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Tech Life

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How tech is transforming the way the world works, learns and plays

Tech Life discovers and explains the ways technology is changing our lives, wherever we are in the world.

Tech Life discovers and explains the ways technology is changing our lives, wherever we are in the world. We meet the people with bright ideas for rethinking the way we work, learn and play, and get hands-on with the products they dream up. We hold tech giants to account for their huge power to affect our lives, and ask who wins, and who loses, in the technology transformation. Tech Life is your guide to a future being made, and remade, at lightning speed in front of our eyes.

Tech Life: Development Tech

11/07/2014

Development Tech

BBC World Service - Tech Life, Development Tech

How tablets are giving Nigerian farmers easier access to subsidised fertiliser and seeds

Are technologies usually associated with commerce actually more valuable in help developing countries to advance? Presented by Jane Wakefield.

Electronic devices carried into the US and UK by air passengers will be checked more thoroughly at airports from this week. But what has changed concerning the terrorist threat? We hear about the chilling technological developments the bomb-makers are thought to be trying to use.

Technologies such as contactless card payments, allowing you save a few seconds when you buy a coffee, are sometimes seen as frivolous. But is the real value of these technologies more likely to be in helping developing countries to progress? 

We discover how tablet computers are giving Nigerian farmers easier access to subsidised fertiliser and seeds, even in very remote areas. And we learn how smartphones could soon be saving eyesight in Africa and Asia.

Presented by Jane Wakefield, with special guest Ken Banks, the anthropologist and mobile technologist founder of Kiwanja.net, and Dave Lee and Mark Ward from the BBC online technology desk.

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