Dakar Live is the result of a project i worked on in 2009 with the Ibrahima Niang’s team from the Centre de Calculs at the Cheikh Anta Diop University  of Dakar, Senegal.

Today, there is no up-to-date map of the whole city of Dakar. You won’t find any tourism office or not many local communication booklets in the senegalese capital that is one of the most important destination and business place in Africa.

Dakar Live is a mobile application that allows the reading and the editing of dynamic geolocalized informations on Dakar’s activities. This application can be set up on basic mobile phones and the cost to access to the service is the one of a SMS. The interface displayed by the application consists in a system of layers of information: the user can superimpose the name or the outlining of the main Dakar’s streets with personal geo-tags or seeked activities. Dakar Live is a space where the city dweller as the tourist can discover new specific activities and places and receive their programmings. He can build its own msds of Dakar.

Senegalese touristic operators, guides, craftsmen, territorial collectivities, communities can list and offer their services through this application in an easy way. They don’t have to localize the exact place on the reduced screen but they just have to indicate shared landmarks linked to the place they want to register like a neighbourhood, a shop, a mosque, etc. In a city where the majority of the streets don’t have names, you identify places in relation to others.

This project relies on the technical platform Ibrahima and his young engeneers have developed and  that allows offering mobile applications at low cost.