A pilot project gets underway soon to test whether mobile phones can be used to help educate the poor. It’s estimated three quarters of the world’s poor have access to mobile phones. Voice of America reports.
The project announced at the recent World Economic Forum will use an app called AppBridge to help alleviate poverty and improve education.
The idea is to link software developers with communities and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. The pilot project is led by a WEF community called Young Global Leaders. It’s made up of about 700 people under age 40 from business, civil society, government and academia.
The early apps are expected to provide skills training.
“In some cases,”Margo Drakos, founder of AppBridge said, “these are going to be very much technically oriented skills, like learning simple automotive or simple electrical or simple plumbing.
Apps could also be used to link entrepreneurs with micro-credit lenders or with markets. “In some cases, women are not able to go and sell their goods from their home unless they know that the store is open and the stores don’t open at a consistent time. So, something as simple and basic as having an alert when the store is open for them to be able to leave their home and go sell their goods,” she said.
At the end of 2011, there were the first signs of smartphone use on SMS: for the first time in some countries, rather than the volume of SMS growing inexorably, it declined for the first time. Russell Southwood CEO of Balancing Act looks at how wider use of mobile Internet may affect SMS volumes in Africa and at two of the new generation of interfaces designed to make it easier for Africans to use the mobile Internet.
Numerous studies have shown that there is a strong link between mobile phones and economic growth. The theory here is that mobile phones encourage improved access to educational opportunities, health resources, business and employment opportunities. Another tie into this theory is that it will be more women accessing mobile phones that will encourage this economic growth. SocialEarth reports via @mobileactive.
Why? Studies have shown that mobile phones encourage a more secure, connected and productive life.
Security: Studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of women feel safer because of their mobile phones globally.
Connectedness: 85% of women report feeling more independent because of their mobile phones. With access to hospitals and other information for their daily lives, at the click of a button, women can be connected to the rest of the world from the most rural regions.
Productivity: From India to Senegal to Kosovo, women are beginning to realize that the power of mobile phones unlocks economic opportunities in their regions. According to one study regarding women’s opinions on mobile phones, more than half agree that mobile phones encourage additional income.
However, there are certainly hurdles to women owning mobile phones in developing countries. These hurdles include the costs of handsets and service, a lack of understanding as to why they need mobile phones, fear of not being able to learn how to use the technology, and cultural issues relating to the stigma of a women’s role.
African countries like Kenya have leapfrogged traditional banking systems by using mobile phones to store and spend money. Do Africans have the better deal? The Christian Science Monitor reports.
.. The University of Nairobi’s Tonny Omwansa, who is writing a book on mobile money, believes the slow growth of mobile cash in the US comes down to Americans’ trusting relationship to banking institutions, despite recent protests.
“The little time I spent in the U.S., I noticed folks very confident of the (banking) system which is very much accessible to them, unlike many African countries,” he told the Monitor. “Rarely would you find a rural poor (African) asking ‘How secure is M-Pesa?’ But this question easily comes up when I meet typical Americans.” M-Pesa is the most popular mobile cash app in Africa.
In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines, but often only because of drought, famine, crisis and insecurity. Al Jazeera launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region -- all via SMS. PBS.org reports.
... The goal of Somalia Speaks is to aggregate unheard voices from inside the region as well as from the Somalia diaspora by asking via text message: How has the Somalia Conflict affected your life? Responses are translated into English and plotted on a map. Since the launch, approximately 3,000 SMS messages have been received. Here is just one example:
I was born in the city of Wanlaweyn, and some of the people there are destroying things. I am poor now.
For Al Jazeera, Somalia Speaks is also a chance to test innovative mobile approaches to citizen media and news gathering.
Mobile network operators in Africa identify rural customer’s problems with charging phones as a major challenge in expanding their businesses. [via mobileactive.org]
This study looks closely at a series of phone charging businesses in Uganda and Tanzania.
The main findings of the research were:
-- Phone charging is a highly viable economic activity where the grid is absent or where grid electricity is present but used by few people.
-- The availability of a local charging service results in greater phone use and increased expenditure on airtime.
-- Phone users report significant economic and social benefits from use of their phones.
-- There is considerable unmet need and significant potential for phone charging microbusinesses to grow.
-- The major constraint on growth is lack of access to funds for the purchase of
additional panels and accessories.
-- These businesses represent a viable, cost efficient and sustainable way of
addressing the phone charging needs of off grid subscribers. Supporting the
development of such businesses is likely to be more effective than other options
currently being considered by mobile network operators.
