I'm going to start periodically posting updates from our EPROM initiative at MIT. What has driven this initiative is the fact that today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of 2.4 billion mobile phone users worldwide. Africa is now the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world.

Yet the computer science curricula of universities throughout Africa still focus exclusively on traditional desktop computer programming. As a result, African computer science graduates are not qualified to address the computing needs of African people. 

In early 2006, MIT and Nokia launched a trial initiative called EPROM in East Africa to develop a mobile phone programming curriculum that equips computer science students with the skills to design mobile phone applications specifically for the needs of people in the developing world.  

Now going into its third year, EPROM has undergone considerable expansion - and with requests from dozens of additional universities across Africa, the initiative appears to be providing a much-needed service to the African computer science community. We've now expanded our mobile phone programming courses to 12 Computer Science departments across Sub-Saharan Africa.  This continued growth has led to hundreds of mobile phone applications developed specifically for the African market. Several of these student projects have gathered international media attention, while others are being formed into start-up ventures based in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Kigali and beyond. It's all pretty exciting - I'll be scheduling weekly posts about EPROM for the next couple of months... Stay tuned!