• economic growth, agriculture and trade;
• global health; and,
• democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.

USAID has set up Grand challenges which include such acute development needs as installing piped drinking water for households, deploying high-quality irrigation systems with locally-accessible replacement parts, and using the latest mobile technologies for banking, sharing vital health data, paying salaries, and checking commodity prices.

Some of their mobile phone initiatives right now are SMS together with radio in Haiti, $100 Million project opportunity for mHealth in Malawi.

Read more on their blog and become a fan on Facebook.

Midnight sun in Kiruna, picture source Wikipedia

MKFC Stockholm College and MKFC Helsinki College takes off for our annual summer break during July.

With midnight sun in Sweden we gather our families in our ’summer homes’.

Until August, Happy Holidays!

Sharing Awareness ™ -team in Stockholm and Helsinki

Patrick Awuah was born in Ghana and shares his experiences in the subject. He tells about the importance to train and to get educated in leadership. I am glad to know what teacher training can do in those areas

The theme for this year is “Home”, reflecting the work of UNHCR in trying to help refugees find new homes – in their native countries or abroad. The theme also highlights the increasing difficulties in doing just that, in a world where many armed conflicts have escalated in recent years.

Several different events will be held around the world to bring attention to World Refugee Day, and UNHCR encourages everyone to get involved.

Follow UNHCR on Twitter, or read more about their work on Flickr where updates are posted regularly.

Written by Fanny Johansson

Wal-Mart executives said it decided to work with an online university instead of a brick-and-mortar school after surveying more than 32,000 of its employees and learning that most of them wanted the scheduling flexibility afforded by online classes.

This result, of course, is not very surprising. Indeed, flexible scheduling is one of the main requirements most working adults have when they consider returning to higher education.

The author of the blog thinks that “the Wal-Mart program, because of its potentially very large number of students and the visibility of the employer, looks suspiciously like a significant step forward in the evolution of for-profit higher education as a disruptive innovation”.

Read the whole article at the blog Changing Higher Education

We at MKFC Stockholm College have worked with eLearning integrated with working life for ten years and know the impact this has on organizations and individuals. We wish Wal-Mart good luck!

Picture: Millennium International Documentary Film Festival

Tomorrow, June 12, marks the start of the second Millennium International Documentary Film Festival in Brussels. This week-long festival, supported by the United Nations, will show films that deal with different aspects of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

One of the festival’s main aims is to show the realities – the real lives of real people – behind the eight MDGs. Some of the topics that will be addressed are the Congolese civil war, a Polynesian community dealing with the effects of climate change, and the harsh working conditions of the Kenyan flower industry. Several different documentaries will be shown between 12-18 June, and there will also be panel discussions, special events and live performances.

For more information, please refer to the Millennium International Documentary Film Festival official homepage or the UNDP homepage.

Source: UNDP.

Written by Fanny Johansson

Paul Polak is founder of Colorado-based non-profit International Development enterprises (IDE)—is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots.

Polak share his experiences and practical strategies in this video clip. You can also find more information on his homepage and Twitter.

Human Rights, Childrens Rights, democracy and gender are in focus in the MKFC discussions with Catherine Isaksson, Secretary General of Centerpartiets Internationella Stiftelse. CIS, among others, runs ongoing projects in South Africa to improve shanty town pre school activities, and another one aiming to improve the quality of teacher educations at a college near by. MKFC could contribute with high quality educational content as well as the e-learning method End-to-End eLearning™.

In the discussions so far we have a similar opinion on the power of change for development in learning activities, and on the huge potential in good e-learning, including the use of different social media.

Olle Lundberg

Mobile phones are transforming health care in many developing countries, reports BBC.

The use of mobile phones worldwide is becoming more and more widespread each day, which makes it an ideal tool for health workers gathering vital information. Using an application called EpiSurveyor, critical data collection concerning, for example, vaccines and HIV rates, has now been made faster and more efficient. The application has been used successfully in several projects, for examle in a malaria study in Nigeria.

Read more here.

Source: BBC.

Written by Fanny Johansson

The 5th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training. This annual event for developing e-learning capacities in Africa took place in Lusaka, Zambia on May 26th to 28th 2010.

Four members from MKFC Stockholm and Helsinki College took part in this conference: Eva Kagiri with eCAP East Africa, Jonas Kwadwo Ansah Boateng with House of Grace Foundation / Ghana Institute of Jornalism, Tuomas Erkkila with MKFC SharingAwareness and Kwabena Obiri-Mainoo with eCAP Ghana Foundation.

Eva Kagiri held a pre-workshop on Wednesday, 26th May, on “Sharing Awareness – Lifelong Well-Beingfor Communities: Improving Health and Creating Change at the Community Level Using ICT”.

Participants who were interviewed after the sessions commented that the workshop was “very interactive and helpful for others to use in their projects.”

Kwabena Obiri-Mainoo also shared a presentation on Thursday, 27th May. His topic was “Sharing Health Education with Rural People in Ghana through ICT”.

The presentation focused on practical ways eCAP Ghana Foundation has been working to bridge the gap in providing health education in underdeveloped and rural communities.