We’ve written and shared much on mobile banking, including case studies on M-PESA, research on branchless banking, and issues of security in mobile banking. Success in mobile banking servicces have varied with some highly successful, and others less so. We also observed that services are highly dependent on many factors, including: reach, reliability, user retention, ease of use, approach with agents or operators, number of customers, geography, mobile infrastructure and landscape, technology used, language, cost, and regulatory issues.
In this newest MobileActive.org case study, we hear from Bill Barhydt, CEO of m-Via, the company behind new mobile banking service Boom. Boom allows people in the U.S., Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala to create bank accounts, and send and access money via a basic mobile phone. It is targeting especially the diaspora and remittance payment from the US to other countries in the Americas. According to the World Bank a staggering $61 billion was sent from the US to Latin America in 2011 in remittances, with intra-regional remittances within Latin America growing as well.
While Barhydt was unable to disclose numbers (of Boom users, transactions, and total amount of transactions) since the service launched in November 2011, we do learn more about how Boom works when it comes to sending and receiving remittances across the Americas.
In a crisp, 6-minute mobile video, Gerald Yawulkpuy introduces the local news from his community.
Welcome to Ramo News – all the news from Ramingining. My name is Gerald Yawulkpuy, good evening.
Tonight, the very successful Youth Week Program. The Court in town for the first time, and the opening of our wet season swimming pool.
But first of all, an update on the critical situation in Ramingining about the road conditions and the fuel for the power station.
Gerald is just one of a growing number of mobile journalists, or Mojos, creating video stories from remote regions in the Northern Territory of Australia. He learned how to use an iPhone kit to create, edit, and upload news stories as part of a project called NT Mojos. The project empowers indigenous people to have a local voice and to provide a less marginalized view of everyday indigenous life in Australia by enabling trained reporters in remote communities to create and share the stories most important to them.
Training instructors use basic Mojo “kits” made up of iPhone hardware and a single video editing application.
In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines but often only because of drought, famine, crisis, and insecurity. Al Jazeera recently launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region - all via SMS.
Somalia Speaks is a collaboration between Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization providing SMS messaging services, Ushahidi, Al Jazeera, Crowdflower, and the African Diaspora Institute. Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said in an interview with us, “We wanted to find out the perspective of normal Somali citizens to tell us how the crisis has affected them and the Somali diaspora.”
The goal of Somalia Speaks is to aggregate often-unheard voices 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 an online map. Since the launch, approximately 3000 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 pilot and test innovative mobile approaches to citizen media and news gathering. Visit the Mobile Media Toolkit to read the entire case study and learn more.
The competition asks for promising innovations to boost media access and participation around the world. Media helps connect people, gives voice to ideas, and equips inidviduals with knowledge to improve their lives and communities. Finalists were chosen from a pool of 426 entries from 75 countries.
Mobile Journalist on an SD Card
Our entry from the Mobile Media Toolkit is the Mobile Journalist on an SD Card. We think one of the most promising and innovative ways to boost media access and participation around the world is via mobile phones.
Most citizen journalists and reporters already use mobiles phones, but the sheer number of tools available makes it difficult to know the best way to use them. Mobile Journalist on an SD Card tests these tools with reporters working in the field, and then makes accessible the best of the tools for journalists and citizen journalists, downloadable and on micro SD cards ready to plug into any phone. Tools will be selected to work in varying situations, including low-resource reporting environments where Internet access is unreliable.
PBS MediaShift is hosting a live chat on Twitter about the use of SMS technology by journalists, news organizations, radio shows and more around the world. In many developing nations Internet access is less prevalent, and the main means of interaction is with mobile phones and SMS. Many projects are using SMS to help connect communities to important news and information, and to create a feedback loop for programs.
The chat takes place on Nov. 2 at 10:30 am PT/1:30 pm ET/6:30 pm CET, hashtag #SMSChat.