Just before Christmas, Duncan Green, Head of Research for Oxfam GB, had a thought-provoking discussion on the BBC World Service with Paul Niehaus, who has set up GiveDirectly, a US-based startup NGO pioneering a new financing model based on cash transfers. The idea couldn’t be simpler: Oxfam Blog reports via @mobileactive.
1. People donate through GD’s webpage
2. GD locates poor households in Kenya (see below)
3. GD transfers your donation electronically (through the M-Pesa mobile payments system) to a recipient’s cell phone (they send each household $500 per year for two years)
4. The recipient collects the transfer
GD reckons that in this way, it can get 90 cents in every donated donor into the hands of poor people. Step 2 is interesting: ‘We do this in three steps.
Kenya with high poverty rates using census data. We then identify villages with low-quality housing and access to an agent providing mobile-phone-based payment services. Finally, we identify the poorest households in these villages using simple, transparent criteria: we target all households living in homes made out of mud, wood, and grass. These criteria effectively identify relatively poor households and are generally perceived by the community as fair. We record eligible households’ phone numbers or, for those that do not have a phone, provide them with a SIM card. We follow up initial identification with a rigorous process of audits to prevent mistakes or fraud.’
The Times of India reports on how women in India are using mobile phones as a tool for learning alphabets and calculation.
Mahila Shakti, a women through education project, uses mobile phones to help empower the poorest and most disadvantaged section of the society through effective and transparent communication techniques.
Idrees-ul Haq, a student at The Model Institute of Engineering and Technology in India, has invented a unique ''SMS Based Non-Conventional Water Pump'' that works on solar energy, sending out an SMS when the upper head tank is full or when the pump is empty.
-- Solar Power, Mobile Phones 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.
Mali has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. There are roughly 111 deaths for every 1000 live births in the country and the under-5 mortality rate is 191 out of every 1000 children. The need for early detection of diseases and stronger local health structures led to the creation of Pesinet, a non-profit that uses mobile technology to provide regular health checkups and affordable health insurance for young children in Mali's capital, Bamako. Mobileactive.org reports.
Roughly 600 children are currently enrolled in the program in the neighborhood of Bamako Coura, under the care of four Pesinet agents (each covering around 150 children). Pesinet combines both early warning systems and insurance. Families pay 500 CF a month for each enrolled child; the payments cover doctor examinations and half the cost of any medications the child needs if he or she gets sick.
Enrolled children are tested weekly for symptoms of illness such as fever, cough, diarrhea, low weight, or vomiting by community health workers who enter data from each visit into a custom-designed Java application on their phone. The data is sent via GPRS to an online database. Doctors at local community health centers monitor the patient data for sudden changes in health. If changes occur, the community health workers receive an alert on their phones and then go back, in turn, to alert the family that the doctor needs to give the child a checkup.
Mobile health platforms are fast emerging in Kenya, where one startup's newly launched mobile health platform is attracting nearly 1,000 downloads daily, and the dominant telecom, Safaricom, has forged a partnership that will give its 18 million subscribers access to doctors. MIT Technology Review reports via @jranck.
.. Many Kenyans have serious health problems; for example, according to the World Health Organization, more than 30 percent of children under age five show stunted growth. At present, only 7,000 doctors serve a nation of 40 million people. But Kenya is rich in mobile phones, with 25 million subscribers (Africa has more than 600 million of them).
The new app, called MedAfrica—available for smart phones and less powerful feature phones—is the product of Shimba Technologies, a Nairobi-based company founded by two locally educated entrepreneurs, Stephen Kyalo and Kezia Muoki, with $100,000 in seed money from a European VC.
MedAfrica is platform that provides a suite of health services (health widgets) such as symptom checkers, first-aid information, doctor & hospital directories as well as relevant alert services.
With mobile telephone access reaching over five billion of the world’s population, the United Nations educational agency today announced the launch of an initiative to harness the technology and bring mobile phone use into the classroom. [via The UN News Room]
In a statement issued in Paris, UNESCO declared the opening of a global summit and symposium gathering experts from around the world to discuss the impact of the mobile telephone on education and learning.
... Initiatives promoting mobile learning have already been spearheaded across a wide range of countries – including Mozambique, Pakistan, South Africa, Niger, Kenya, and Mongolia – where policies have already provided access to distance education in far-flung communities and improved literacy among girls and women.
According to recent data, 90 per cent of the world’s population now has access to mobile networks, prompting growing enthusiasm for the potential of mobile devices to improve education access and quality.
