Grameen Foundation and Google create mobile apps for Africa

Real time information about farming, health and trading will be available to mobile phone users in Uganda with new technology services developed by the Grameen Foundation, Google and telecom operator MTN, writes The Seattle Times.

About 18 months ago The Grameen Foundation started a project called the Application Laboratory (AppLab), with much of the work being done in Seattle through the Grameen Foundation's Technology Center.

Peter Bladin, Grameen Foundation executive vice president, said AppLab builds on the success of an earlier project, Village Phone, in which local entrepreneurs rent cell phone use to villagers for pennies a call. Uganda now has 50,000 Village Phone and pay phone operators and nine million cell phone subscribers.

Bladin said he sought out Google and MTN Uganda to help scale up the applications and roll them out to other parts of Africa, where Google has seven offices.

The new services can be accessed by existing Village phone operators, as well as by people with their own phones.

Read full article.

Related Grameen Foundation news release

Disaster-prone Bangladesh trials cell phone alerts

Tens of thousands of mobile users in Bangladesh's flood and cyclone-prone areas will now receive advance warning of an impending natural disaster through an alert on their cell phones, reports Reuters.

... Bangladesh, with a population of around 162 million, has more than 46 million mobile phone subscribers.

Syed Ashraf, communications specialist for the country's Disaster Management Bureau, told Reuters by telephone that the messages would not be the usual SMS format, but would flash automatically on the screen of mobile phone sets, instead of going to message boxes.

This way, people would not have to even push a button on their handsets, making it very user-friendly, he said.

Image from newleypurnell's photostream on flickr.

Mobiles boost Africa climate data

Gaping gaps in weather and climate data across Africa may be filled by a partnership between humanitarian groups and mobile phone companies, reports the BBC.

The project aims to deploy 5,000 automatic weather stations across the continent mounted on phone masts.

They will gather data on aspects of weather such as rainfall and wind, and send it to national weather agencies.

Former UN chief Kofi Annan says the project could help save lives of people on "the frontlines of climate change".

"The world's poorest are also the world's most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change, and the least equipped to deal with its consequences," he said.

"Today you find cell phone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale, until now."

Nokia to Offer Life Tools for Rural Mobile Users

Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more emerging markets following a successful pilot program in India, a company executive said Monday. Yahoo Tech.

Nokia is now formulating plans to roll out Life Tools, which includes agricultural and educational services for rural mobile users, in other emerging markets following the "great success" of a trial conducted in India.

Nokia sees emerging markets in Asia and elsewhere as an important source of growth as the number of mobile subscribers increases and many come to rely on their handsets for Internet access.

Juniper Research: Cheap Phones Are Big Business

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will rise to north of 700 million units, up 22% from this year. TechCrunch reports.

The report goes into the various schemes that have been implemented to help ‘connect the unconnected’, or the estimated 3 billion people on the planet that do not own mobile phones.

That number include people who live in areas where wireless networks offer coverage, something that is not always the case because operators tend to shy away from underdeveloped markets because of limited chances of financial return on investments. Apparently, the key to be able to tap into this vast pool of potential customers in these so-called ‘emerging markets’ lies in drastically reducing the cost of handsets that can be used by low-income users.

Read full article.

The Cellphone has been crucial in binding India together

India now adds more cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role there — more so, it seems, than in the wealthy countries where it was invented. The New York Times reports.

Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only a third of the population. But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions of people.

Imagine what it was like — in the Pre-Cellular Age — to be young in a traditional household. People are everywhere. Doors are open. Judgments fly. Bedrooms are shared. What phones exist are centrally located.

The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours.

Read full article

Treating crop diseases via mobile phone

Mobile phones are being used to diagnose and treat crop diseases that cause massive losses to farmers. The East African reports.

An initiative in two districts of Uganda, has community knowledge workers sending text messages to farmers in a given locality.

The information may include how to arrest the diseases, and where to buy uncontaminated seeds, as well tips on how to improve soil quality to increase yields.

