About Us

Rural Web is a community or network of people who believe life long learning and ICT skills form the keys to development. We make available our friendship, knowledge and certain tools to help people to apply ICT for Development (ICT4D), especially in developing countries.

The site provides a single entry point for people from developing countries who seek to improve their own lives, as well as for people and NGO’s working in development aid. The idea is that lots of useful information is available online, but to find and use it, you need to know how ICT works and what can be found online. But ICT is also just a tool which’ value will only become apparrent when applied to a certain task. 

To help people achieve more with ICT, Rural Web works on 4 main axes: 

  1. community building based on personal interaction. Taking part in Rural Web means becoming part of a family who will help you wherever they can, grow with you and support you. Personal relations, participation and interaction are key to our success.
  2. a personal development plan – “Our way” – based on a Dream-Learn-Do-Achieve mantra which helps develop good habits and shows how to use Rural Web’s tools in every day life.
  3. a Chest of Knowledge: links to third party resources as well as our own resources, which are useful for people mastering basic ICT-skills, or living or working in a development context.
  4. Learning Circles: We promote life long learning, and developed the concept of learning circles to aid with that. We also work on and promote development and sharing of curricula specially for people from developing countries.

Who participate?

Ruralweb is offered to you by a community of over 150 persons from all over the world. All of them support Ruralweb with their time and expertise. Maintenance of the site is done until now by the initiator, Cheryl van Kempen who also pays all costs: >200 euro per year. (15 euro per year until 2013)

The User community is steadily growing and includes very diverse users; both from developing communities and from developed communities, both with advanced ICT skills (i.e. working in the ICT sector) and with only few ICT skills. We also collaborate closely with some organisations.

Ruralweb was initiated in the Netherlands, and some of the core group participants live there. Most activities take place online however, so anybody can join. We do not focus on any particular region in the world and try to publish all information openly on the web.

This is a web 2.0 process: anybody interested in being involved can get involved and any idea is welcome. Everything we do, we do in a mindset of open source, open data, co-creation co-learning and attribution where possible.

Contact & Follow

Ruralweb was initiated by Cheryl van Kempen and Firmin Soutime during A Call 2 Action 2011. Inemarie Dekker was community manager from 2012 to 2014, after which Cheryl took over again.

Ruralweb would not be here without the support of all volunteers, followers, people and organizations who told us: “this is a good idea, go through with it!” Ruralweb is possible thanks to all of them, and you are welcome to join our community.

Most interaction among members takes place in the facebook group, but communication also takes place through newsletters.

Contact Ruralweb via: info@ruralweb.info

Become a member by subscribing for the newsletter or following us via the social media

 Join the discussion on Facebook Or follow @ruralwebinfo on twitter

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