Fri 19 Nov 2010 // Danish brothers Christopher and David Mikkelsen founded Refugees United, an NGO that uses secure web and mobile technology to enable refugees to find loved ones throughout the world. It started with a web-based system allowing refugees to create and search profiles in order to find loved ones by name or identifying characteristics. By expanding the program from web-based to mobile phones, the organisers hope to reach people in areas with poor computer access and training. Now, people can utilise the Refugees United system over simple SMS or WAP-enabled phones. “Even the most remote refugee settlements, you still find mobile phones everywhere,” David Mikkelsen says. There's a series of keywords, so if you send 'REG' to the number, it assumes you're registering and it sends you back a request that starts off by asking your name. Then it asks your age and your gender and so forth. You can search for people on the system, and if you find someone you think might be family you can send a message as well. The site urges people contacted by other users to ask a series of personal questions to establish that the contactee is in fact who they claim to be. The expansion of the platform to mobile phones will be implemented in collaboration with Ericsson, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Ugandan mobile operator MTN, and Delta Partners.
Links
http://www.mobileactive.org/case-studies/refugees-united-goes-mobile
http://www.refunite.org/
Apologies that the blog has been a bit quiet of late, I have been busy searching for collaborators to develop a real project, but I can report that there are some exciting possibilities in the pipeline!! Fingers crossed for now and I hope to make a collaboration announcement in the next couple of weeks...
The “Stop Stock-Outs” campaign is based around a little-known, but devastating, problem. Medicine stock-outs - where local clinics and pharmacies run out of high-demand, crucial medicines - are a potentially lethal problem in a number of African countries, yet governments insist they don’t occur. The team behind the Stop Stock-Outs project set out to find a solution and asked themselves, ”What could be more powerful than a map which contradicts these government claims?” Last year, activists in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia started surveying clinics in their respective countries, checking stock levels of essential medicines. After visiting clinics and pharmacies, activists report their results using their mobile phones through structured, coded text messages (SMS) – “x,y,z” – where the first number represented their country code (Kenya, Malawi, Uganda or Zambia), the second their district or city, and the third the medicine which they found to be out of stock. The messages are then visually displayed on an online map, showing specific reports by location and building up “hot spots” of activity. Within the first week alone, the team collected reports of 250 stock-outs of essential medicines. Because incoming data automatically populates the map, it represents an almost real-time picture of stock-outs. After a successful launch and a week piloting the service, the “stock-out SMS number” has been distributed to medicine users throughout each country so that anyone with a mobile phone can send in a stock-out report. However, unlike reports from official, known data collectors, these messages will firstly be checked by staff at Health Action International before being posted up on the map. Then the government can’t deny it’s happening and the public pressure can really start.
Full article from Oxfam: http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=1543
Official website: http://stopstockouts.org/
Nigel Waller dropped the surprising statistic that worldwide there are one billion people who use cell phones – but don’t own one; instead they share, borrow or rent them. The Cloud Phone was intended to serve this market. At first Waller tried to create a cell phone that could be manufactured for just $5 so that everyone could afford one, but he couldn’t pull it off. Instead Waller went with a $25 phone, but designed it so that a village of users could share it while still maintaining individual phone numbers accounts on a single phone. Activation cost? Just 10 to 20 cents per person.
The Cloud Phone is a service that allows people to have their own identity, and to log in and log out of other people's mobile phones, just like you can log in and out of your e-mail account using someone else's PC. In this way users can have their own personal mobile number for private communication, at half the cost of a SIM card and without the hassle of carrying a SIM card around.
When a user logs in with their own number and pin code they will be greeted with a menu. For example it says, "Hello, John. Your balance is $1. You have two missed calls. You've got one SMS message."
The Cloud Phone was developed by Movirtu and Frog Design, after they met at the PopTech conference last year, and the development process included a field study with 12 residents of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya.
Links
core77: http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/movirtus_cloud_phone_is_mobile_for_...
CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/21/cloud.phone/index.html
Frog Design: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/mobile-impact-at-socap-2010.html
Movirtu: http://www.movirtu.com/
28 Oct 2010 // The idea came to Nathan Eagle, a research scientist with the MIT, when he was doing a teaching stint in rural Kenya. He realised that, as three-quarters of the 4.6 billion mobile-phone users worldwide live in developing countries, a useful piece of technology is now being placed in the hands of a large number of people who might be keen to use their devices to make some money. To help them do so, he came up with a service called txteagle which distributes small jobs via text messaging in return for small payments. Mr Eagle hopes txteagle will do its bit by mobile “crowdsourcing”—breaking down jobs into small tasks and sending them to lots of individuals. These jobs often involve local knowledge and range from things like checking what street signs say in rural Sudan for a satellite-navigation service to translating words into a Kenyan dialect for companies trying to spread their marketing. A woman living in rural Brazil or India may have limited access to work, adds Mr Eagle, “but she can still use her mobile phone to collect local price and product data or even complete market-research surveys.” Payments are transferred to a user’s phone by a mobile money service, such as the M-PESA system run by Safaricom in Africa, or by providing additional calling credit. Working with over 220 mobile operators, txteagle is able to reach 2 billion subscribers in 80 countries. It already has the largest contract-labour force in Kenya and new ways of using it are being found all the time.
