Abstract
Despite its global reach, the World Wide Web still fails to serve about 3 billion people, the majority living in the Global South, especially in poor, low-resource regions, where broadband internet is not expected to be rolled out in the foreseeable future. Yet, to bring the advantages of ICTs at the reach of communities in low-resource development regions, lightweight, affordable and context-aware ICT solutions are needed, that fit local needs and context. To this end the Kasadaka platform was developed. This platform supports easy creation of local-content and voice-based information services, targeting currently ‘unconnected’ populations, taking into account contextual and infrastructural requirements, and matching local ecosystems. The Kasadaka platform and its Voice Service Development Kit support the development of decentralized voice-based information services, to serve local populations and communities in their own local languages, in regions where Internet and Web are absent and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
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Notes
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Sub-Saharan Africa: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=ZF.
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As an illustration to this point, a group of Malian entrepreneurs launched a media initiative to persuade local Internet Service Providers to provide better services: http://100mega.ml/.
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A Raspberry Pi 3 (including case, power supply and SD card) costs around
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The VSDK’s code can be found on GitHub. See: https://github.com/abaart/KasaDaka-VSDK.
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For this use-case a Kasadaka can be equipped with two dongles, providing two telephone lines.
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A demonstration of the BipVote application is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxtRCMht0qg.
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See https://viamo.io.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Christophe Guéret for the original idea and his initiative in the first steps towards the Kasadaka platform. Additionally, the authors would like to thank Adama Tessougué, Amadou Tangara, Gossa Lô, Julien Ouedraogo, Matthieu Ouedraogo, Hans-Dieter Hiep, Roy Overbeek, Paweł Ulita, Tjitske de Groot and Gamariel Mboya for their invaluable contributions to this research.
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Baart, A., Bon, A., de Boer, V., Dittoh, F., Tuijp, W., Akkermans, H. (2019). Affordable Voice Services to Bridge the Digital Divide: Presenting the Kasadaka Platform. In: Escalona, M., Domínguez Mayo, F., Majchrzak, T., Monfort, V. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35330-8_10
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