MobileActive.org

 This paper is a collection of five ethnographic reports examining the role of ICT in Uganda. The first is not particulalrly mobile focused and looks at how those who have access to internet in Uganda use it. The second report is about the ways ICT is changing print media. The third report focuses on the the opportunities ICT present for civil society and non-governmental groups. The next report outlines the way the ICT sector in Uganda was developed. The last report examines ways that ICT may be used in government accountability.

This paper presents an empirical assessment of the impact of information and communication  technologies (ICTs) on political development in sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis, based on the  Mo Ibrahim indicators of democracy in Africa for 2008, reveals a close alignment between ICTs in Sub-Saharan Africa and democratization – or political development broadly defined.

Our examination of the data demonstrates that elevated levels of phone, computer, and Internet  diffusion are associated with political development, although only the effect of the phone remains once other variables are specified. The phone is the most robust of all individual factors explaining variations in political development.   This may be explained by the fact that all strata of society can use cell phones, while the Internet is primarily used by the elite.

Service providers periodically publish different tariff offers with the objective of both customer acquisition and customer retention. Transparency in the provision of telecommunication services and tariff offers has always been and continues to be of prime concern to the Authority. TRAI has in the past taken several steps to enhance transparency in tariff offers.

The Authority, however, is receiving several complaints and representations from consumers and their representatives seeking further effective transparency measures. In view of the increased competition as well as the spread of telecom activity to rural areas, the relevance of having a more transparent regime for tariff offerings cannot be overemphasised.  At the same time, service providers and their associations have also raised certain concerns. This consultation paper brings out various issues that have a bearing on telecom tariff offers.

Mobile-based branchless banking has become one of the key mechanisms for extending financial services to disenfranchised populations in the world's developing regions. One shortcoming of today's branchless banking systems is that they rely largely on network-layer services for securing transactions and do not implement any application-layer security. Recent attacks on some of the most popular branchless banking systems show that these systems are not end-to-end secure.

In this paper, we make the case for designing mobile-based branchless banking systems which build security into the application layer of the protocol and guarantee end-to-end security to system users. Our main contribution is a threat model which effectively captures the goals of end-to-end authenticated transactions in branchless banking. This model, besides incorporating the obvious external threats to a protocol, also accounts for the possibility of insider attacks - those mountable by banking agents or other human intermediaries in the system. We then provide recommendations for solution design based on the security requirements of our model and the infrastructural constraints under which branchless banking systems operate.