I made this video as an introduction to my master thesis project, Mobile Learning for Africa.

Thanks to Chao Shangguan for the help with Flash!

Just came across this video that effectively presents some key statistics about mobile and internet usage in Africa!

I came across the Afrographique blog today, a great project by Ivan Colic, who aims to to assist the changing perception of Africa and its people by collecting as much data as possible and presenting the information in an exciting and digestible format to all. Check out the above infographic on African mobile subscriptions plus many more.

Link: http://afrographique.tumblr.com/

Aug 2, 2010 // frog Executive Director of Global Insights Jan Chipchase gave a speech entitled “Scaling the Mobile Frontier” to members of the U.S. State Department about his research in the field of mobile money.

Chipchase raises several interesting issues in this talk which must be considered on a wider scale of mobile services, not only mobile banking:

// The 2 key motivations for individual handset ownership are convenience and privacy.
// We need to think about literacy vs. competency. What exactly is the required knowledge for a mobile user to complete a task (e.g. a phone call, a fincancial transaction, etc)?
// Illiterare mobile users display competency of use through rote learning. If a user is sufficiently motivated they can rote learn anything.
// Product ownership is not the same as product use.
// 'Corner-shop app stores' as an important touchpoint and channel of distribution.
// We need to consider user literacy vs. our literacy of users. What do we really know about the people we are designing for?

frog's work in mobile banking is part of their larger 'Mobile Mandate', a programme of projects that aim to amplify the positive social impact of mobile technologies through the transformative power of design.

Links

Full article at: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/jan-chipchase-goes-to-washington.html

Frog's Mobile Mandate: http://mobilemandate.frogdesign.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.

txteagle: http://txteagle.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

Of the planet's estimated 5 billion cellphone users, a privileged minority have smartphones; a paltry few, iPhones. Meet the most popular phone in the world, the Nokia 1100, which has 250,000,000 users worldwide.

The phone’s small size makes its extremely portable, and easy to carry or stow. That narrow, squishy keypad is dustproof and water resistant, so a splash of rain or a drop in the sand won’t ruin it. The phone’s plasticky shell and light weight make perfect sense the first time you see it bounce off your tile floor, skittering to a stop unscathed. This phone was meant to survive and to do; its only jobs are to call and to text and to create convenience for as long as possible, as cheaply as possible.

"The way we get to those features is by spending a lot of time with consumers, with teams in their homes, interviewing them, seeing how they live," says Alex Lambeek, who, prior to becoming Nokia's VP of Phone Marketing, worked extensively with hardware design for the developing world. "Take for example a feature like a torch (flashlight), and you might think: Who cares about a torch? Well, for a consumer who lives in an area, let's say, of India or Indonesia or Africa, where there is either no power supply or power is intermittent, having a torch is pretty important."

The lesson, basically, is that a company won't do well in the developing world simply by hawking cheap, out-of-date hardware after it's become obsolete in places like America. Companies like Nokia, LG and Samsung spend a lot of time and money developing new phones that you and I might consider old-fashioned or odd, and with good reason: Emerging markets are huge. The 8th, 9th and 10th largest phone seller in the world, by volume, are companies you've never heard of—ZTE, G-Five and Huawei—which have made heaps of money selling millions of customers their first phones.

Full article from Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5634258/the-most-popular-phone-in-the-world

This 2010 report from Sida (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) contains a great deal of useful data regarding mobile apps in East Africa:

Click here to download:

The_Innovative_Use_of_Mobile_Applications_in_East_Africa.pdf (818 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

The_Innovative_Use_of_Mobile_Applications_in_East_Africa.pdf (818 KB)

However the part that caught my attention the most was the discussion of the key barriers to mobile apps in the region.

So, what hinders the take off of mobile applications for economic and social development in East Africa?

Firstly, the most significant barrier is the total cost of ownership and use, i.e. cost of device, airtime, charging, etc. The cost of communication must go down – SMS is very overpriced and so is voice and data traffic.

Secondly, many applications and services never reach out to the masses due to poor marketing and the non-existing meta data about the available applications. Subscribers must know what solutions are available, why and how to use them. This will lead to volumes which will eventually lower the price of the particular service. In other words, there is a huge need for marketing (of the product) and education (for the end user) in order to make mobile applications sustainable.

Thirdly, many interventions are not designed with scale in mind. Many of the existing SMS based applications that could benefit the poor the most are still in their infancy in the region. A few successful cases, namely mobile money transaction systems and various health related solutions are being used at scale, but the fact remains that the number of scaled-up mobile services are still few and/or limited geographically. Few implementers are familiar with all the costs involved and seen from a technological point of view, the requirements on networks and different requirements on handsets and end-users that mobile applications have must be understood better.

Other barriers include lack of electricity, illiteracy, language, privacy issues, gender, and concerns about security (e.g. phone theft).

The mobile app industry is starting to explode in Africa, according to reports from Nokia and Ovi Store this month. There’s two parts to this: the number of apps that people are downloading and buying; and the number of developers creating new apps.

Since July 2010 (three months ago), the number of Ovi Store downloads by African consumers has grown by 50%, with the number of active users growing by 20%.

In South Africa, which appears to be the most mature market in the region, purchases from Ovi Store have grown by a whopping 438% since June. This massive increase followed the introduction of operator billing for apps, which clearly makes people far more likely to purchase compared to pulling out their credit cards or other alternatives. The introduction of operator billing to an area results in 13 times as many sales on average compared to credit cards.

Developer registrations on Forum Nokia from Africans have also grown by 60% over the same three months. East Africa is becoming a centre for the rapidly growing area of mobile money, with players such as M-PESA, Zap, Yu-Cash, MTN Money and Orange Money collecting an estimated 12 million subscribers in the area between them.

So how long before Africa beats the current top continents for downloads and new apps? At this rate of growth, it might not be long.

Full article from Nokia Conversations:

http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/10/04/africas-fast-growth-app-economy/

Vodafone research on the socio-economic impact of mobile (SIM) shows has that increased mobile penetration has a significant impact on GDP growth. Their Africa report, published in 2005, documented the boost to economic growth from greater mobile penetration and found that, even in remote rural communities, there were fewer barriers to the use of mobiles than might have been expected.

Click here to download:

Vodafone_Report_-_Impact_of_Mobile_Phone_in_Africa.pdf (2.11 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Vodafone_Report_-_Impact_of_Mobile_Phone_in_Africa.pdf (2.11 MB)