Alcatel, founding partner of the "Connect the world "initiative”
Connect the World” is a global multi-stakeholder initiative launched by the International Telecommunication within the context of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, to consolidate and scale up existing development-oriented connectivity projects and stimulate new partnerships to achieve the goal of connecting all communities by 2015 in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) . It has 22 founding partners, including leading international companies, inter-governmental organizations, NGO s and national governments.
Read more...

Alcatel and Global Imaging Online develop digital medical imagery in Africa
Alcatel signed a 3-year Memorandum Of Understanding with Global Imaging Online, a French company specializing in medical treatment and medical diagnostic imagery. This partnership will allow people living in emerging countries, particularly in rural and isolated regions of Africa, to benefit from remote radiology diagnosis thanks to Alcatel’s broadband solutions for transferring data over the Internet.
Read more...

In Tunisia and Egypt: the “Partnership Centers”
Alcatel launched a “Partnership Center” in Tunis in December 2003 and another one in Cairo in September 2005. These “Partnership Centers” are essential places to foster exchanges and share expertise. They are incubation centers located within Alcatel premises and open to local partners selected on the basis of proposals. The company provides developers with a platform for the realization of innovative applications and services designed for mobile networks.
Since its inception, the Tunis Center has incubated 20 projects developed by 4 partners. The Tunis Center migrated in September 2005 from an original SMS-only platform to an MMS-enabled one. Three partners are already working on the development of MMS applications. In the Partnership Center in Cairo, 5 projects out of more than 20 submitted proposals have been selected. It is expected that by the end of the year all of them will have completed their first stage of development and will consider starting field trials through local mobile operator networks. An MMS platform is also available in Cairo. The next call for candidates will also be open to partners from other countries in the Middle East, highlighting the regional role of the Cairo partnership centre.

In South Africa: the Makuleke project
In 2005, in partnership with Manobi, the leading operator of mobile and Internet services dedicated to the rural sector of emerging countries and Vodacom, the main telecom operator in South Africa, Alcatel launched a groundbreaking pilot project in Makuleke (South Africa) to connect rural farmers to real-time market information. This service enables producers, intermediaries, and wholesalers to use a GSM mobile phone to obtain real-time prices for produce that is being traded on the main wholesale markets of Johannesburg and Pretoria, located hundreds of kilometers away. They can also sell their harvest to other potential buyers (restaurants and lodges for example) by making proposals through SMS to all other Manobi subscribers.
Approximately 200 farmers in this town of 15,000 inhabitants are trained to use the service in the pilot phase. The goal of this project is for the users to break out of their isolation by remedying their lack of information and thus their low competitiveness.
Read more...
Watch the video

	In 2003, Alcatel and Manobi launched an innovative project in Senegal to enable fishermen and farmers to know the prices of their production via mobile networks and thus to negotiate under more equitable conditions. Read more... Watch the video