What a difference a year makes. Over the last twelve months, sales of smartphones surpassed feature phones for the first time, global mobile subscribers hit close to seven billion, and data traffic grew by 80% – thanks largely to emerging market growth. As the year draws to a close, the developing world is not only […]
Read More… from Top 10 Predictions for Mobile Technology in 2014
As part of our new series on PhDs and development in Sub-Saharan Africa, SciDev.Net is collating data over a range of issues – from postgraduate enrolment and gender equality to the links between PhDs and economic growth. We aim to gather and visualise the statistics underpinning stories about doctoral investment and growth on the continent. Read more […]
In this podcast, recorded in Johannesburg, South Africa, Adam Habib, vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, talks about the relationship between PhD research and Africa’s future social and economic development. He argues that, as developing nations become ever more dependent on knowledge-based industries, the need to have high-quality skills, innovation and outputs becomes increasingly […]
Read More… from Q&A: Doctoral research and economic growth in Africa
At a computer in her office at the Havard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s Western highlands representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town […]
A charity set up to support development by acting as a broker between UK scientists, NGOs and developing world firms has failed to gain traction and is trying to refocus its mission by launching an online collaboration on global risk. Science for Humanity was created in 2008 with the aim of letting scientists showcase technologies — in fields such as medicine, agriculture, energy, water supply and sanitation — […]
Read More… from Science for Humanity falters but hopes to reinvent itself
Using market dynamics to roll out new technologies for development can bring unexpected challenges, say the developers of a low-cost innovation to treat jaundice in newborn babies, whose initial plan to let the tech ‘sell itself’ backfired. Read more: http://www.scidev.net/global/technology/news/market-forces-insufficient-to-roll-out-low-cost-tech.html?utm_source=link&utm_medium=webfeed&utm_campaign=e […]
Read More… from Market forces ‘insufficient’ to roll out low-cost tech
Aid agencies have ambitious goals to empower women in the developing world. Yet many feminists believe donors’ gender policies are depoliticised — that they fail to address the unequal power balances between men and women. Read more: http://www.scidev.net/global/gender/opinion/tech-can-give-women-the-space-to-fight-for-their-rights.html?utm_source=link&utm_medium=webfeed&utm_campaign=en […]
Read More… from Tech can give women the space to fight for their rights
How do you cross the digital divide to connect the remaining one billion people to the internet? A debate at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, yesterday looked at the remaining barriers and emerging opportunities as mobile operators and phone producers pursue new customers in developing countries who are not online yet. Read more: […]
On Saturday, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conducted a session in Chicago speaking about the state of biosciences in Africa. African experts in the field of agricultural biotechnology held presentations highlighting the impacts of biosciences on small holder farming sectors. The African economy is on an upward trajectory, and is among […]
Forty African countries showed reductions in malaria transmission between 2000-2010, but despite this progress, more than half (57 per cent) of the population in countries endemic for malaria continue to live in areas of moderate to intense transmission, with infection rates over 10 per cent. The findings are based on a series of prevalence maps […]