MobileActive.org

Understanding Negotiation in Airtime Sharing In Low-Income Microenterprises

How Users Understand Cellular Infrastructure

Deprivation, Distance and Connectivity: The Adaptation of Mobile Phone Use To A Life in Wesbank, A Post-Apartheid Township in South Africa

Early Experience of Mobile Telephony: A Comparison of Two Villages in Papua New Guinea

Using ICT to Promote Governance

Funding Mobile Strategies for Social Impact: The Future is Now

Mobile Security for Journalist - The Essential SaferMobile Survival Guide

The new Mobile Security Survival Guide for Journalists from SaferMobile helps you better understand the risks inherent in the use of mobile technology. It also discusses tactics you can use to protect yourself. 

As someone working with sensitive information, mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose journalists and citizen reporters working in sensitive environments to risks that are not easy to detect or overcome. This guide is designed to help you navigate these challenges.

We outline the risks and offer tips to help mitigate them. SaferMobile's primary goal is to help you make better decisions about using your mobile phone as a journalist, rights defender, or activist. SaferMobile is a project of MobileActive.org.

The Mobile Security Survival Guide is written with the workflow of a journalist in mind and covers Mobile Network Basics, Prepping for Assignment, Reporting with your Phone, Filing the Story, and considering for Social Media use on your phone. Check it out.

There is much more at SaferMobile - resources, apps, and training materials to make you and your mobile communications more secure.  

Can Cash Compete with a Pig?

Editor's Note: This is the second blog in a three-part series co-authored by Ali Ndiwalana, Lisa Kienzle and Ignacio Mas on mobile money. Post #1 can be found here.

What are the rewards or incentives and mechanisms that are needed to help poor customers set aside money to meet their financial goals? Banks in Uganda are taking numerous measures to capture the market – from offering unusually high interest rates (Crane Bank is advertising 20% on fixed-deposit accounts) to introducing lottery schemes that offer houses and cars for new savings account customers (e.g., Vimba with Bank of Africa or Fuuka binojjo with Housing Finance Bank).

But even this fierce competition and significant incentives, the majority of Ugandans still prefer stuffing cash under their mattress or converting their cash into in-kind assets such as chicken, pigs, goats and cows. Lack of access to formal financial tools is just one reason for this preference. There is something fundamentally important that the banks have not considered when cultivating their incentive schemes: The rewards offered by these assets are hard to beat.

Take the example of the pig, which produces three cycles of eight piglets, or 24 piglets, per year. A grown pig can be sold for 200,000 UGX ($80), which amounts to a return of 4.8 million UGX, or a bit more than $2000, per year minus the cost of their upkeep. Not bad for some swine! These in-kind investments also regularly produce other goods that can be consumed or sold – for example, chickens produce eggs, and cows and goats produce milk.

Within the context of such returns, cash can never really be king in poor communities because it does not quickly multiply or consistently produce anything of palpable value. What you see is what is printed on the note. It is only what you can buy with it in the market that changes. And with food inflation as high as 42%, cash is quickly losing its value. So why would anyone in their right mind keep their value in cash in the context of such high returns? More importantly, how can we design appropriate financial products in communities where it pays off to be “cash lite”?

The Mobile Phone as a Megafone: Immigrants Telling Stories in Their Own Words

Every Saturday, a group of Queens, New York residents gathers to learn how to use mobile technology to tell their stories. Megafone, a mobile-based citizen media project, provides an outlet for groups that are often not covered by traditional media organizations. In Queens, a group of Chinese immigrants use Megafone to document their daily lives and experiences in New York City.

Antoni Abad, the founder and director of Megafone, started in 2003 when camera phones first started appearing on the market. He realized that having a low-cost, portable documentation tool would create new opportunities for capturing every-day life – especially for marginalized communities that either are portrayed negatively in the media or aren't covered at all.

Built on the Open Data Kit platform, Megafone content is directly uploaded from mobile devices to the Megafone website. The project has been in operation since 2004 in a number of countries, each time focusing on a marginalized group such as Roma in France, disabled people in Barcelona, or taxi drivers in Mexico. Abad says that by using Megafone, "Communities that suffer stigma have the opportunity to counteract the media and prejudices they encounter in society." 

Designed to Scale: How Programme Mwana Uses SMS to Get Health Results Across Zambia and Malawi

In Zambia, roughly 13.5% of the population is estimated to have HIV/AIDS, while the number of children (ages 0-14) with the disease is estimated to be 120,000. Programme Mwana uses SMS technology to send lab results between community health clinics and diagnostic labs to improve the process of early infant diagnosis across the country.

