Break the Digital Divide the African Way

Cameroonian android developers would love this one, a great way to start a post right…well a lot of thinking has been going on in the pulse team on ideas that will bring a real change to African education, and this particular idea which we expect to roll during the Pilot phase of Pulse was pitched in by one of our advisers.

University Professors who are to enroll in our pilot program will each receive an Android tablet PC, and this lands well as Cameroon prepares the Android Developer Challenge,

this will therefore be an opportunity for the developers to distribute their app and even monetize , Crazy idea or not, you may think, but we expect to introduce this feature later to all university students through university partnerships. We are so excited at the prospect of this feature and we hope the African and especially Cameroonian developers will find methods make extreme use of this. The reason why we are doing this is because we constantly question the status quo of higher education. Books , textbooks and pens though still valuable resources of our education,have had their time, today we starting a lil revolution, aiming digitize our educational resources, notes, textbooks, provide them to students. it will take time, money and effort to get this done, but we are going to start now.

Where will we take money to do this and are Tablets Pc not supposed to be expensive, well you are right, though we are still bootstrapped, we should be able to pull this over, so the team members Nara, Quincy, James, Horace and William are really putting all what they can to make this come life and yes tablets are expensive the average $300, but we are eying entry level devices (~$50 - ~$100) and we plan to start with the university of Buea, and will progressively extend to other universities. So if you are a developer and you are thinking, “Why come to Pulse, I can submit directly to the android market,” well you are 100% right, but think about your app coming pre-installed and potentially available to over 100,000 students.

• Will Pulse be selling Tablets ? No.


• Will these Tablet PC’s, be crucial for our platform to work ? No.

The Pulse platform will first and foremost work on the web and mobile,this feature just adds to break the digital divide the African way , we don’t even expect universities to get on board yet, but that shouldn’t stop us.

Now back to reality, do you think when we say we expect to give androids tablets to the professors who are to enroll in our pilot program, we may be joking or just trying to foster hype ? Well guys, No, as I speak write this post, I have ordered a my tablet and it should be arriving the US in a week or so, and later, all things being equal we expect to get our first shipment to Cameroon by the June-July.
Update : september -october 

If you are a developer and you are interested in looking into this, please drop us a note at android@pulse.cm #LesWaysFort my friend @izanefg will say, but we are strong believers of the pulse project and we shall continue provide news way to make things easier for the users.

I shall be explaining in later post,what we expect do with this Tablets, but right now, we just had to share this.