I've been reading up on the research by Andrew Thatcher, a Psychology Professor in University of the Witwatersrand. His more recent work on cognition of technological devices and cognitive ergonomics is specifically of interest to my research. I think I got some useful ideas from his work on user responsiveness to ATMs in South Africa, from a pool of literate and semi-literate users. His research found that semi-literate users had found much less problems with the ATM process than the literate counter-parts. Interestingly, both groups showed a tendency to prefer the icon-based alternative ATM interface to the speech-based alternative interface and the traditional text-based ATM interface.

Donald Z. Osborn is an expert in rural development with extensive experience in West Africa. His paper on African Languages and Information and Communication Technologies:
Literacy, Access, and the Future, calls on to international communities to develop content in African languages. He specifically looks up to the African diaspora to initiate this venture. I found it interesting that efforts to improve ICT use involved knowing either English, Frech or Portugese that are spoken mainly in urban parts of the countries. Many African writing systems are designed to have a meaningful and graphical representation of knowledge. It would be a great idea to incorporate some of these concepts into applications targeting African audience, literate or otherwise.