MediaShift's executive editor Mark Glaser (@mediatwit) will be moderating the live Twitter chat on SMS use, with these special guests:
Melissa Ulbricht: MobileActive.org and the Mobile Media Toolkit (@MobileMediaKit)
Sean McDonald: FrontlineSMS (@McDapper)
Zach Peterson: Radio Free Europe/Radio Azadi (@zachprague)
How to follow the discussion:
To follow the discussion, please log on to Twitter and search for the #SMSchat hashtag. Glaser will be sending out questions to the guests and audience in the format of Q1, Q2, Q3, and if you want to answer them, please reply with the Q number as well as the hashtag #SMSchat. All participants will need to use the hashtag in every tweet so we can see that as part of the discussion stream.
The discussion will be archived on PBS Idea Lab on Thursday using Storify.
Help us spread the word! We'll make it easy:
If you'd like to tweet about the chat please use this language or something similar: Live Twitter chat about SMS and journalism, with @mediatwit, @MobileMediaKit, @McDapper, @zachprague, 11/2 at 10:30 am PT at #SMSchat
The Mobile Media Toolkit is a new resource site with lots of content about how mobile tech can be used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media.
The Toolkit content is available in English, Spanish, Arabic, and we are translating into Russian as well. We've been adding lots of helpful new content since our launch a few months ago. Here is a sampling:
NEW How-To Guides: The latest is on how to use Bambuzer to live stream content and engage with audiences. Michelle Li of WECT tells us how her newsroom uses Bambuser to share live video and engage with viewers. (And lets us in on what news anchors talk about, off-camera.) Check out the complete guide here.
NEW Case studies, for instance on how to use SMS and radio to engage with listeners in Uganda. No Internet? No problem. Using a new tool called TRAC FM, stations are able to poll listeners via SMS and share the results over the radio. Read the full case study here.
TIPS for the Mobile Journalist, (aka MoJo) such as this video on how to shoot and transfer content from a mobile phone to a tablet using basic hardware and software. For more, check out the Toolkit section on Creating Content (and getting it off) your mobile phone.
According to the report, at the end of 2010, more than 4 billion people paid for mobile serivce. By the end of this year, about 5 billion mobile phones will be in service in a world with 7 billion people. The report suggests that the implications of so many people having access to phones are many: for politics, for education, for economies, for civil society, and for news and information.
While it offers several examples of mobile case studies in these various issue areas, the report focuses primarily on the growth of mobile Internet, and, hence, high-end smart phones over basic feature phones.
At MobileActive.org and on the Mobile Media Toolkit, we write often about the role of and potential for the basic feature phone. The CIMA report takes the stance that while 5 billion people will have access to mobile phones, by the end of this year “virtually every phone sold” will be a more high-end device.
This year, Chinese company Huawei launched an $80 Android phone, the IDEOS, through Kenyan telecom Safaricom. According to sources, the phone has sold over 350,000 units in Kenya, “a staggering statistic considering nearly half of Kenya’s population lives on less than two dollars per day.”
We thought it important to take a closer look at this relatively low-cost device and the larger issues and questions that arise from it.
The Android Edge?
An article on Singularity Hub suggests that while affordability is a key driver for adoption, a larger issue with the IDEOS phone is the competitive edge of Android phones:
Somalia is suffering through its worst drought in 60 years, and people are fleeing the famine and conflict. A large number of Somalians already live in diasporas across Africa, Europe, and North America. A new service from Voice of America’s Somalia Service and AudioNow makes it easier for Somalians in the United Kingdom to listen to coverage of the drought and other audio news updates, via a basic mobile phone.
“You have a well-educated, motivated, and mobile population that is willing to dial up and listen to radio broadcasts on their mobile phones,” said Steven Ferri, Web Managing Editor of VOA in Africa.
Bribespot is a mobile app for Android that allows people to submit reports of corruption and bribes. People can also submit reports on a website and instances are plotted on a map using Google maps API.
In March 2011, Artas Bartas and a team of people from Estonia, Finland, and Lithuania developed the app at Garage48, an event where participants try to pitch and develop an app within 48 hours. Bartas is familiar with issues of corruption; prior to Bribespot, he worked for the UN development program coordinating anti-corruption projects. And, unfortunately, there is demand for an app like Bribespot.
