'Mobile phones revolutionise e-commerce in Africa'

The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Tuesday released the results of a comprehensive study into the economic value of mobile phone use in Africa, particularly in the banking sector. Afrique en Ligne reports.

The study, undertaken by three academics, examined how mobile phones had 'revolutionised' e-commerce in Senegal, Kenya and South Africa, and the economic impact this has had on the rural populations in the three countries.

Read full article.

In mobile phone journalism, Africa is ahead of the west

In areas where net-connected computers are not as common, the mobile phone is already becoming a vital tool for news. The Guardian reports.

Apart from radio, mobile phones are a relevant distribution tool for news. Newspapers only matter in urban areas and with policy makers," says James Mbugua, Business Writer at Radio Africa.

TV has maybe gained, but newspapers provide the content that they actually talk about. The majority of people is getting their news with radio as it has a lot of reach in rural areas, or with mobile phones. So quite a few of the media houses send out text messages with breaking news, final scores of sport games and stocks."

Read full article.

Saving Lives with "SMS for Life"

A new solution developed by IBM, Novartis and Vodafone with the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, is helping to save lives using everyday technology to improve the availability of anti-malarial drugs in remote areas of Tanzania.

Tanzania has around 5,000 clinics, hospitals and dispensaries, but at any one time, as many as half could potentially be out of stock of anti-malarial drugs.

Called "SMS for Life," the initiative uses a combination of mobile phones, SMS technologies and intuitive web sites to track and manage the supply of Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT) drugs and Quinine injectables, both of which are key to reducing the number of deaths from malaria.

After visits to clinics, hospitals and dispensaries across Tanzania, IBM, Novartis and Vodafone initiated a five-month pilot of the SMS for Life solution, covering 135 villages and over a million people in different geographic locations across Tanzania.

Read full press release

Africa: Growing Use of Cellphones for Family Planning

Another way cell phones are being used in the developing world, by providing family planning information. allAfrica.com reports.

Bangladeshis rush to learn English by mobile

In an ambitious new project, the BBC World Service Trust is harnessing the latest communications technology to provide English language learning for over 50 million mobile users in Bangladesh.

The first of its kind in the world, this project will provide high quality English learning tools using mobile, television and the internet to millions of people, many of whom live on less than £2 a day.

Central to the project is BBC Janala (“Window”) which uses the mobile phone as a powerful low-cost learning device by offering over 250 audio and SMS lessons to the growing 50.4 million mobile users in Bangladesh.

To make the lessons affordable, the BBC has teamed up with all six of Bangladesh’s mobile operators who have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by up to 75%. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 3 taka (2.6p).

According to The Financial Times,

More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh have rushed to sign up to learn English over their mobile phones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch on Friday.

Part of a UK government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that mobile phones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.

[via Switched]

TED Talks Jan Chipchase on our mobile phones

Nokia's handsome researcher Jan Chipchase's investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. He's made some unexpected discoveries along the way.

Video on TED Talks

SIM Card operated Phone Booths

Equatel is a virtual phone, a SIM payphone system that works in places where regular handsets don’t have reception.

Individuals with their own pre-paid SIM cards, can make and take phone calls from a special GSM payphone, receive and send text messages, even make payments. And all of these operations are saved.

Watch the presentation.

[via L'Atelier via Twitter/RaphaelHunold]

Kabul Street Phone Charging Norms

How they charge cell phones in Kabul.

[via Jan Chipchase for Future Ferfect]

Student projects explore innovative cellphone uses in developing world

A cellphone is not just for calling, texting and taking pictures anymore. Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous devices. They are using phones to help people, especially in developing nations, to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they're going and even diagnose their ailments. MIT News reports.

Excerpts:

... Improving the delivery of health care in rural areas has been one major focus of these research efforts. Patients in a remote village, for example, now may have to spend a whole day or more traveling to the nearest clinic in order to be tested, diagnosed and receive treatment or a prescription drug for their health problems. But a new open-source software system developed by students who formed a nonprofit company called Moca could provide a faster way.

