Sauti ya wakulima, "The voice of the farmers", is a collaborative, multimedia knowledgebase created by farmers from the Chambezi region of the Bagamoyo District in Tanzania. By using smartphones, farmers gather audiovisual evidence of their practices, and publish images and voice recordings on the Internet.
Since March 2011, the participants of Sauti ya wakulima, a group of five men and five women, gather every Monday at the agricultural station in Chambezi. They use a laptop computer and a 3G Internet connection to view the images and hear the voice recordings that they posted during the week. They also pass the two available smartphones on to other participants, turning the phones into shared tools for communication. The smartphones are equipped with GPS modules and an application that makes it easy to send pictures and sounds to the Internet. The farmers at Chambezi use them to document their daily practices, make reports about their observations regarding changes in climate and related issues, and also to interview other farmers, expanding thus their network of social relationships.
As mobile gaming explodes worldwide, the market for “games for good” (either with an educational or social-change focus) is open for growth. Mobile games provide a way to quickly pass time, an always-on-hand source of entertainment, and a way to connect with others through competing scores or sharing strategies. Can mobile games also be used to teach, inform, and raise awareness?
Level One: The Mobile Gaming Landscape
The current mobile landscape shows that games are popular worldwide, regardless of handset type or region. A June 2011 Gartner report on the state of the gaming industry reported that mobile gaming is expected to see the largest growth percentage of any aspect of the industry (compared to consoles and PCs), estimating “its share growing from 15 percent in 2010 to 20 percent in 2015.” Tuong Nguyen, principal research analyst at Gartner, is quoted as saying, “As the popularity of smartphones and tablets continues to expand, gaming will remain a key component in the use of these devices. Although [mobile devices] are never used primarily for gaming, mobile games are the most downloaded application category across most application stores, […] For this reason, mobile gaming will continue to thrive as more consumers expand their use of new and innovative portable connected devices.”
The growth of mobile games can be clearly seen in US mobile trends; a July 2011 report from Nielsen says that games are the most popular kind of app for smartphone owners, with 64% of US smartphone owners using a mobile game app at least once a month. The Nielsen report also found that “the average mobile gamer plays an average of 7.8 hours a month,” and that “those with iPhones tend to play around 14.7 hours each month while those with Android smartphones play around 9.3 hours per month.”
But mobile games aren’t just popular on smartphones; feature phone users are embracing the mobile gaming trend as well. MobiThinking’s 2011 global mobile statistic report found that among Africans who use mobile devices as their primary means of accessing the Internet, 55 percent report downloading games. OnDevice Research’s 2011 Mobile Internet Satisfaction report found that mobile games can influence handset purchase, as users want mobile devices that can support games. They report that, “89% of mobile media users in Kenya consider the quality of games they can play on their device when choosing a new phone.”
A 2009 report on India’s mobile gaming field from Vital Analytics found “approximately 120 million urban Indians used their mobile phones to play games during quarter ending July 2009, a reach of 41%. In terms of time spent playing games, 37% of the population spends less than an hour in a week playing games while on the other end of the spectrum 9% spend over 5 hours on an average.” The report also found that most popular types of mobiles games for Indian users were sports games (such as cricket) and arcade-style puzzle games.
With all these mobile gaming enthusiasts out there, where does that leave educational and social change games? Couldn’t some of this popularity be turned toward math, literacy, or advocacy games? The landscape shows that mobile games are popular regardless of handset and location, so the question now is how to make a game that provides both value and entertainment to the player.
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:
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on the Hearst magazine empire's new focus on mobile apps, what can go wrong on your mobile website and how to spot it, a camera phone-to-email project in India, checking African drugs with SMS, and a new speed texting record.
The use of mobile phones for quick-time data collection is proliferating around the world. To get a better understanding of the scale and scope of these new data collection efforts, we partnered with UN Global Pulse initiative to conduct a survey of present and planned mobile data collection efforts. The survey results will help identify new, quick-time data sources.
The first findings of the global survey have been compiled in an inventory. The inventory is a living document that will be regularly updated as we become aware of new projects. If you are managing a mobile data collection project and you would like to have it featured in the inventory, please contact us or leave a comment.
We are also currently conducting for UN Global Pulse a mobile phone survey across multiple countries including Uganda, India, Mexico, Ukraine and Iraq. The survey is being conducted via text message and uses simple questions to understand how populations in different parts of the world perceive. We are drawing on our extensive network of partners on the ground to conduct the survey and will make the results publicly available (albeit in an anonymous and aggregate format). The survey is an exercise in rapid, bottom-up data collection. Questions in the survey focus on economic perceptions, including:
Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a global celebration that raises awareness about the enivronment. To do our part to celebrate this day, we’ve put together a look at some of the mobile tools and organizations we’ve covered recently that are doing their part to help the Earth. If you have any suggestions about tools or organizations that are doing great environmental work with mobiles, please leave a comment and let us know – and have a good Earth Day!
Water Quality
We recently covered the Water Quality Reporter, a program in South Africa that uses mobiles to test the health of water supplies. The program allows field workers to use mobile forms or SMSs to cheaply and effectively transfer data about water quality to a centralized database, while receiving feedback about how to handle local water problems.
Consumentor is a cooperative with 10 employes.Our goal is to offer a simple and flexible tool that enables all consumers to make longterm sustainable consumer choises on a daily bases. It should be easy, fun and awarding to do right !
