MobileActive.org

The world is witnessing a new dawn with regard to the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to contribute in the fight against poverty. For the first time, there are now realistic opportunities for inhabitants of remote locations in low-income countries to get connected via ICTs. Farmers, fishermen as well as entrepreneurs in urban areas are rapidly adopting mobile phones as a key tool to advance their commercial activities, and some poor people are finding new livelihoods on the back of this trend. Against this background, the Information Economy Report 2010 focuses on the nexus of ICTs, enterprises and poverty alleviation. Whereas the knowledge base needs to grow considerably, the evidence presented in this Report suggests that more attention should be given by policymakers and other stakeholders to this new set of opportunities.

The Report is organized into five chapters. Chapter I introduces a conceptual framework for the analysis that follows. Chapter II reviews recent connectivity and affordability trends to gauge the degree of access and uptake of different ICTs among the poor. Chapter III turns to the role of the poor in the production of ICT goods and services (the ICT sector). In chapter IV, the focus shifts to the use of ICT by enterprises, with emphasis on those that matter most for poor people, namely small and micro-enterprises in urban and rural areas. Finally, chapter V presents the main policy implications from the analysis.

The supply/demand nature of market-based models (led by the private sector and consumer level uptake) is argued by some as being a better form of introducing new technologies that benefit the poor than direct interventions from development actors. This so called passive diffusion view is based on the way mobile telephony has spread so rapidly. The approach holds that if ICTs do have developmental value for the poor, a combination of private firms’ search for profit plus the poor’s search for value will make it happen. Development money is best spent elsewhere.

A long history of failures in national government rollout of telecentre networks across Africa to the village level along with a spike and lull in donor driven ICT projects is perhaps reason and evidence for the passive diffusion view becoming popular. Particularly evident is how a top-down supply push for perceived ICT ‘needs’ of the poor does not always match on the ground demands and realities.

Today services delivered via mobiles that have widespread availability and use at the base of the pyramid are predominantly left to market forces to deliver. There are of course a number of notable and innovative exceptions to this and it is certainly true that private sector mobile based services have often been less ambitious in terms of pro-poor outcomes than development sector pilots – as might be expected. Yet many of the innovative case studies involving development interventions have remained niche, difficult to replicate, and have often not been sustainable over time.

This paper seeks to give a brief overview of the history of development sector interventions of ICTs and where this positions ‘ICTs for development’ going forward. A key question to ask as we move into the second decade of the 21st century is how the impact of ICTs on the poorest can be improved – and the role of the development sector and government in achieving this in what is today a predominantly market-driven approach to mobiles and more broadly to ICTs.

A 2010 Country Governance and Anti-Corruption (CGAC)-funded pilot in Guatemala employed entry-level mobile phones in conjunction with EpiSurveyor, a free, web-based software for data collection, to drastically reduce cost, facilitate accuracy and accelerate implementation of a nationally-representative beneficiary survey of Guatemala‘s conditional cash transfer program.

As such, it illustrates the potential of mobile phone-based data collection to strengthen program monitoring, evaluation and implementation, in particular in remote and marginalized areas highly populated by indigenous peoples.

Mobile-based branchless banking has become one of the key mechanisms for extending financial services to disenfranchised populations in the world's developing regions. One shortcoming of today's branchless banking systems is that they rely largely on network-layer services for securing transactions and do not implement any application-layer security. Recent attacks on some of the most popular branchless banking systems show that these systems are not end-to-end secure.

In this paper, we make the case for designing mobile-based branchless banking systems which build security into the application layer of the protocol and guarantee end-to-end security to system users. Our main contribution is a threat model which effectively captures the goals of end-to-end authenticated transactions in branchless banking. This model, besides incorporating the obvious external threats to a protocol, also accounts for the possibility of insider attacks - those mountable by banking agents or other human intermediaries in the system. We then provide recommendations for solution design based on the security requirements of our model and the infrastructural constraints under which branchless banking systems operate.

Both mHealth and MFS (Mobile Financial Services) are nascent industries and fragmented along multiple dimensions. The aim of this paper is to help reduce some of these uncertainties and reinforce dialogue on how the mobile communications platform can be leveraged to strengthen mutually positive outcomes related to both financial inclusion and health. With user-centric solutions that leverage common technologies, new efficiencies and capabilities can be created that serve to accelerate global scale.

Unlocking this potential will require the following questions to be addressed: 1. What will be the best method to drive awareness and adoption of the self-reinforcing dynamics of “wealth and health”? Who will lead these efforts? 2. How will the integration and interoperability of disparate technologies across multiple industry and public sector domains occur? 3. Who will build and manage the common infrastructure and distribution networks? 4. How will the various points of policy coordination work across sector domains?