Using a menu of questions downloaded to a cellphone - and, if necessary, a picture taken with the phone's built in camera - a patient can transmit enough information to a doctor or nurse in a remote location to get a preliminary diagnosis, and to find out whether the condition warrants a trip to the clinic or not.

While Moca aims to improve people's health, some new cellphone ventures also aim to build users' wealth. One such plan is a project called Zaca, which initially aims to empower farmers in the poor, rural Mexican state of Zacatecas.

Farmers there have been doing so poorly that many have already emigrated to the United States (it is estimated that up to 1 million Zacatecans now live in the U.S., compared to about 1.3 million still in the state). The Zaca team hopes to alleviate the situation by giving the farmers more information, allowing them to make deals through their cellphones to sell their crops directly instead of having to deal through middlemen, and giving them details of crop prices and growing practices that can help them make better decisions about what to plant each year.

Read full article and MIT NextLab "Can you make a cellphone change the world?"

[via Raphael Hunold on Twitter]

Ethiopia. Testing carbon offset with mobile phones

Small farmers near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, are testing a carbon offset market facilitated by mobile phones. Green.Inc reports

Mr. Pohjonen’s son Matti, a Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, has been overseeing the technology end of the project.

“The standard function of a mobile phone is talking and texting,” Veli Pohjonen and the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs said. But it can also be used, he added, to access the Internet and run queries regarding carbon prices or exchange rates.

Veli Pohjonen and his son Matt have been testing the system on eight farms in the country’s central highlands, where the average farmer is earning approximately 1000 Birr, or $80, every six months from their carbon offsets.

Read full article. Image from EthioBlog.

Mobile Phone Use Soars in Africa, unevenly

Some interesting figures from a United Nations report on mobile phone growth in Africa, via Voice of America.

-- In the five years between 2003 and 2008, the number of subscriptions in Africa grew by more than 500 percent.

-- In Gabon, the Seychelles, and South Africa there are 100 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people.

-- In Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, the mobile industry has only penetrated 10 percent of the population.

-- The U.N. report says monthly Internet access in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic and Swaziland is more than $1,300, the highest in the world.

-- And only five countries - Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia - account for 90 percent of Africa's broadband subscriptions.

-- While Internet access in Africa remains largely elusive, according to the U.N. report wireless Internet is spreading fast in other developing regions. India registered almost 100-million new wireless subscriptions in the first half of 2009.

Kenyans to buy air, bus tickets through M-pesa

Telecoms operator Safaricom has integrated its M-Pesa money transfer service and data platform to enable users book and pay for their domestic air, road and rail travel through their data-enabled mobile phones. Kenya's Daily Nation reports.

The company has signed partnerships with local airlines — East African, Air Kenya and Aircraft Leasing Services (ALS), the Rift Valley Railways and bus companies such as Akamba, Crown bus and Busways to offer this service.

Related articles on M-Pesa

A new future with solar mobiles

For millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, t solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary. stuff reports.

... Solar cell phones could build on the economic advantages that mobile phones have already brought to far-flung regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, including price transparency and more accurate and timely information.

Mobile phone penetration in these regions has been held back by a lack of electricity: there is simply no way to charge a cell phone in many rural areas of developing countries.

An estimated 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity at all, while another 1 billion people have no electricity for much of the day, according to estimates by development groups.

Fortuitously, perhaps, most of these people live in sunny climates. And this is where solar mobile phones come in.

Read full article.

How Mobile Phones Contribute To Female Progress In Developing Nations

For those in developing nations, a mobile phone is more than a communications luxury. These tiny handsets act as hubs for mobile banking, entrepreneurship, fact-checking, and public health announcements - and they may be the key to women's economic equality. Jezebel on last week's report on telecoms in emerging markets from the Economist.

The innovations in technology have been able to provide women with various ways to make a living.