“We have trained the workers on how to use mobile phones to get information to the farmers. They offer agricultural tips and advise through the phones on what to do and not to do to control the diseases,” said Whitney Gantt of Grameen Foundation, a global anti-poverty organisation.

Many small scale farmers in Africa still rely on little more than their instincts and past experience to decide which crops to plant.

They lack access to information specific to their farm areas including type of soil, fertilisers, best seeds, climatic conditions as well as market prices.

Kerala farmers adopt SMS service to know rubber prices

According to The Hindu, many rubber farmers and dealers in Kerala are tracking the prices of the commodity real time, helped by a service by the Rubber Board which through SMSes updates the farmers with rates in the global as well as domestic markets.

The Rubber Board provides the update of both national and international rates of natural rubber through SMS throughout the country at rupees two per SMS.

"On an average 300-400 SMSes are received on a daily basis from around Kerala," a senior Board official said.

Free text messages save lives in Malawi

A simple SMS system is revolutionizing medical care in Malawi, where scarce resources and a skeleton hospital staff must serve thousands of people spread over hundred of square miles. The Guardian reports.

Josh Nesbit, an undergraduate at Stanford University in California teamed up with Ken Banks, the founder of Cambridge-based FrontlineSMS – free text message software aimed at charities and NGOs – and created FrontlineSMS:Medic

Community health workers, most of whom had never seen a mobile phone, let alone owned one, were trained to send text messages containing medical information back to the hospital staff.

If health workers sent a drug name in a text, the system would automatically respond with information on dosages and usage. Health workers can also give status updates on particular patients or make a call for further medical information to help them treat cases on the go. It is particularly important in a country where HIV and Aids are rife – with infection rates as high as 70% in some areas.

The pilot project, which has been running for five months, has already had a significant impact: as well as getting emergency medical attention for 130 people who would have otherwise gone unseen, it has allowed the hospital's tuberculosis officer to treat twice as many people because his time can now be more used more efficiently.

Read article.

Help for poor to access banking

Bill Gates' charitable foundation has pledged $12.5m (£8.6m) to help the world's poor access banking services. The BBC reports.

Working in conjunction with the mobile phone industry, the foundation aims to help provide a basic service that local banks are unable or unwilling to give.

It is thought that more than a billion people worldwide do not have a bank account but do have a mobile phone.

The foundation says that extending banking services to the world's poor is vital for economic progress.

... Research by consultants McKinsey estimates that the mobile money market for people without a bank account could grow to $5bn over the next three years.

Related: - Bill Gates grant to extend mobile banking to poor

Mobile Phones to Serve as Doctors in Developing Countries

"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world. The New York Times reports.

In a recent study released by the UN and Vodafone titled, "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World," over 50 of these types of initiatives throughout 26 countries were discussed. The biggest adopters of mobile technology were India with 11 projects and South Africa and Uganda with 6 each.

The new alliance wants to guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how mobile technology can be used to help save lives.

Examples of the mHealth projects included:

-- Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.

-- Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.

-- In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.

-- In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.

Read full article.

Bill Gates grant to extend mobile banking to poor

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has agreed to help fund a massive rollout of projects enabling poor mobile phone users to transfer money using their handsets, an industry body announced Tuesday. From Yahoo Tech.

The GSM Association, which represents 750 mobile phone networks in the world, said a grant of 12.5 million dollars (9.8 million euros) from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would help fund 20 initiatives in Asia, Africa and South America.

Money transfer via mobile phone is seen as a potential area of growth for network operators in developing countries, where millions are without access to the banking system.

"There's 1.7 billion people in the emerging markets who don't have a bank account but do have a mobile phone, so they could use their mobile phone to conduct financial transactions," explained Michael O'Hara, marketing director or the GSMA.

"The target is to reach 20 million additionnal unbanked people with the service by 2012," he added.

About 12 mobile phone banking programmes have been launched worldwide in the last few years, with about 10 million users benefiting so far.

The Gates Foundation said the grant was part of its programme to extend financial services to the poor who are often without access to a simple savings account.