The app has been downloaded 600 times. On the site, about 700 total reports have been submitted and visualized, from around the world.
A just-published guide from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is all about making media mobile, specifically at newspapers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The full report is available for download here.
Billed as a guidebook, and not a one-size-fits-all rulebook, the guide aims to help Sub-Saharan African news publishers develop and implement mobile services. The report is based on a series of on-site interviews with newspapers in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa, including The Observer and the Daily Monitor in Uganda, The Standard and the Daily Nation in Kenya, and Grocott's Mail, Mail & Guardian, Avusa Group, and News24.com in South Africa.
Though the primary audience of the guidebook is media managers, there are lessons and tips for anyone interested in the current state of and potential future for mobile print media in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We would have wished that there was a greater focus on online media as the guide is almost entirely focused on print. Given the fast growth of online media outlets in a number of African media markets, this is an unfortunate limitation.
At the same time, the guide provides a detailed landscape of mobile telephony in Africa, including usage and infrastructure and access points (including SMS, mobile Internet and data, Sim Tool Kit, USSD, voice and interactive voice response). See explanations and examples of these access points in the Mobile Media Toolkit Glossary, here.
The Mobile Media Toolkit helps you make sense of the growing role of mobile tech in media. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, mobile tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media. We cover it all, from basic feature phones to the latest smartphone applications.
It's an exciting day for us here at MobileActive.org as we launch the Mobile Media Toolkit. For the last year we have been interviewing people, researching projects, and testing tools, to bring you this free resource. It is designed to help you evaluate and effectively deploy the right tools for reporting and sharing content on and to mobile devices.
Please visit the Toolkit. Share it with others. Add to it! It's available in English, Spanish, and Arabic. So, please join us and say Welcome, Bienvenidos, and مرحبا to the Mobile Media Toolkit!
With the growing use of mobile phones for citizen media comes new risks, challenges and opportunities. This online dialogue is a space to discuss stories, tactics, and resources for using mobile phones for citizen media, as well as a space to discuss mobile risk assessment and security. Jin the discussion on July 27 to share your stories, ideas and resources!
You can find more information on how to participate here.
Targeting women with mobile phones and mobile-based projects can bring great benefits and opportunities, as we outlined in Part 1 of our series on women and mobiles. But, there is a “darker side” to this world, which includes changes in gender relations and power dynamic, a potential increase in violence, substitution of money or a change in expenditures, invasion of privacy, and increased control by a male partner.
Changes in Gender Relations and Power Dynamics
When the traditional social dynamic of a household is patriarchal, introducing a mobile phone into the hands of the woman can challenge the existing gender structure. Trina DasGupta, mWomen Programme Director for the GSMA Development Fund, writes in an e-mail to MobileActive.org, “threats to the status quo have sometimes been viewed negatively by community leaders and we have seen examples of this gender discrimination manifesting itself when women gain greater access to empowering tools, such as the Internet or mobile phones.”
Women themselves may not agree. The GRACE project study in Kenya, for example, finds that women do not perceive mobiles at tools for males. “Unlike our literature review that suggested that the mobile phone is culturally construed as a male tool, the women entrepreneurs did not perceive the phone as such. However, the study does indicate that usage of the phone is culturally construed, with an increase in responsibilities and empowerment for one or other profession socially construed as women’s work.”
A paper by Aramanzan Madanda looks at gender relations and ICT adoption in Uganda (the work will soon be published in book format) and finds that “existing gender structures have been dented and that patriarchy is stressed by adoption of the technologies especially mobile phones leading to transformation of gender relations to an extent.”
A village in India last year banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they would arrange forbidden marriages. The village council suspected young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange to elope. Meanwhile, unmarried men could use mobile phones under parental supervision.
As mobile penetration increases across the developing world, the entry of mobile phones in the hands of women causes reactions. In many cases, mobile phone ownership empowers women in myriad ways: economic gains, increased access to information, greater autonomy and social empowerment, and a greater sense of security and safety.
