Keitai

“Nokia and international children’s organisation, Plan (formerly Foster Parents’ Plan), have joined forces to use modern communications technologies in Africa to raise children’s awareness of their rights and opportunities. Nokia has provided an initial donation of 1 million Euros for 2006. The first stage of this new joint effort will see Nokia focus on supporting Plan’s existing media and communications technology projects for Africa’s children and youth.” [via Mobile Africa]

More about Plan’s media and communications programs can be found on their site. The existing programs seem to mostly focus on children producing radio programs for local broadcast:

Africa - Rights of the Child in Malawi
Radio program in Malawi, in partnership with Malawi Broadcasting Corp and funded by UNICEF. Children produce radio shows about their rights.

Asia - Agami | “Future” in Bangladesh
Weekly television show in Bangladesh broadcast by BTV, the national public network. Children host the shows and talk about issues relevant to their lives. The show reaches millions of viewers.

Asia - Children’s voice in Nepal
The radio project produced and broadcast in Nepal has involved more than 100 children. The show aims to promote child rights and child participation.

Adding mobiles with video, audio and moblogging capabilities to all this would certainly enhance the content creation capabilities and lead to all sorts of interesting roving child journalist programs. I ran into an example (PDF) of a similar project a while back from India via Nokia’s New Horizon’s Newsletter. The project offered students a 7610 cameraphone along with a copy of Life Blog to allow them to creatively record aspects of their community engagement.

Their assignments were aimed at fostering the self-directed, collaborative approach to learning that is often lacking in Indian schools. The most significant benefit of the Learning Lab Initiative for students, says Mr Sood, is that it offers them a hitherto unavailable chance to learn by expressing themselves creatively.

You can subscribe to the newsletter on this page (beware, it’s a paper copy sent by mail. A PDF is also available if you hunt for it.)

I also ran into the related Nokia Community Involvement section which outlines other similar projects, case studies and success stories involving youth in emerging markets.