“In this way we are helping farmers make decisions regarding where to sell, what to plant and how to best take care of their crops,” Shuman said. “It’s all about giving communities the ability to help themselves.”
Not all of the questions that come in are business-minded. Some are about sports — “Which is the better soccer team, Manchester United or Barcelona?” — or historical trivia.
In India, villagers can use Question Box through an actual box — a metal one with a push-to-talk button. They ask a question and an operator in a distant city will either look up the answer on the Web immediately or ask the callers to wait a few minutes before getting back to them.
In Uganda, though, that model proved unworkable because Internet connections are so slow. So the operators at Question Box search a locally stored database created by Appfrica Labs, a Ugandan company that hosts the call center. The database contains answers to past questions as well as a repository of documents, government statistics and research papers.
“A lot of this information isn’t even available on the Internet,” said Jon Gosier, chief technology officer of Question Box and founder of Appfrica Labs. “The real value in this database is that it contains a wealth of data that only pertains to the local areas.”
Most of Uganda’s rural agricultural communities are simply too remote to make it cost effective for Internet providers to offer service there, Gosier said.
“Even in the next 10 years I don’t think you’re going to see areas like this being wired. That’s why Question Box will continue to be an important tool for getting people in these areas the information they need,” he said.
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