The Ushahidi Web site is collecting a variety of information and alerts of the situation in Haiti in realtime including messages of people looking for friends and loved ones as well as reports of locating missing persons and needs of supplies and resources in specific locations.
 

World Bank Day is a unique, one-day workshop at the mHealth Summit that will seek innovative ideas from practitioners and policymakers in the mobile health field.  Bringing together over 30 leading experts, the workshop will explore lessons from specific cases studies and country perspectives in the context of scaling up mobile innovations in the World Bank Health Sector Projects.

The recent riots in Kampala have revealed a couple of things about the flow of news and how people behave in crisis situations. We still don’t quite know what we’re dealing with in Kampala. It’s either the beginning or the end of a wider scale confrontation. For those of us on the ground, we’re starved for information. The mobile phone and it’s users ere essentially the only reports we can rely on for timely info.

Imagine we do not only use our mobile phones to make phones calls and SMS, but to contribute to science. How does that work? We can directly engage in micro-voluntarism or contribute valuable information without doing much more than carrying our mobile phone with us.

The Global Development Commons congratulates Pascal Katana, a Fourth Year Student at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Nairobi, Kenya on his two new inventions which will enhance food security and renewable energy usage.

The sign of success in foreign assistance is that “We are partners in building capacity for transformational change,” President Obama said in a recent speech in Ghana.

“Africa’s future is up to Africans,” he said.

The Commons is excited to see that USAID partner Western Union has announced it will be certifying mobile platform vendors to provide money transfer services- traditionally only available at Western Union outlets- through mobile phones.

Yesterday Grameen Foundation announced the launch of a suite of mobile phone applications developed with Google and MTN Uganda (MTN) that deliver services and information that were previously unavailable to Uganda’s poor and disadvantaged communities.

Check out the apps here!

Enhancing value chains to provide market based solutions to development challenges is a strategy that has huge potential to unleash business growth in untapped markets.