Information and Communication Technologies for Development

I was very excited to join the Smart Microloans team just over a week ago. Within that short week the team has become a cohesive unit, orchestrating meetings with our course advisor as well as our project sponsors from the India School Fund. Both of the meetings gave our team an invaluable amount of detail about the scope of our project and the deliverables expected at the end of the ICT4D class. Probably the best aspect of the ICT4D class is that at the end of the semester our prototype could actually be tested in India and be used to meet otherwise unmet financial needs of Indian villagers, how exciting.
In our meeting with Esmerelda Megally and Ranjani Saigal, the India School Fund sponsors, there was considerable talk about the framework in which our solution would be offered, and such discussion was invaluable to get our heads around possible obstacles we might face in implementation. We also whittled down the scope of the project to look at offering a platform technology to provide financial information about the villagers to the banks so that they could assess their creditworthiness and award loans. There are two clients involved in the service we would offer, lenders and borrowers, and it is important that we ensure that the borrower recognize the bulk of the benefits. Okay, gotta run and do my needs assessment survey....
Leigh