Alcatel-Lucent’s Digital Bridge Initiative seeks to create win-win solutions based on innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in under-served, usually rural areas, in emerging countries. This is undertaken with the active involvement of local players, in order to create high added value services and applications designed to answer the needs of the local population.

In partnership with the NGO ATD Fourth World and DTS, Alcatel-Lucent inaugurated a project to equip deprived populations of Madagascar with DSL and WiMAX access.

Last 15 October a press conference was organized to announce the connection of the first of the 5 selected sites, and on the 17th a large popular celebration was held on the occasion of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Read more...

Alcatel-Lucent, the Orange Mali Foundation, Afrique Initiatives, Médicament Export and Kafo Yeredeme Ton provide preventative healthcare services inn the district of Bamako Coura in Mali

Pésinet has been designed to provide preventative healthcare services for children from 0 to 5 years old from low-income households thanks to remote diagnosis based on the tracking and monitoring of changes in the children’s weight. Read the press release Read more...

Alcatel-Lucent congratulated by ITU
On April 16th, 2007 at the opening ceremony of the Telecom Development Advisory Group (TDAG) in Geneva, Mr. Sami Al-Basheer, the ITU-D director, handed the Alcatel-Lucent delegation to this meeting a certificate acknowledging the gratitude of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) for Alcatel-Lucent ‘s long-standing support during the last ten years.
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Alcatel-Lucent joins with Cafés Malongo, the University of Nice and ComCEL to offer broadband Internet access to the isolated rural areas of Cap Rouge in Haiti
This pilot project called "Traçabilité du Café" (Coffee Traceability) will give Haiti's coffee cooperatives Internet access from their plantations by applying WiMAX and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies. By having such access to the latest information technologies, they will be able to monitor the traceability of their fair trade labeled production and sell their coffee on optimum terms by reducing the number of intermediaries.
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Alcatel-Lucent and the UN agency ESCWA  issue a report untitled "Broadband for development in the ESCWA Region
This report highlights the telecommunications development potential in 13 Middle-East countries, with examples of concrete business cases. It also provides an assessment of factors that hinder the deployment and spread of broadband, while proposing concrete actions to build the information society by using ICT (Information and Communication Technology) as a development enabler.
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Offering high speed Internet access to disadvantaged people in Madagascar

The company has signed an agreement with ATD Quart Monde, a non-governmental organization set up to fight world poverty, and Data Telecom Service, an Internet service provider and telecommunications operator in Madagascar, to supply broadband Internet access to the deprived people of Antananarivo. Read the press release

Developing digital medical imagery in Africa

The company 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 our broadband solutions for transferring data over the Internet.
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In Tunisia and Egypt: the “Partnership Centers”

The company 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.

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, the company 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.
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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.
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In Senegal: a project for fishermen and farmers
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.
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These few examples illustrate the key elements of Alcatel-Lucent's "Digital Bridge Initiative": respond to essential development needs, demonstrate innovative, tailored solutions, and work in close partnership with local players, to ensure solutions are reliable and future-proof.