Knowledge is Power

enabled = connected + empowered 

Nobody can deny that in 2020 we are indeed living in interesting times. The work environment today is vastly different from the way it was at the beginning of the year. WORLD is continuing its work under lockdown conditions and we are using our own technology to do so.

James Doyle, a serial problem solver with a passion for computer technology, joined our development team working on the WORLD app. An old face joining the development team is Adrian Cazan (Canada) who will be processing event data records from Transact (WORLD’s payment capability) so that we can bill for WORLD services.

We’ve also been lucky to entice Ashley van den Berg (New Zealand), who will be utilising her marketing skills to take on the role of Social Media Communicator

Knowledge is Power

The GSM Association has researched the usage behaviour of mobile data. They found that in developing countries the use of internet products and services varies quite considerably across regions. Some web sites and services are well used in some places but appear to be unknown in others. This variation reflects the knowledge and web-awareness of the people in the area.

The velocity of information is higher in urban areas, where users are exposed to frequent inter-personal contacts and a higher incidence of advertising. Consequently urban areas display a wider awareness and more established internet usage pattern, while rural areas show a pronounced variation in usage.

Knowledge is power and WORLD is empowering Citizens in rural areas by simplifying their access to information through the use of chatbots. For example; the Wikipedia Topic enables Citizen’s to pose questions with short answers returned from the wiki. There is a Covid-19 Topic for requesting location-specific information and the option to get Weather forecasts for any location. WORLD has also partnered with the Gateway Health Institute to provide information on topics of interest to women. All of this is free of data charges in countries where WORLD has secured reverse-billed data agreements.

The chatbot can obtain content from any HTML source or RSS feed, or it can screen scrape data from web sites. This information can be distributed either on schedule or be requested by Citizens in real-time. WORLD encourages third-party developers and content providers to exploit the WORLD platform to make their information easily accessible to all. 


Looking ahead

Legacy phones and 2G networks are still prominent in the markets WORLD is targeting and for many people, the mobile internet is still a dream. SMS use is dying out for people with smartphones, but for those who rely on it, it is still very expensive. WORLD is working on SMS chat functionality that will allow smartphone Citizens to send messages from the WORLD app to legacy phone users and receive their SMS response back in the app. Watch this space because we will be talking more about this as we develop our vision of helping connect the world to everyone and leaving no device behind.

In the next few weeks, we will be launching our much anticipated WORLD wallet in Eswatini. More details in our next newsletter.

Covid-19 has made securing funding considerably more challenging. WORLD is pursuing grants in addition to the existing funding initiatives.

If you liked this newsletter and want to support enabled.WORLD, you can go to www.enabled.world, and install the app, and then share it with your friends. If you are a developer with spare time, contact us, we have a worthy project waiting for you.

   WORLD – always connected

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.