The purpose of PeaceTXT is to leverage mobile messaging to catalyze behavior change around peace and conflict issues. In the context of Chicago, the joint project with CeaseFire aims to leverage SMS reminders to interrupt gun violence in marginalized neighborhoods. Now PeaceTXT is launching their first international pilot project called PeaceTXT Kenya.
... Conflicts are often grounded in the stories and narratives that people tell themselves and the emotions that these stories generate. Narratives shape identity and the social construct of reality—we interpret our lives through stories. These have the power to transform relationships and communities.
We believe the PeaceTXT model can be applied to catalyze behavior change vis-a-vis peace and conflict issues at the community level by amplifying new narratives via SMS.
About 600 million out of 1.2 billion Indians have ready access to a clean bathroom, while 800 million Indians have cell phones. So Swapnil Chaturvedi, an entrepreneur who has been working on sanitation projects in India’s slums, came up with a project called Poop Rewards, that creates an incentive program using cell phone talk minutes and other prizes to convince Indians that don’t have easy access to toilets to use designated public toilets in their area. GigaOM reports.
These cell phone users are extremely price sensitive, explained Chaturvedi to me in an interview after winning first prize at the business competition Startup Weekend Delhi, and he thinks this demographic will be willing to change their behavior (or use a public toilet) to save a little bit of money or earn free cell phone talk time.
With a phone company as a partner, more public toilets could be built in the necessary areas — the U.N. estimates it only costs $300 for a low-cost toilet — and cell phone companies can use the rewards program to retain low-price conscious customers and provide a public service, which can also help with loyalty.
New Delhi: In a society where girls often get married by the age of 17 and have four kids by the time they turn 21, women typically face violence in one form or another, be it physical or mental, says Preeti Soni from Kutch, Gujarat. Soni is the executive director of Kutch Mahila Vikas Samiti (KMVS), which has been working to improve the lives of women for 20 years. Livemint reports via @JodyRanck.
Last year, the organization started Hello Sakhi, a mobile helpline for women, in conjunction with the local police department. A special cell has been set up to handle calls from women in nearly 940 villages in the west zone of Kutch. The initiative provides support to women through counselling, provides them shelter and, if need be, helps them file police complaints. It also gives training to groups of women to stand up against physical and mental harassment.
The initiative also informs village women about their rights, particularly property rights, and domestic violence. It works with a paralegal team—a group of two to three village women given training in the judicial system and basic rights of women.
Importing or copying the latest 'e-health' technology from developed countries may not be the best way forward for health services in Africa, a conference has heard. SciDev.net reports via @JodyRanck.
A focus on high-tech healthcare solutions could come at the expense of basic prevention such as access to clean water and sanitation, good nutrition and hygiene, and health education, said experts at the AfriHealth conference in Kenya, this week (30 November?1 December).
In a continent where 80 per cent of illnesses stem from preventable infectious diseases, this is a move in the wrong direction, said Yunkap Kwankam, executive director of the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth.
"Most African health needs can be solved by the age-old basics of water and sanitation, nutrition and hygiene; if we concentrate on these we will make big strides in the lives of our people.
An interesting post from Mobileactive.org on how virtual meetings using mobile phones are helping to resolve tribal conflicts in Yemen.
... A tribal dispute hotline was created to receive notifications about developing disputes in order to address them before they escalate and become violent. After the dispute notification is received, the trained tribesmen in that area are contacted to react to the complaint, and resolve it in its early stages.Tribal leaders on both sides are called to start a negotiation process and propose an arbitrator to resolve the dispute.
This process has been largely effective and in many cases prevented wider conflicts from emerging. In fact, many of the regional and tribal wars in Yemen were initially a result of small disputes that due to the lack of communication channels between tribes, turned into brutal conflicts that in some cases lasted for decades. And although the use of mobiles in conflict resolution in Yemen relies on the most basic of its functions, the outcomes are promising.
Visa has been hard at work on a mobile digital wallet that it hopes to roll out early next year. But that’s not the only mobile market the credit card company has its eye on. Bits reports.
On Wednesday, the company announced plans for a product aimed at letting cellphone users in less developed nations buy goods and pay bills using their phones.
“It won’t require a physical card attached to the account,” said John Partridge, president of Visa. “It’s a virtual prepaid account designed specifically for the mobile market in the developing world.”
The service will be available through a simple application or text messaging, and it will work across mobile operators. Users will be able to add more money to their virtual Visa accounts at special kiosks.
