With the aid of the World Bank, a new mobile application has been designed and developed to monitor waste disposal in Ghana.
Officially launched as “The Ghana Districts Monitor”, the smartphone-based app also known as “Taarifa” which means “headline” in Swahili, is to help citizens and local governments to keep track of waste disposal across the country.
In a blog post March 26, 2013, Gaurav Relhan, an ICT specialist at the World Bank, said Taarifa is designed to be a sustainable and powerful social accountability tool, citing an example that the “app automatically captures GPS coordinates, works in the absence of any mobile internet signal (the information gets stored in the phone memory and is automatically sent when the phone connects with Wi-Fi or catches a signal), and the platform also integrates with regular SMS.”