"The foundation believes that setting aside small sums in a safe place allows people to guard against risks and build financial security," said spokeswoman Susan Byrnes in a statement received by AFP in Washington.

The GSMA estimates that the money transfer market on mobile phones could represent 5.0 billion dollars by 2012.

'Mobile health' campaign launched

Three foundations have announced their intention to join in a "mobile health" effort to use mobile technology to provide better healthcare worldwide. The BBC reports.

The UN, Vodafone, and the Rockefeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance aims to unite existing projects to improve healthcare using mobile technology.

The alliance will guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how they can save lives in the developing world.

The partnership is now calling for more members to help in mHealth initiatives.

The groundbreaking "mHealth for Development" study produced by the UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership lists more than 50 mHealth programmes from around the world, showing the benefits that mobile technology can bring to healthcare provision.

The report also outlines how such programmes offer value to the mobile industry.

Read full article.

Harnessing Personal Movement for Power in Rural Africa

Dr. Cedrick Ngalande has announced a new project called Green Erg, which harnesses (literally) a person’s movement energy to create electricity.

Designed to work perfectly on all types of road, ground or floor conditons. Will generate power when attached to a person walking or to a moving skating board, bike, ox-cart, farm animal...

"At normal walking speeds we have gotten more than 2 watts which is more than enough for running cell phones or radios."

[via Afrigadget]

SMS scheme taps work force in developing countries

A new scheme that distributes simple tasks via text messages is being used to target a potential untapped work force in developing countries. The BBC reports.

Txteagle is making it possible for many people in countries like Kenya to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks like translations or transcriptions.

The service was founded by Nathan Eagle, a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

... "An individual in Kilifi receives the text message saying, please translate the word 'address book'.

"They type in that particular word and it gets sent back to our server, which is collecting a lot of responses from that same task until we are confident we have the right answer.

"Once we get the right answer we push it back to - in this case - Nokia.

"This system enables companies like Nokia to build-up a corpus of these translations, so that they can do software localisation," he said.

He feels that texting tasks like simple translations to participants in developing countries is economical not only in a business sense but also provides participants with an additional source of income.

... All payments for completed tasks are received by mobile phones, using M-PESA, a popular mobile banking service.

Cell phones to fight India rebels

The government in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has given free mobile phones to more than 200 village leaders to help fight Maoist rebels. The BBC reports.

Police say the aim is to receive swift tip-offs about rebel movements.

... Some 220 village headmen have already received mobile phones; more are due to get them in weeks to come, police officials say.

Villagers have been provided with important police numbers to call up in the event of an emergency or if they notice Maoist movements.

Officials say the government will pay the bills for the phones, but that they will have to guard against misuse. .

A Ugandan Housewife’s Homemade Mobile Phone Charger

Mrs. Muyonjo is a housewife in a remote village of Ivukula in Iganga district, Eastern Uganda. She had a bad experience with a local mobile phone charger, so decided to hack her own solution in response. Read the full story on the Women of Uganda Network’s site.

She uses ordinary size D batteries that are readily available in the village to power radios and torches. She wraped five (5) batteries together, then removed the plug from the phone charger and attached the bare wires to the + and – terminals of the batteries.

[via Afrigadget]

Cellphone application for farmers among finalists from India

A cellphone application which allows farmers in Maharashtra to remotely access their irrigation pumps has earned Pune-based Ossian Agro Automation a place in the finals of the Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators Contest to be held in Barcelona, Spain, on 17 February. livemint.com reports.

The remote access eliminates the need to travel, sometimes long distances in inclement weather, to check the power and turn on/off the pumps.

About 5,000 farmers are using the application, called Nano Ganesh , since its launch in September.

MALAWI: SMS to fight malnutrition

For the first time in years, John Phiri, a health extension worker in Malawi's central Salima district, does not have to fill in a stack of forms during his monthly round of collecting data to monitor nutrition levels in the community. IRIN reports.

Now he whips out his mobile phone and texts the data, including the height and weight of the children in the area, while covering his beat. The information is immediately captured by a computer that stores the national nutritional and food-security statistics in Lilongwe, the capital.

