Mobile Phones in Ehiopia

The mobile phone is among the technologies that have been directly transferred to Ethiopia, reports EthioBlog.

"... As the majority of the people of the country are not familiar with the English language or other languages that are used on mobile phones, we observe many people can’t do a routine operation like save a friends name and number.

“Because of the language barrier, many people in our area and the majority of Ethiopians do not properly understand the English menus on their cell phones,” says Abraham. “What we did was to figure out how we can solve the problem.”

... Abraham and his team eveloped 200 characters on the nine keys of a Motorola apparatus. Using Amharic language characters, they were able to develop phone book, message and phone settings in Amharic."

... They are looking for a partner who is willing to provide them with the necessary equipment to finalize their research and develop their first fully compatible Amharic mobile phone operating system using Symbian."

(Picture left from Mobile Phones in Ehiopia)

Related Essay by Jan Chipchase for Nokia:Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication

Overview:

-- Emerging markets have higher numbers of textually non-literate people than more developed markets

-- Effective use of mobile phone features requires an understanding of textual prompts

-- Contact management and asynchronous communication in particular presents challenges for textually non-literate people

-- Solutions can be categorized as improvements to the phone, the ecosystem and to the operator infrastructure

emily | 6:18 PM | Mobile phone projects - Third World |
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