Full article at The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/17366137?story_id=17366137txteagle: http://txteagle.com/
As mentioned in my "Phase 1" post, this next phase involves a lot of emailing (to organisations, NGOs, institutions, companies, individuals, etc) who I feel could be interested in what I'm doing and who could bring something to the project, whether it be some insights into African culture or really collaborating with me in the development of the new application, for example helping me to identify real needs and opportunities; to conduct ethnographic research or test prototypes in Africa; or to provide technical support in the development of new software.
However this phase also involves a lot of...waiting! In between contacting people and waiting for replies I'm continuing to search the web to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings in the field of m-applications: upcoming conferences, new ventures, competitions, and so on. I'll also continue to post the most relevant/interesting things I find here on the blog.
Meanwhile, if anyone knows any organisations working in (or with) East Africa that I could get in touch with, please do let me know! Thanks!
The World Bank is sponsoring an Apps for Development competition which challenges the public to create innovative software applications that move users closer to solving some of the world's most pressing problems. Focusing on one of the various Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), submissions can be for any widely available software platform. The MDGs articulate specific targets to be reached by 2015 related to poverty and hunger, universal education, child health and other crucial dimensions. The potential datasets have been made available in the World Bank Data Catalog. Submissions to the Competition will be accepted until January 10, 2011. Interested participants and developers must include a link to the application, a video of the application, a text-based description of the application, and at least one still photograph of the working application in order to be considered. More info: http://appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/Online ideas brainstorm: http://wbapps.ideascale.com/
25 Oct 2010 // Tavneet Suri of MIT and Billy Jack of Georgetown have resurveyed ~2,000 Kenyan households about their perceptions and use of the M-PESA phone-based money transfer service. The first survey took place in the fall of 2008; this one took place in fall 2009. The results are just out: // M-PESA is rapidly propagating down market to poorer, less educated, more rural customers. In the 10-month period between the two survey rounds, the percentage of households using M-PESA increased from 43% to 70%. During this period, the percentage of M-PESA users who were unbanked increased from 25% to 50%, while the percentage of rural users increased from 29% to 41%. // Agents are working better, and liquidity issues are sorting themselves out. A much larger percentage of users in Round 2 trust their agent (95%) than did users in Round 1 (65%), even while the number of agents quadrupled during the 10-month period from 4,000 to 16,000. // Awareness is almost 100% - The percentage of households who don’t know about M-PESA fell from 18% in Round 1 to 3% in Round 2. // Increased use for saving - The percentage of users who use M-PESA for saving increased from 75% in Round 1 to 81% in Round 2.
Full article: http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2010/10/m-pesa-reaching-poorer-people.php
8 Sept 2010 // A new Mobile Application Laboratory (mLab) will be launched in Nairobi this year in a 2-year program that aims to create 8-10 new mobile apps. It will be hosted by the *iHub, Nairobi’s Innovation Hub which is an enabler and catalyst within the technology community. The *iHub consortium comprises eMobilis, the University of Nairobi's School of Computing and Informatics and the Web Foundation. As well as the lab in Nairobi, there will be a second mLab created in South Africa.
The mLabs will be focal points run and used by Africans working to increase the competitiveness of innovative enterprises working in mobile content and applications. In each lab local companies, technologists and experts can collaborate to develop locally relevant applications that meet user demands.
Each lab will be a platform for building the technical skills, business nous and personal relationships needed to build scalable mobile solutions into thriving businesses that address social needs. As well as providing state of the art equipment, the labs will offer technical training and workshops and connect developers and entrepreneurs with potential investors, academic experts, and even public sector leaders.
The mLabs are expected to be fully operational by the end of 2010. Future mobile applications labs are planned for Eastern Europe and Asia.
The labs are part of the wider €12.9 million program 'Creating Sustainable Businesses in the Knowledge Economy' ran by infoDev, Nokia and the Finland Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which aims to encourage innovation and competitiveness among SMEs in the information and communication technologies and agribusiness sectors in particular.
Full Article: http://www.infodev.org/en/Article.592.html
InfoDev Project Implementation Plan: http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.909.html
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