... The RapidSMS system, as it is called, is on a four-month trial run that began in January 2009 in three districts of Malawi's Central Province. The SMS (short message service) text message and web-based tool was developed by the Innovations and Development team of UNICEF, the UN children's agency, and allows text messages to be captured via the internet.

''The quick collection and availability of data can help government and other aid agencies intervene if the statistics show a crisis is unfolding''.

Besides the obvious advantage of speed and quality of data, the system also creates spreadsheets and graphs, allowing for easy interpretation of the data.

Read full article.

Nokia To Launch 'Live Tools' For Farmers, Students In India

According to TopNews.in, Nokia plans to roll out subscription-based mobile phone services ‘live tools’ for the farming and student community in India.

Mr. D. Shiva Kumar, Managing Director, Mobile Phones, Nokia India, stated that with these new services, farmers can easily get information on agriculture, commodity prices and weather to the farming community and other related issues over their mobile handsets.

As for students, they will be taught a new word on a daily basis, and also know how to use it. It is said that if one learns about 700 words, he/she will be capable of conversing in that language.

Help Support AfriGadget’s Young Mobile Reporters

The Grassroots Reporting Project puts smarter mobile phones into the hands of young Africans and has them report on
AfriGadget.

So far the right people have been identified for the project, but
AfriGadgett needs to raise $500 to make it happen.

A combination of mobile phones and computers will be assigned to individuals in 10 African countries for the purpose of getting more on-the-ground reporting of stories of African ingenuity to the world. An AfriGadget editor will be in charge of identifying the best candidates for inclusion in the program. This editor will also travel to each country to train and equip the new AfriGadget reporters for the program.

Chip in!

Texts tackle HIV in South Africa

The popularity of mobile phones in South Africa is helping to tackle HIV and Aids in the nation. The BBC reports.

Project Masiluleke will send one million free text messages a day to push people to be tested and treated.

Approximately 350,000 people die of Aids-related diseases in the country every year.

Trials of the system showed that calls to counsellors at the National Aids helpline in Johannesburg increased by 200% when messages were broadcast.

Related:

-- Cell phones mobilized to fight AIDS in Africa

-- RU OK? South Africans tackle AIDS with texts

-- SMS fight Aids in Kenya

AFRICA: Communication technologies transform elections

That technological change is transforming economic and social relations in Africa has become something of a cliche and is often presented as a panacea for Africa's ills. Mobile-phones and the internet are being used to coordinate agricultural prices, transfer money and coordinate famine relief. However, the political impact of new technologies has received less attention.

A special report from the IHT.

Rigging. Innovative non-governmental organizations including the National Democratic Institute in the United States have pioneered the use of mobile phones in the process of election monitoring. The first recorded example of the exclusive use of a mass coordinated mobile phone network to monitor an election occurred in Montenegro in 2006. In recent years, a decentralized system of releasing election results first at the constituency level combined with the spread of mobile phones, has allowed opposition parties and monitors to construct their own version of the 'real' election results in Africa.

Read full article.

Fish Texting and the Great Green Wave

The Huffington Post has an interesting article on how text messaging may become the companion service that will make (green and social change) net-based social networks really action-oriented:

"Take fish texting. Blue Ocean Institute has established what it calls Fish Phone in which you send the Institute a text message about a fish you are thinking of eating or buying, and the Institute replies with a green light message or some sustainable alternatives.

... The adaptation of texting to help make social groups make greener choices is hopefully just in its infancy. Open Green Maps, for example, is in the process of designing interactive online maps that would use texting to let users share information about sustainable services and events in their town, while Goose Networks lets users deploy texts to link together prospective ride shares.

And kiwanja.net is working on ways to use texting in developing nations for one-to-many communications on environmental and social change issues.

Selling Potatoes By Phone In Remote Bangladesh

CellBazaar, which offers a virtual marketplace for the 20 million mobile-phone subscribers of Bangladesh's GrameenPhone Ltd., might not sound like a big deal in much of the Wi-Fi-enabled, laptop-toting world. But to farmers and fishmongers in Bangladesh with almost no access to computer terminals -- and often without the electricity to power them -- the service is a much-needed portal to additional income in the densely populated agricultural nation. The WSJ reports.