But, there is a darker side. Targeting women with mobile phones can cause changes in gender dynamics and family expenditures and may relate to increases in domestic violence, invasion of privacy, or control by a male partner.
One of the largest parallel vote tabulation efforts is under way right now in Nigeria to observe and monitor gubernatorial elections. Project 2011 Swift Count is observing the national assembly, state assembly, and gubernatorial elections with 8000 trained election observers. The observers are also working across six high-priority states to complete parallel vote tabulations to verify the official results in six corresponding gubernatorial elections.
At around 9pm in Nigeria on election day, MobileActive.org spoke with Chris Doten, senior program officer on the ICT team for the National Democratic Institute (NDI). When we spoke with Doten, two-thirds of trained election observers had sent in via text message final vote counts, meaning the final tallying was complete at that particular polling place. A much higher percentage of observers have sent in summaries of total ballots cast.
The World Bank announced today the winners of its first-ever Apps for Development competition. The contest launched last October as part of the Open Data Initiative and invited developers and development professionals to create mobile applications to help solve world problems apply their skills toward the Millenium Development Goals. A total of 107 applications were submitted form 36 countries across every continent.
Honorable mention, for example, went to Treepet from Mexico, that teaches people about the realities of worldwide deforestation via a game in which you plant a seed, nourish and water it, and try to restore an ecosystem. One of the winning apps helps the Bank directly: StatPlanet World Bank from Australia uses the 3000-plus indicators available from the World Bank database in interactive maps and graphs.
It will also show you how to upload your own content and tell everyone about your mobile project, organization, or tool. We'll walk you through how to do just that, too.
Check it out and help us help you find what you are looking for!
SMSall is a service in Pakistan that enables mailing-list style interaction over SMS. It serves over 2.1 million people, and an average of 300 million SMS messages are sent every month (follow the total SMS count on the website). It is Pakistan’s largest SMS social network.
The founder of the service, Umar Saif, refers to it as “Twitter for SMS,” or as “Twitter for the 4 billion,” referring to the 4 billion people in the world who have access to mobile phones but not the Internet.
SMSall formed in response to the 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan. Like most Pakistani’s, Saif said, he tried to help during the aftermath but realized that although there were many rescue workers, there was no way to coordinate activities. “You would travel to a remote region with medicine, only to realize that there is plenty of medicine and all they needed were tents and warm clothing,' he said.
So Saif took action. On his laptop, he hacked together a basic response service, connected a mobile phone, and set up a broadcast group for all the rescue workers in the area. Those who subscribed to the “rescue group” would then receive SMS messages and information from the entire group.
From this grew the current-day SMSall service, the largest SMS social network in Pakistan. MobileActive.org spoke with Saif to hear more about the growth and next steps for the SMS service.
How does it work?
With the Kashmir earthquake, people could send an SMS to the service and ask to subscribe to the rescue group. Subsequently, they would receive SMS messages from everyone who posted to the rescue channel. This way, rescuers could keep in contact, in real-time, with only a basic mobile phone.
Now, SMSall users can create a group, join a group, follow a group, and broadcast to a group. The service has been used to spur blood donations, to communicate emergency responses, and to mobilize citizens in political protests. The service is used both by NGOs and more informally by people to keep in touch with friends and build communities around common interests.
SMSall became a popular platform for communication during media bans at the end of Musharraf’s rule. Political activists and members of civil society used SMSall to coordinate protests and activities. “One of the biggest groups on SMSall was run by an NGO setup by families of “missing persons” -- people who disappeared without trace during the political upheaval that gripped Pakistan in 2007 and 2008,” Saif said.
When a disaster or breaking news event occurs, specific groups form almost organically. An SMSall user will first notify an established group of friends and family, and from these many simultaneous chats, specific disaster or emergency groups are often formed, Saif said. The service resembles Twitter in that messages are being “pushed” out and viewed by any number of followers. Currently, there are over over 150,000 established groups on SMSall in Pakistan.
