Blessing Hwacha
A WebRTC BASED MULTIMEDIA CLIENT:
A CASE STUDY FOR MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES TO INTERACT WITH GOVERNMENT SERVICES
Supurvisor: Dr. Zelalem Shibeshi Co-Supervisor: Prof Alfredo Terzoli
The lack of critical ICT infrastructure to communicate and gain access to essential government services has contributed to the delay in bridging the gap in service delivery between remote, disadvantaged communities and the remainder of the world. This phenomenon is worsened by the high cost, poor maintenance, and little to no scalability of the already existing means of access to these services. This study within the area of ICT4D investigates the possibility of a Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) based multimedia client for marginalized communities to interact with government services. This will be done by harnessing the power of a WebRTC gateway and its interoperability with legacy telephony like the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The desire in this approach is not only to achieve a cost-effective solution, but the integration of telecommunication means in a bid to upscale accessibility and service delivery turnaround time of otherwise disadvantaged communities.The research is use-case-centered: as there are many WebRTC implementations available today, the aim is to produce one that mitigates the disadvantages faced by the poor when trying to access modern means of communication. We used the Twilio gateway to implement a web application that can make phone calls from the browser to a legacy telephone network at the cost of data only to the caller.