A coordinated movement is beginning to engage people living with HIV, en mass, through FrontlineSMS.
St Paul’s health center in Ugunja, western Kenya, formed part of a pilot study, to investigate the effectiveness of using SMS to support those living with HIV. In this rural town near the Ugandan border, nine out of ten residents regularly use a mobile phone, according to our recent survey. And of those, over 72% ranked mobile telephony as the most important technology they use to get information and to communicate.
The pilot study involved sending a course of SMS messages to 268 people living with HIV up to three times a week. Trial messages included: “Wash hands with soap and safe water before handling food, eating and after visiting the toilet. Wash fruits and vegetables with safe clean water before eating them.” It was hoped that such advice would help prevent infection and illness among those most vulnerable.
Farmers now get an alert on their mobile phones of sudden climate variations that can harm their crops. This is one of the innovative projects taken up by the central government to help farmers adapt to climate change in the country’s 100 most vulnerable districts, climate-wise. Hindustan Times reports.
In this project, sensors have been installed in farms which record the varying temperature. As soon as the temperature falls below a certain level, which can be harmful for crops, an automatic SMS is sent to the farmer.
“It provides two to three hours to the farmers to deal with the situation,” Dr B Venkateswarlu, said. One such option is to light a fire to increase the ground temperature so that damage to the crop can be minimized. There have been huge losses to wheat crops in Punjab and Haryana during winter months because of the frost.
The iCow mobile-phone app, invented by an organic farmer outside of Nairobi, Kenya, is just one example of the country's growing high-tech entrepreneurial culture. The Christian Science Monitor reports.
iCow is a mobile-phone application that allows herders to register each individual cow, and to receive individualized text messages on their mobile phones, including advice for veterinary care and feeding schedules, a database of experts, and updated market rates on cattle prices. It’s an example of how high technology can help out even in the low-tech business of agriculture, in which 80 percent of Kenyans make a living.
... Ms Su Kahumbu’s iCow may not be the latest sensation on Wall Street, but experts say it is just the latest example of an innovative high-tech entrepreneurial culture that has started to take hold in Kenya.
The London Conference on Cyberspace has cited the usage of text messaging in Nigeria as one of the ways development actors provide services to local communities. Next reports.
"Data collection via mobile phone is now being used in epidemiological mapping to study the spread of disease over geographical regions,'' she added.
Clark, who spoke at one of the sessions entitled, "Hopes and Fears,"said though there were legitimate fears about the demerits of the growing dependence on cyberspace, there were also the transformative and development benefits.
... Elizabeth from the other cyber cafe felt strongly that mobiles were not at all having an impact on their business. Her rational was that customers found going online with the phone too expensive, approximately 4 Ksh a minute versus 1 Ksh that was standard in Wote.
The Opinion Page of The New York Times has an interesting article on how the Canadian Foodgrains Bank is providing Somalians with paper vouchers that they can use in shops of selected local merchants - instead of waiting in long lines in designated areas where sacs of grain are distributed.
It made me think of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Syria that rolled out not paper, but electronic food vouches for Iraqis, using SMS.
Iraqi families eligible for e-voucher food assistance are given a SIM card and received a text message with a code during each two-month food distribution cycle. The voucher can be redeemed in selected government shops. After each transaction an updated balance is sent by SMS.
The Washington Post on a new grievance reporting service to use for sending complaints via text message to the Indian government about problems in villages.
lmost everyone in this village in central India has a complaint. Electricity comes only three hours a day. The road has potholes. Widows’ pensions arrive late. The school lunch program often runs low on food.
Villagers say they send letters, call a goverment complaint line and wait outside officials’ offices for help, but never get a response. “All our complaints go into a blind well of the government,” said Mukesh Chandravanshi, 30, a farmer.
Now a simple cellphone text messaging program is providing a more direct line of communication between villagers and the government. Developed by activists, local officials and an IT company, the system ensures that complaints are immediately acknowledged and that residents regularly receive updates on how and when their problem will be resolved.
In early September, 29 community health workers began using Nokia cell phones as the latest tool in the fight against cholera. The specially programmed phones help track information about cholera patients in isolated communities throughout Haiti’s Central Plateau – an important step in gathering the up-to-date infection data that could prevent more deaths.
The Health Metrics Network (HMN) priority strategic initiative called MOVE-IT aims to improve monitoring of vital events ― births, deaths and causes of death ― through innovation and the use of information technologies.
