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Impact of low-cost, on-demand, information access in a remote Ghanaian village

Published: 13 December 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Technology projects are finding ways to provide information to people living in rural poverty. However, using information to affect health or farming practices requires overcoming unique challenges including illiteracy and lack of electricity. We examine the effects of a low-cost audio computer ("Talking Book")--a battery-powered, durable, handheld device that enables users to create and listen to recordings and copy recordings between devices-for improving learning opportunities and knowledge sharing in such environments. In northern Ghana, we studied the impact of giving rural, illiterate people on-demand access to guidance created by local experts. Our evaluation suggests that Talking Books can make a significant impact on learning and behavior change in villages with low literacy rates and no electricity.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICTD '10: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
December 2010
479 pages
ISBN:9781450307871
DOI:10.1145/2369220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 13 December 2010

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Author Tags

  1. agriculture production
  2. audio
  3. illiteracy
  4. information dissemination
  5. knowledge transfer
  6. low-cost technology

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ICTD '10

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Overall Acceptance Rate 22 of 116 submissions, 19%

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  • (2022)Understanding the information landscape in agricultural communities in rural BangladeshTHE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES10.1002/isd2.1224589:1Online publication date: 9-Oct-2022
  • (2016)The Ins and Outs of HCI for DevelopmentProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858081(2220-2232)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
  • (2015)VillageAppsProceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/2737856.2737904(1-4)Online publication date: 15-May-2015
  • (2013)A Low-Cost Audio Computer for Information Dissemination Among Illiterate People GroupsIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers10.1109/TCSI.2013.226469360:8(2039-2050)Online publication date: Aug-2013
  • (2012)The midwife's assistantProceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/2160673.2160700(200-210)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2012
  • (2010)A case for custom silicon in enabling low-cost information technology for developing regionsProceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development10.1145/1926180.1926208(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2010

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