IDEA

captired by Timothy Kariithi from last week's meeting.

Manu Raghavan
Georgia Institute of Technology
Masters Student Electrical and Computer Science

The speaker presented a talk on Initiative for Development and Education in Africa (IDEA).
The main aim of IDEA is to
Target the social economic conditions in Africa
To come up with something tangible (a tangible result)
There are three projects running
A collaborative teaching project.
Essay competition
Afric@tech

Collaborative teaching Project
The objective of this project is to come up with curriculum and joint instructors with African Universities (in Kenya Kenyatta University KU)
In KU they have a course and two projects
Digital Media

Text to speech interface
This project will enable the illiterate to use their mobile phones.
The application is being developed in python.
Apart from text to speech there is also development of locally relevant icon to enable illiterate user ability to use the phone

Open Source Course Management System
Currently KU is using an Course management system called Black Board that cost a lot in term of licenses. IDEA is
helping so KU students to configure an open source equivalent system which they will modify and put relevant material on and also modify the Graphical user Interface (GUI) to reduce migration time and training cost. The motivation for the students is that they can later sell the finished product to KU at a fraction of the cost.

The Githurai commodity Exchange
The objective of this project is to make farmers aware of the cost of there produce thus reducing increasing their profits.
This will be done using information transmitted through an SMS gateway that will provide the suppliers of the info with credit loaded to their phones and those requesting for use of the information will get it at premium cost say +5/= above the cost of the SMS thus making it a self sustainable project.

Essay Competition
An essay writing competition targeting undergraduates and graduates to write on Pan African perspectives on development and technology.
This competition will open mid August to end of December.
The objective of this competition will be
voice out opinions of African Youth.
Identify new action driven approaches.
Create a forum on African Development.

Afric@Tech
This usually facilitates African leaders to speak Georgia Institute Of Technology
Previous Speakers are president of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,