20 Jan 2011 // Families in the Philippines uprooted by disaster have begun receiving text messages which they can cash like checks to buy food. The pilot project makes use of the widespread availability of mobile phones in the Philippines, which is known as the “texting capital of the world”.
The Philippines is one of the most phone-savvy countries in the world, but it’s also prone to violent storms and conflict, which force people from their homes and threaten them with hunger.
In emergencies like these, WFP often helps by setting up “Cash for Work” projects that help uprooted communities get back on their feet. With the cash people earn as they work on rebuilding homes and communities, they can buy the food they need.
Now, in the texting capital of the world, WFP is testing mobile phones as a way of distributing the cash.
“It’s like a digital wallet—almost like a bank account,” said WFP Country Director Stephen Anderson, who explained that giving participants cash in the place of food rations allows them to buy a wider variety of food in a way that favours the local economy.“Our survey shows that they are spending up to 70–80 per cent of the cash on food,” he added. “We think that’s a good thing.”
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.
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.
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.
Text to Change (TTC) offers an interactive Mobile SMS Quiz with knowledge questions linked with a rewarding system (incentive). By means of this edutainment and this interactive way of communicating, the SMS Quiz is designed to raise and help resolve key issues around local development programs.
TTC is a non-profit organization that uses mobile phone technology to collect and disseminate health information. TTC has been one of the pioneers in using mobile phones for health monitoring and advocacy in Uganda reaching out to the general public at a large scale. TTC works demand driven and sets up complete programs with local and international partners. The aim of TTC is to make life saving knowledge easily available to the general public and especially to community and family level caregivers. TTC is specialized in interactive and incentive based SMS programs addressing a wide range of health issues such as HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Reproductive Health.
Unlike radio it is hard for authorities to block mobile signal without severely disrupting the country’s infrastructure and economy. In times of unrest or authoritarian rule the SMS can function as the only source of news. The London-based SW Radio Africa sends out a selection of headlines to 30,000 people in Zimbabwe via SMS.
