UN Global Pulse at Mobile Monday Kampala

UN Global Pulse at Mobile Monday Kampala

For the past five months, UN Global Pulse has had a team of two Innovation Officers on the ground in Uganda.  The team has been working closely with the Global Pulse staff in New York to lay the groundwork for establishing a Pulse Lab, located in Kampala.  This work comes from a request by the Permanent Mission of Uganda to the UN General Assembly that Uganda to be the host country for the first of these groundbreaking labs.

Pulse Lab Kampala will be a physical space where software developers, designers and analysts can work together to address pressing problems around crisis impact monitoring by utilizing real-time information and new technologies.  It will be a space where private sector, academia and civil society can share space, tools and lessons in a collaborative learning and experimentation environment.  It will be a place where tried and tested, locally created solutions can scale, both to the national level to support the Government of Uganda and its partners, and to a global level to enhance the Global Pulse technology platform’s technology toolkit.

Last month, three members of the Global Pulse New York team, including myself, the Global Pulse Director and our Chief of Partnerships, went to Uganda for a weeklong mission to synthesize thinking done to date on the Lab, while at the same time creating new opportunities for partnerships and collaboration. We met with some fantastic potential collaborators – everyone from top technology firms in Uganda to key government officials – and fleshed out plans for Pulse Lab Kampala.

One of the most interesting events occurred on the first night of our stay; Global Pulse was invited to speak at the monthly meeting of the Kamapala chapter of “Mobile Monday.”  The event brought together thought leaders from the mobile technology space to discuss mobile finance. While at first glance this topic may not seem like an immediate fit for the Global Pulse project, the rich discussions that ensued made it clear that the value add of a Pulse Lab in Kampala would not be limited to specific sectoral areas such as food security, health, or education. Rather, there will be tremendous benefit from having a collaborative space in which to develop open source solutions for inter-related social issues across the board… Continue Reading the Full Post Here.