On 14 May 2018 the Energy and Environment Partnership Trust Fund opened two funding windows i.e EEP Innovation and EEP Catalyst. An application guide in available here.
Heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) meet next week in the Zambian capital, Lusaka. SADC is a group of countries whose leaders meet every so often to discuss what went wrong since the last time they met. A lot has gone wrong in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean economy is in tatters, held together by Band-Aid and Scotch Tape. Pump readings at fuel stations are unable to keep up with inflation. While the SADC meeting may offer a sympathetic ear to President Robert Mugabe, attempting to fix his economy is akin to picking nickels in front of a steam roller. That said, the economic fortunes of the other members of the group have been good. Economic growth is at its best in years with GDP averaging 5% over the last five years. Triple digit inflation no longer haunts governments. Commodity prices have soared, with copper taking the lead. Interest rates are down along with the cost of borrowing. Despite the drought in South Africa, corn (a regional staple) is in abund...
A mobile phone is a miniature telephone exchange. It accepts incoming calls, initiates outgoing calls and can act as a repeater by forwarding calls or as a switch through teleconferencing. These are the basic features of a telephone exchange. TerraNet , a Swedish firm, has exploited these features to facilitate free mobile-to-mobile calls. Using peer-to-peer technology, a cluster of mobile phones can communicate without the need to go through a base station (switch) provided they are within 1,000m of each other. This technology, being trialled in Ecuador and Tanzania, is perfect for developing countries where infrastructure is as limited as disposable income. Because mobile phones can forward calls, the effective communication distance can be extended from a 1 kilometer radius to about 20 kilometers. That is sufficient to cover most rural communities and, for example, university campuses. Like Skype , this is a subvertive, effective and disruptive technology. While manufacturers...
Back in 2004, NTT DoCoMo introduced the first mobile wallet. DoCoMo is a spin-off of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), the largest telecommunications carrier in Japan. Named Osaifu-Keitai which literally means 'Wallet Mobile', the wallet is based on the FeliCa integrated circuit developed by Sony. FeliCa is a smart card and is the de facto card standard in Japan. NTT DoCoMo fully integrates the chip into phone handsets thereby extending mobile device functionality to include payments. The chip communicates with contact-less readers such as POS equipment, parking meters and train ticketing kiosk to effect payment. While Osaifu-Keitai is a product of bringing together an array of players, other wallets are sponsored by either a bank, operator or a combination of both. Mobile operators typically favour SIM-based wallets. All the functionality is embedded onto the Subscriber Identity Module. The application is pre-loaded or provisioned over the air and the database is main...
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