Bouncing a great-grandchild on her knee in her house in Bukaweka, a village in eastern Uganda, Mary Wokhwale gestures at her surroundings. "My mobile phone has been my livelihood," she says. In 2003 Ms Wokhwale was one of the first 15 women in Uganda to become "village phone" operators. Thanks to a microfinance loan, she was able to buy a basic handset and a roof-mounted antenna to ensure a reliable signal. She went into business selling phone calls to other villagers, making a small profit on each call. This enabled her to pay back her loan and buy a second phone. The income from selling phone calls subsequently enabled her to set up a business selling beer, open a music and video shop and help members of her family pay their children's school fees.

Business has dropped off somewhat in the past couple of years as mobile phones have fallen in price and many people in her village can afford their own. But Ms Wokhwale's life has been transformed.

[via Gizmodo]

In Rural Africa, a Fertile Market for Mobile Phones

The New York Times on mobile phones in Africa.

Africa has the fastest-growing mobile phone market worldwide. Entrepreneurs and development organizations are eagerly seizing the opportunity presented by such growth. They are creating mobile phone applications for profitable and nonprofit ventures across the continent. Millions of Africans, for example, now use their mobile phones to transfer money, turn on water wells, learn soccer game scores and buy and sell goods.

The penetration of the mobile phone is far greater than that of the Internet in Africa, especially in rural areas, making it the most accessible communication tool, said Jon Gossier, founder and president of Appfrica, a technology company with headquarters in Uganda.

Read full article.

The power of mobile money

Mobile phones have transformed lives in the poor world. Mobile money could have just as big an impact. A summary of mobile payment options by the Economist.

Across the developing world, corner shops are where people buy vouchers to top up their calling credit. Mobile-money services allow these small retailers to act rather like bank branches. They can take your cash, and (by sending a special kind of text message) credit it to your mobile-money account. You can then transfer money (again, via text message) to other registered users, who can withdraw it by visiting their own local corner shops. You can even send money to people who are not registered users; they receive a text message with a code that can be redeemed for cash.

By far the most successful example of mobile money is M-PESA, launched in 2007 by Safaricom of Kenya. It now has nearly 7m users—not bad for a country of 38m people, 18.3m of whom have mobile phones.

Read full article.

Mobile operators killing SMS revolution

Joshua Goldstein writing for Business Daily describes how African mobile networks are costly because the price of sending an SMS is kept up by high taxes and interconnection fees.

However, there is reason for hope. Mobile companies and regulators around the developing world are recognising the “economics of abundance”— that more users at lower prices will result in more revenue.

In the Philippines, for example, according to telecom expert Steve Song, mobile providers charge less than one US cent per SMS on average. What is striking about this is that they manage to generate three times the revenue per capita from SMS traffic as compared with South Africa where the average SMS costs over nine US cents.

Also, in Uganda, for the first time in the telecom industry’s history, MTN agreed to lower the price of a premium SMS to 5 US cents for Farmers Friend, one of the newly launched Grameen and Google services, aimed at poor farmers.

Read full article. Image from Kiwanja.net.

Update: Uganda Rejects Call to Lower Mobile Phone Sales Tax

Mobiles offer lifelines in Africa

If you want to see how east Africa may respond to the arrival of high-speed internet links, look no further than the mobile phone market, says developer Ken Banks, reports the BBC.

In a continent often painted in a poor light, home-grown innovation has been on the rise. In the absence of high speed internet, most activity has focused on mobile technology.

Today, a tech-savvy programmer with access to a computer, cheap mobile phone, software development kit and the kind of entrepreneurial flare which many Africans have in abundance, possesses all the tools they need to solve a business, technical or social problem. And solving them they are.

Read full article.

'Pill-check' SMS the cure?

Activists who use cellphone text messages to expose missing essential drugs from clinics in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Malawi say the same system would work well in South Africa. The Mail&GuardianOnline reports.

Members of the public run a "pill check", visiting public hospitals to check the availability of drugs at their local clinic or hospital pharmacy.

If they are turned away on the grounds that essential items are out of stock, an SMS relays the news to another cellphone, this time linked to a computer run by the African wing of the civic group Health Action International (HAI).