"Although 75% of Bangladesh's population has no access to electricity and Internet penetration is only 0.03%, CellBazaar has more than one million users. A quarter of them use the service on a regular basis, with about 550 new items posted each day.

Almost all of that is by mobile phone, though CellBazaar also offers an online platform. But what Mr. Quadir, 36 years old, finds gratifying are the stories behind the numbers -- such as a post from a farmer in a remote area of Bangladesh offering to sell a bag of potatoes."

Image from Fresh Plaza

Cellphone Tales From Around the World

Cyriac Roeding, a mobile technology expert and enthusiast -- took a 'round-the-world odyssey to see how the rest of the world uses cellphones.

He saw parking meters that talk to phones in New Zealand, teenage text-messaging monks in a Himalayan monastery and cellphone charging stations along the Ganges River in India, right next to a raging funeral pyre.

... Roeding's take on his circumnavigation: "I have known how important mobile is for some time now, but I've got to tell you, I was personally surprised and sometimes shocked at how far the use of mobile goes," he said. "It actually surprised me that mobile is reaching to the very edges of the world."

Full story in The Washington Post.

Telecoms: One man's vision proves a lifeline in conflict zones and disasters

Satellite phone missions keep thousands in touch with the outside world. An interesting article by The Guardian on Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF.

"Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF), the brainchild of Jean-François Cazenave, has provided a vital link for aid agencies and a lifeline to friends and relatives from Iraq, Niger, Sri Lanka and Nicaragua and more recently, Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.

"In every disaster relief situation we saw the same thing, the need for victims to be able to communicate. And all the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also need telecommunications", Cazenave explains.

So he went back to his local council with a proposal and the mayor bought Cazenave his first satellite phone.

ince it's first mission in Albania in 1998, TSF has been out on more than 70 missions to 50-odd countries."

Picture above, a communication services set up in one of the 37 locations in Niger ravaged by famine.

Restricted mobility in an African Village

Ken Banks on kiwanja.net explains how a cell phone operator in a remote African village where competition is tough, offers his customers some privacy, by allowing them to try out a cell phone, tethered to a long wire. Clever.

Making a phone call on a Village Phone can hardly be called a private affair. First of all you're likely standing out in the open, the phone owner usually hangs around a couple of feet away, and children crowd around because that's what children do. In an attempt to break the mould - and gain a little competitive advantage...

New fuels will expand phone cover

The problem of providing mobile phone coverage to large expanses of the developing world may be coming closer to being solved through the use of alternative fuels. The BBC reports.

"Many people have little or no mobile coverage because base stations, which provide the signal that the phones use, are prohibitively expensive to run - mostly because of the fuel costs.

But the GSM Association - the trade body for the mobile phone industry - says solar power and biofuels could be used to power new base stations and so network up more of the world.

"... When you look at the cost of putting a new base station in to cover a group of villages, you're looking not only at the cost but of the road, of the electricity, and so on," Tom Phillips from the GSM Association said. "The costs can multiply many times."

Mr Phillips added that he was hopeful that the development of more base stations using alternative fuel sources would provide a source of income for the communities "as they manage the production of those fuels and secure the base station at the same time."

Burma's emergency telecoms delay

Foreign aid workers dedicated to delivering emergency telecoms in disaster areas have been prevented from going into cyclone-hit Burma. The BBC reports.

"Like many charity groups, the Telecoms Sans Frontières (TSF) organisation has so far been denied entry visas by the military-run government.

A TSF team has been waiting in Bangkok, Thailand, with its equipment all week.

If visas are eventually granted, the team will go in to set up phone and other network links.

These will be used by many aid groups to co-ordinate the huge relief effort that is needed.

Locals will also be offered "welfare calls", to make contact with friends and family who will have been worried about their safety.

The UN fears more than 1.5 million people have been affected by Cyclone Nargis which struck on Saturday.