The rise of the mobile phone has challenged the predictions that many information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) specialists offered about information in the developing world. Instead of embracing community solutions that offered shared access to information, many poor people have been willing to pay large sums and others have documented, sometimes more than 50% of their disposable income) for personal access to communication tools.

Presented with a model that extends connectivity into many poor communities without government subsidy, often turning a profit (and thus being sustainable), the development community is rightly looking for ways to build tools that leverage these platforms to promote economic and community development.

There is something profound taking place in emerging markets with mobile money movement... it is now a “Mobile Money Movement” with the potential to substantially alter the economic paths of the poor and emerging economies at large. For this reason private and public sectors alike are now taking notice of this industry. Mobile finance is becoming an increasingly important topic for The World Economic Forum and for the G20 summit. Nearly 2/3 of the world’s population lives in poverty: four billion people live on less than $8.00 USD per day. Most do not have bank accounts, but do have mobile phones (1.7 billion people by 2012.)

Mobile money provides an opportunity for financial inclusion to the unbanked base of the economic pyramid - the majority of the global population who has lived in the informal financial sector and who has relied on cash to conduct all financial transactions. As such, they lack access to credit, insurance, and savings. This wave of mobile money momentum, if not slowed down by other challenges inherent in these markets, will undoubtedly positively impact the course of economic growth in emerging markets for a number of reasons that are inherent within mobile money itself.

Mobile money will spur economic growth in emerging markets because of the forces inherent to mobile money itself. Specifically, these forces include:
1. the ubiquity of data transmission that mobile provides;
2. mobile money as a new industry;
3. mobile money as an infrastructure supporting new businesses and other industries;
4. the infusion of new capital from the informal sector; and
5. the efficiency gains that digitization of money enables.

Populations in the rural developing world have just as many, if not more, information needs as people living in more affluent areas. But their constraints — intermittent power, intermittent connectivity, limited education, literacy and capital — make first-world approaches to accessing information systems inapplicable. Mobile phones are on the cusp of spurring an information revolution in such regions. Long battery life, wireless connectivity, solid-state memory, low price and immediate utility make this device better suited to rural conditions than a PC. However, current software on mobile phones makes them hard to use and to program.

In this dissertation, I present the design, implementation and evaluation of CAM — a mobile application framework designed to address the information needs of the rural developing world. Beginning with a two-month participatory design study, including users with varying levels of education, I propose some general guidelines for user interface and system design in this context. Motivated by these guidelines, I present CAM. CAM applications are accessed by capturing barcodes on paper forms using the mobile phone camera, or entering numeric strings with the keypad. Supporting one-step navigation, direct linkage to paper practices and offline multi-media interaction, CAM is uniquely adapted to rural device, user and infrastructure constraints. To demonstrate the usability of this framework, I implement and evaluate several distinct CAM-based applications (one of which has already been commercially deployed). I also provide preliminary motivation for fourteen other applications that could be implemented with the same, or similar, approach.

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering support via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 26 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

The paper suggests that research on the role of mobile telephony for socioeconomic development (M4D) draws on two frames. One frame stresses the relative freedom of telephone users to do whatever they choose. The other stresses how technologies and technology-led interventions are embedded in recursive, context specific relationships with user communities. Together these frames support M4D’s “dual heritage”. After detailing current M4D archetypes representing each heritage, the paper introduces a conceptual and practical synthesis, that is, large-scale platforms for distributed, semi-constrained interaction.

This paper considers two examples of such platforms—MXit, South Africa’s mobile social networking service and M-PESA, Kenya’s mobile money transfer system—including both anticipated and unanticipated consequences of operating “at scale” and beyond the confines of a controlled M4D intervention. Finally, this paper introduces implications of the dual heritage and of the rise of hybrid platforms for research and practice.

This paper explores the reach and use of m-money among the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in the Philippines using survey data from LIRNEasia’s 2008 Mobile 2.0 surveys. It looks at m-money’s potential and actual use for remittance among internal and external migrant workers and their families. The results are triangulated with focus group data and literature on mobile and electronic money, and framed using Van Dijk’s (2006) Stages of Access to digital technologies.

Although usage of m-money among the BoP remains low, the ICT infrastructure for this is in place. Compared to other Asian countries where the survey was also conducted, Filipinos are more familiar and have higher trust in mobile electronic transactions. Managing their resistance to change from current offline remitting practices remains a challenge.