User:Mahenge michael john

1.0 Introduction
In the developing world, there isevidence that many emerging mobile users are found in rural areas (Sood, 2006),and Africa has the world’s fastest growing mobile phone subscriptions (ITU,2006). For example in Tanzania, mobiletelephony has been cited as the fastest growing ICT sub-sector, with five mobileproviders-TIGO, Zanzibar Telecom (ZANTEL), VODACOM, Tanzania TelecommunicationCompany Limited (TTCL) and AIRTEL. The opportunity brought about by mobilephones can be used to improve rural likelihood and accessibility to educationalopportunities.

2.0 Current Contribution to rural likelihood
According to Siffe A. (2010), mobilephones provide rural households with fast and easy modes of communication,thereby increasing their ability to access livelihood assets, undertake diverselivelihoods strategies, and overcome their vulnerabilities. The phonescontribute to improve rural livelihoods through a number of ways. First, byexpanding and strengthening social networks; increase people’s ability to dealwith emergencies and to work together thereby reducing costs and increasingproductivity. Secondly, mobile phones enable rural people to cut down travelcosts; minimize physical risks; maximize the outcomes of necessary journeys;increase temporal accessibility; amplify efficiency of activities; and sendand receive money. Thirdly, mobile phones help rural traders and farmers tosecure better markets and prices; save time and money; and promptly communicatebusiness-related information.

3.0 Recommendation
However, mobile phones have notmade important contributions to improve education delivery and accessibility indeveloping country like Tanzania. The problem domain is inefficient, shortageof learning resources and costly delivery of educational resources. Theopportunity brought about by mobile phone can be used to improve educationdelivery and accessibility through mobile delivery service which can makelearning content available anywhere at any time needed by the learners. Toachieve mobile- delivery service, the centralized local database managementsystem integrated with the mobile technologies is proposed in this case. The centralizeddatabase will keep track of educational resources like books, notes, articles;and allowing open access through mobile phones. This will bridge the gapexisting in the context of educational resources accessibility in most schoolsand learning institutions. The expected result is timely and cost effectivedelivery of learning contents to improve educational performance.