Tens of millions of births and deaths go unrecorded each year and reliable data on causes of death are lacking for the majority of the world's population. MOVE-IT aims to contribute to reversing the lack of progress over several decades by supporting the development of standards and tools, advocacy, and innovative country projects.
Read interview with Doris Ma Fat, Statistician, Health Statistics and Informatics Department, World Health Organization (WHO) via @JodyRanck.
Mobile Phones will be used to help health professionals collect data, have it analyzed and receive feedback in a show case project to be launched next week in Ethiopia. The project is led by Technology for Change International and is expected to cost approximately 370,000 US dollars.
The project will distribute a thousand mobile handsets to health professionals in the Amhara, Oromia Southern and Tigray regional states. The health professionals will use the handsets to gather data on pregnant women and send it on to a central server.
In Morocco, 1 kg of sugar can buy you 1 minute of talk time. In Egypt,1 kilogram of oil has the same value of 48.43 minutes of pre-paid mobile voice service. [via Mobileactive.org research]
The Fair Mobile Index aims at communicating the real value of mobile voice services and at
comparing differences in mobile voice services value across the African continent. It allows for the comparison of mobile services tariffs in all African countries in relation to the value of a widely used commodity with which citizens are likely to be familiar such as cooking oil, sugar or tea.
... Feedback suggests that we have still not found the product that people can really relate to across the continent and that really has local resonance. Therefore, we are returning to one of the original proposed products, namely a can of Coke. We are in the process of trying to get the recommended retail prices of Coke in each African country. We believe that the Coke Mobile Index will really capture the cost of communications and the relative luxury it is at current prices in most African countries. Nevertheless, the figures below are a closer approximation of what people are foregoing in order to pay for mobile minutes.
Heard of cloud computing? Probably, yes. Heard of the cloud phone? Similar idea, different medium. Dowser.org reports via @Jody Ranck.
Despite the growing number of mobile users worldwide, many still have to borrow phones to make a call. Such calls can be accompanied with “borrowing premiums,” escalating costs for users. So, why not give everyone a virtual number, something that they can plug into any mobile, determine how much talk time or credit they have, and use accordingly?
That’s what Nigel Waller of Movirtu is aspiring to do. With pilot testing underway in Madagascar, Waller and his colleagues are building a virtual mobile.
The project announced at the recent 
Numerous studies have shown that there is a strong link between mobile phones and economic growth. The theory here is that mobile phones encourage improved access to educational opportunities, health resources, business and employment opportunities. Another tie into this theory is that it will be more women accessing mobile phones that will encourage this economic growth. 
African countries like Kenya have leapfrogged traditional banking systems by using mobile phones to store and spend money. Do Africans have the better deal? 
Mobile network operators in Africa identify rural customer’s problems with charging phones as a major challenge in expanding their businesses. [via 
Just before Christmas, Duncan Green, Head of Research for 
Mali has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. There are roughly 111 deaths for every 1000 live births in the country and the under-5 mortality rate is 191 out of every 1000 children. The need for early detection of diseases and stronger local health structures led to the creation of 
Mobile health platforms are fast emerging in Kenya, where one startup's newly launched mobile health platform is attracting nearly 1,000 downloads daily, and the dominant telecom, Safaricom, has forged a partnership that will give its 18 million subscribers access to doctors. 
About 600 million out of 1.2 billion Indians have ready access to a clean bathroom, while 800 million Indians have cell phones. So Swapnil Chaturvedi, an entrepreneur who has been working on sanitation projects in India’s slums, came up with a project called Poop Rewards, that creates an incentive program using cell phone talk minutes and other prizes to convince Indians that don’t have easy access to toilets to use designated public toilets in their area. 
New Delhi: In a society where girls often get married by the age of 17 and have four kids by the time they turn 21, women typically face violence in one form or another, be it physical or mental, says Preeti Soni from Kutch, Gujarat. Soni is the executive director of 
Importing or copying the latest 'e-health' technology from developed countries may not be the best way forward for health services in Africa, a 
An interesting post from 
A coordinated movement is beginning to engage people living with HIV, en mass, through 
Farmers now get an alert on their mobile phones of sudden climate variations that can harm their crops. This is one of the innovative projects taken up by the 
The 
Mobile Phones will be used to help health professionals collect data, have it analyzed and receive feedback in a show case project to be launched next week in Ethiopia. The project is led by Technology for Change International and is expected to cost approximately 370,000 US dollars.
Heard of cloud computing? Probably, yes. Heard of the cloud phone? Similar idea, different medium. 
