Bottom billion architecture
Jörg Dörflinger, Tom Gross · 2010
The progress of developing countries towards an information society has entailed a strong demand for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access solutions that are able to cope with the infrastructural and cultural requirements specific to rural developing areas. Most software architectures developed in former ICTD projects realize ICT access limited to one specific concept like kiosk PCs or Smartphones or SMS applications. However, extensible and reusable architectures supporting multiple concepts are missing. In this paper, we present the Bottom Billion Architecture (BBA), a software architecture that supports various hardware (Desktop PCs, Smartphones, Feature and Non-Feature Phones), applications (native, Java, Mobile Web) and data channels (voice, signalling, data). Implemented in rural South Africa, the BBA was deployed within a real procurement use case, following a Living Lab approach. During a eight month pilot experiment the BBA proved to be an appropriate architecture concept to host an improved ICT enabled procurement process that saves time and money of the participating shops. To test and improve the generalizability of the BBA concept it will be replicated in an agricultural use case in rural Ghana.