exercise, we will mass produce these technologies, at lower cost with locally available tools and scale it up to a much wider range of stakeholders.
Where are we based?
Our lab is in the Silicon Valley of Indonesia, the city of Bandung. However, our field partners are in Kenya, India and Indonesia.
Let's partner up
Are you or your organization involved in developing technologies for the rural poor, or work in agricultural research, impact investor, researcher, donor or farmers’ organization. Get in touch with us to explore collaboration opportunities.
Reach us at ict4d@dev-cafe.org