During the early days of SMSall, it was used to coordinate class quizzes and exams and communicate course schedules at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Saif worked with several students to tweak the system and used it in a course he taught. Other professors followed his lead, students started using it, and “before we knew it, the system went viral, very quickly,” Saif said. SMSall is currently used by over 180 colleges and universities in Pakistan. And from this grew the “SMS mailing list” in Pakistan.
A comprehensive new study, commissioned by UNICEF, sheds light on trends and challenges in global mobile telephony. The report, Mobiles for Development, focuses on mobile tech as an area of significant future opportunity for advancing social development around the word. The report finds that there is an increasing number of mobile-based projects, with the most common sectors being health, socio-economic development and agriculture. Findings also show that "mobile tools can identify the most deprived...communities, provide cost effective interventions, overcome bottlenecks to services, and enable communities to maximise the impact of available resources."
Additionally, the report takes a look at the mobile operators in this field. It finds that there are significant business opportunities for regional operatators in the field of social development, including:
Our latest case study features Small World News, reporting live from Benghazi with citizen media efforts in Libya. About a dozen young Libyan citizen journalists are capturing and sharing video content of life on the ground in Benghazi, right now. And they are scooping many major media outlets in the process -- check out their footage captured yesterday from the eastern gate of Ajdabiyah, a city east of Benghazi where heavy artillery is moving in.
With the increasing number of projects in this mobile-for-change field, there have been a fair share of failures. We have tried to analyze those with project leaders in our series of FailFaires.
But a project does not need to be a failure to an provide an opportunity for public evaluation, reflection, and dialogue, as we see in a recent series of posts. We were excited to see posts that take an introspective approach: these entries assess program effectiveness, identify gaps in M4D projects, and discuss challenges and solutions in the field.
A post on the Grameen Foundation blog discusses a control trial to asses the impact of a mobile for health project in Uganda:
..We recently completed one of the first randomized control trials designed to assess the impact of a mobile phone-driven health service aimed at improving the lives of the poor.
Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have been on the minds -- and on the screens -- of people around the world.
News organizations are covering the events in innovative ways, and people have noticed. More generally, the role of social media itself in protests and revolutions is also being debated. But, as Charlie Beckett writes on his blog, let’s “put aside the silly debate about whether Twitter 'caused' revolution and look instead at how it helped tell the story.” Twitter is just one platform being used to help tell the story, as we see from our conversation with Al Jazeera, one of the most innovative newsrooms in the mix.
The radio station WNYC is creating on-air and online stories from two things very familiar to people in the Northeastern United States: mobile phones and snow. A snowstorm over the holidays was the heaviest December snowfall in six decades and dumped up to 20 inches in many parts of New York City. The story quickly became one of snow removal and how the city was not removing the snow as quickly as people had hoped.
Jim Colgan and the WNYC newsroom wanted to get a sense of what was happening on the streets. Problem was, there was no good or easy way to do this. The station couldn’t rely on the city for real-time information, and reporters couldn’t get to many of the areas. The answer was to have the listeners share their own reports and stories, via mobile phone.
Mobile panels. Software as a service. The United States State of the Union adress by the American president. These are things not typically viewed as “sexy,” but the team behind SurveySwipe is trying to change that.
SurveySwipe is a mobile application that allows a user to take simple surveys or participate in live pulse polling. The app is from IdeaScale, a company that provides services for online and mobile crowdsourcing endeavors -- they work with groups from small non-profits to government agencies to large companies and brands.
The company has been doing Software as a Service (SaaS)-based marketing since 2003, or as Rob Hoehn of IdeaScale said, since “before it was cool.” SurveySwipe is a foray into qualitative data analysis and feeback; for our MobileActive.org audience, it is also an example of a creative, two-fold approach to mobile data collection.
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Now, SMSall users can create a group, join a group, follow a group, and broadcast to a group. The service has been used to spur blood donations, to communicate emergency responses, and to mobilize citizens in political protests. The service is used both by NGOs and more informally by people to keep in touch with friends and build communities around common interests. 