Software automatically punches a red dot into an online map, as long as the activists use a code. (A normal SMS from a member of the public is put in manually, after staff double-check the information.)

As shortages worsen, the dot swells in size. When an internet user clicks on the dot, a pop-up bubble displays details of what is out of stock -- contradicting possible government denials.

Within one week more than 250 out-of-stock medicines -- including anti-malarials, penicillin, antiretrovirals, diarrhoea medication and zinc tablets -- were reported in the four countries. More than 100 public hospitals and clinics in Kenya alone were exposed for operating without essential medicines.

Read full article .

Wearable Flexible Solar Panel Vest for Boda Boda operators

AfriGadget reports on a solar vest that recharges mobile phones worn by Boda Boda operators, bicycle riders that carry passengers from main roads to villages off the beaten track in Western Kenya.

Wearing Flexible Panels while cycling generates power from sun-up to sun-down, an average of 12 hours a day.

.. The Panel can be attached in a variety of ways. Velcro, Pop Buttons or simply attach Rucksack like straps so it can be worn with any garment. In the latter case the small pouch containing the controller and battery is attached to the back of the panels with Velcro.

Related:

-- Solar Jacket Charges Gadgets on the Run

-- Solar Power hand bags and golf bags

-- Solar Power bikini

-- Solar power devices recharge while byciling

-- A charger bra for your cell phone

Solar Power, Mobile Phones Converge to Distribute Water in Kenya

The New York Times on how solar power and cell phone converge to distribute water in Kenya.

On the heels of complaints about corrupt distributors and conflicts over the fair allocation of water, a community in Musingini, Kenya, is working with Safaricom and Grundfos Lifelink, a division of the Danish pump maker Grundfos Group, to implement a solar-powered, pay-for-use water vending system using the M-PESA backbone.

The solar-powered well is activated using a smart card, which permits water to flow until either the card is removed or the user’s account runs out of credit.

... ”With this system we can monitor remotely how efficiently the solar well is operating, how much water has been used and how much income has been generated,” Mr. Hansen added.

Read full article.

Indian Farmers Use Mobile Phones to Control Irrigation

Mobile Operator Tata Teleservices is testing technology that allows farmers to use their mobile phones to remotely monitor and switch on irrigation pump sets in far flung locations. PC World reports.

The technology, called Nano Ganesh, is being tested in two villages in the Indian state of Gujarat.

In India, where the electricity supply is erratic, farmers often walk several kilometers to where their irrigation pumps are located, only to find that there is no electricity available, Lloyd Mathias, chief marketing officer of Tata Teleservices, said on Wednesday.

By dialing a code number from his mobile phone to a wireless device attached to the pump, farmers can now remotely monitor the electricity supply, and also switch the pump on and off, Mathias said.

Cellphones Tipped to Drive Growth in Poor Nations

The global ICT sector has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the past decade driven by growth in the use of mobile phones, a World Bank report says. All Africa reports.

By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4 billion mobile phones globally. No technology has ever spread faster around the world. Mobile phones now represent the world's largest distribution platform", it states.

The report titled Information and Communications for Development (IC4D) 2009: Extending Reach and Increasing Impact, takes a close look at mobile and broadband connectivity.

It analyses the development impact of high-speed Internet access in third world countries and provides policy options for rolling out broadband networks and addressing the opportunities and challenges of convergence between telecommunications, media, and computing.

Important marketAccording to the report, the mobile phone market is especially important for developing countries, where it is growing most rapidly and where it is seen as a "leapfrogging" tool.

For Uganda's poor, a cellular connection

More than a third of Uganda's population, about 10 million people own a cell phone - a counry where only 10 percent of the population has electricity - and many more have access to these phones through family members and neighbors. Cell phones can be found in every desolate corner of the countryside, where 85 percent of the country's residents live. With the dire need to be connected, people go to great lengths to use cell phones, charging them with car batteries or solar chargers.

Several nonprofits have begun thinking that the best way to reach the country's poor and get them much needed information is through their phones.

Read full article in Cnet news.

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