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/

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.

txteagle: http://txteagle.com/