Radio Marché Service ready for deployment in Mali

The Radio Marché Service will help farmers in Mali to broadcast their offerings of produces like sheabutter and honey on the local radio using innovative Voice Technologies. The Radio Marché Service marks the first phase of the pilot of the VOICES-W4RA project. It is now going to be deployed in Mali, next week (13-19 November 2011).

The system was developed by a close collaboration of teams from VUA and Web Foundation, also using valuable inputs from partners at North-West University and France Telecom.
Yesterday, November 10th, the team at VUA managed to get the Radio Marché system up and running using the Office Route hardware for the Web-Mobile interface.
The advantage of using OfficeRoute is the fact that no internet connection is necessary.
Apart from this we are also going to test the service using the France Telecom voice platform: Emerginov, and compare the (technical) results. For the Emerginov solution you need an internet connection to enter the data. The radio stations can use Radio Marché without having an internet connection, only using their simple mobiles. This was in fact the objective of the whole setup of Radio Marché.

The system will first be deployed at Sahel Eco's office in Bamako, and then tested at the radio stations of ORTM Segou and Radio Moutian. We are very interested to hear the reaction of the actual users in Mali. Is this system useful? Do they like it? Will it serve the local situation?

More about the Radio Marché Service in a short while.
To be continued....