Editacuja is a Brazilian startup focused in knowledge management and contend development services for education, training and culture.
Integrate emerging technologies to provide innovative solutions to companies, universities and schools, enabling cross border iniciatives with high ROI
Works with a multi-media approach, enabling mobile, press, audiovisual and web media services and products.
With a multi-disciplinary team, Editacuja adds value and knowledge for projects that can educate and relate.
Suraj Wahab is passionate about cookstoves. Indeed, efficient charcoal burning stoves like those made by his company, Toyola Energy Limited, offer a lot to be passionate about.
For hundreds of thousands of families in Ghana who cook using traditional methods, these simple metal and clay devices provide a cleaner, safer, more efficient way to prepare their daily meals, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation. The stoves are sold in markets and door-to-door by Toyola “evangelists”, individuals who record each sale in a notebook and then are paid on commission. With 50,000 stoves projected to be sold this year and double that possible in 2010, the paper records are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
On October 24th, 2009, more than 5200 events in 181 countries took place as part of a climate change awareness campaign. Planned by 350.org, this worldwide festival of events is a call to action.
In December, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen with one critical goal in mind: to create a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. 350.org wants to ensure that the treaty is tough enough to enforce the changes necessary to lower atmospheric carbon levels.
The 350.org name comes from the level of acceptable carbon dioxide –350 parts per million – that can exist in the atmosphere before effects of global warming begin to manifest. Currently, the carbon levels in the atmosphere are at 390 parts per million; 350.org believes that lowering the carbon emissions in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million can help undo some of the damage caused by global warming.
A new-media training organisation that empowers young African men and women to build and pursue a career as reporter and to strengthen the media function in Africa. Visit the progress of our trainees on our Online Training Platform: www.VoicesofAfrica.com.
Voices of Africa Media Foundation has led the Voices of Africa project that trains journalists around Africa to use mobile phones in video and multimedia reporting.
At 12:18 p.m. today, thousands of mobile phone alarms went off all over the world.
"It creates a ringtone symphony, and people find each other," said Ben Wikler, spokesman for advocacy group Avaaz.org. "Then they simultaneously call government offices."
The alarms, and subsequent phone calls, were meant to draw attention to climate change legislation on the eve of the United Nations Climate Summit, held this week in New York City. At each event, a flashmob of people all set their phone alarms for 12:18, held their phones above their heads when the alarms went off and then found the other participants. Flash-mobbers then used their phones to take pictures, and called government offices. There were about 1500 flashmob events in 130 countries, said Wikler.
"It's a global climate wake-up call," said Wicker. Although the event that Wikler attended, in New York's Union Square, had only about 30 attendees, an event in India had more than 1300.
WildKnowledge (WK) are a spin out company from Oxford Brookes University in the UK. WK enables members to create and share mobile recording forms (WildForm), decision trees (WildKey), maps (WildMap) and diagrams (WildImage). These tools enable the user to make informed decisions in the field and gather good quality data. This collated data can then be uploaded and shared as part of collaborative projects. Most of our members are UK school children and students, we are keen to explore new areas both geographically and contextually. All WK applications are wep apps and can work on any device with a web browser from a mobile device to a laptop (functionality will vary according to browser's capabilities).
WWF South Africa was founded in 1968 by the late Dr. Anton Rupert and was then know as the Southern African Nature Foundation. Throughout the past 40 years, this national office of the leading global conservation organization has been committed to conserving the natural heritage of South Africa for future generations.
WWF South Africa currently has 7 main programs; Climate Change, Trade and Investment, Environmental Education, Species, Marine, Freshwater and the Ecosystems Partnership.
We work with numerous partners including NGOs, industry and government to achieve our goal of people living in harmony with nature.
Greenpeace India/SMS Lead Generation data sheet 5858 Views
Greenpeace's first use of SMS in India was as a fundraising tool. As part of a campaign to encourage people to plant trees, Greenpeace India sent out text messages offering free saplings.
All text for this case study came from this description on SOFII.
The Peace Corps traces its roots and mission to 1960, when then-Senator John F. Kennedy challenged students at the University of Michigan to serve their country in the cause of peace by living and working in developing countries. From that inspiration grew an agency of the federal government devoted to world peace and friendship.
Since that time, more than 195,000 Peace Corps Volunteers have served in 139 host countries to work on issues ranging from AIDS education to information technology and environmental preservation.
Here are some mobile events for the month of September that we thought are noteworthy and of interest to the MobileActive.org community. If you know of others, please mail us at info at MobileActive dot org.
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camp in Bangalore includes:
We are occasionally commissioned to write introductory articles about the mobile revolution and implications for NGOs for various publications. Here is one broad overview of some areas where mobiles are deployed in civil society.
Cellphones have become the most ubiquitous communication device in the hands of human beings. There are an estimated 3.5 billion mobile phones in use and there is coverage in even remote corners of the world. Cellphones have revolutionized not just the way we work and organize within cultures and societies, but have the potential to change how NGOs (non-governmental organizatios) operate.
Mobile phones are already experimentally used in multiple ways by NGOs. We at MobileActive.org have been tracking how organizations in areas such as health and disease prevention, economic development, humanitarian relief, democratic participation, and advocacy are using mobile phones to make their work more effective and efficient.
Following are a few examples of what we have seen and where we think mobile phones have potential to be used more strategically by NGOs.