Launched in 2010 through a partnership with UNICEF Innovation, the Zambian Ministry of Health, Boston Univeristy, CHAI, and the local UNICEF office, Programme Mwana was designed to be a scalable system to help with infant health interventions, allowing HIV/AIDS results to be sent securely from labs to district clinics. The project was launched simultaneously in Malawi. Merrick Schaefer, who led the development of the project with UNICEF, says that the group focused on participatory design to develop agile, adaptable software that meets the needs of community health workers.

Kenyan Farmers’ Use of Cell Phones: Calling preferred over SMS

The Developmental Contribution From Mobile Phones Across The Agricultural Value Chain In Rural Africa

April Events: Join a Mobile Discussion!

Ready for April events? This month has plenty of conferences and panels to keep anyone with an interest in mobiles entertained. Check out the upcoming events to see what's happening this month.

2-3 April, Africa Mobile Money Research (Nairobi, Kenya) The goals of this two-day event are to examine opportunities, trends, and growth strategies in mobile money initiatives, and to highlight African mobile money innovation.

Mobile Mondays: Each month independent branches of Mobile Monday gather together to discuss different aspects of mobile technology. Some of this month's events are:

• 2 April, Mobile Monday (Montreal, Canada) The organization will be discussing mobile advertising.
• 4 April, Mobile Monday (Bangalore, India) This meet-up is centered around the Ubuntu Cloud Day presentations.
• 5 April, Mobile Monday (Tokyo, Japan) This is an open event focused on socializing with other fans of mobile technology.

17-18 April, The Mobile Show (Dubai, United Arab Emirates) The Mobile Show is a multi-track event focusing on a variety of mobile themes: App Development, Mobile Advertising, M-Entertainment, M-Commerce, and M-Health.  The conference has panels and exhibits focusing on different aspects of mobile phone use.

GetH2O Mobile Game

GetH2O Mobile Game data sheet 1305 Views

Basic Information

Website URL: 

http://www.butterflyworks.org

Organization involved in the project?: 

Butterfly Works

Project goals: 

The project goals were two fold:

1. Action research: Can a mobile game provide an engaging learning experience on a social topic with young people in East Africa.

2. The learning goals of the game are to increase awareness and critical attitudes amongst young people in urban areas in relation to the bad conditions of people living in informal settlements and their relationship to conflict escalation.



And more specifically the goals are to:



• Raise awareness about conditions in informal settlements and how they can lead to conflict.

• Reflect on the responsibility of the individual to contribute to their community good. 

• Raise awareness about the water shortages in informal settlements.

Brief description of the project: 

GetH2O Mtaani is a serious game, which simulates the complexity of life in an informal settlement, focusing on the scarcity of resources, especially that of water and housing. Players learn how to manage resources, invest in the community and prevent escalation of conflict.

Target audience: 

The game targets young people in the age group of 15 to 28 years that live in urban areas, informal settlements and smaller towns in East Africa and specifically Nairobi and Kampala. A later version of the game targets young people in the Netherlands in the same agre group.

Detailed Information

Mobile Tools Used: 

Wordpress Mobile Pack

Length of Project (in months) : 

24

Status: 

Ongoing

What worked well? : 

Development and Creation Process:

The game was developed in a series of co-creation workshops with designers and young people in Nairobi and designers from Butterfly Works. Similarly the testing was a collaborative process.

Background context and theories:

As the game was to deal with the themes leading to violent conflict amongst young people in Urban Kenya (specifically in slum areas.) the first workshop was held in Nairobi with a range of young people, policemen, teachers, community workers and parents. Together, the group listed the main issues in their lives, the types of regular conflicts they deal with and their causes, they then wrote scenarios on how these conflicts typically arise and do or don’t get solved.

Conflict Escalation

Informed with a number of theories on conflict escalation and specifically Staub and Pearlmans’ ‘Continuum of violence', including scapegoating, we started on the board game development. This concept session was held in Amsterdam and led by games designer Joris Dormans, using his game development kit, whereby we played a blank board game with blank counters and projected various scenarios and rules onto the board. What quickly surmised was that resources contestation was a good game dynamic and water was chosen as common good which needed to be shared and which could lead to conflicts. Inspired by the game Werewolf, we added a number of player roles to increase complexity, such as the thief, the arsonist and the land developer.

Following a workshop in Nairobi, again with young designers (all of whom grew up in the slums) served to fine tune the game rules and choose the game roles (characters) so that they were a true reflection of how things work in the slums in Nairobi. The designers also reviewed the draft game visual designs and suggested improvements. We first developed the board game and were kindly sponsored in the production of the boards by the German company Ludo Fact. 1000 games were produced in English language and 1000 in the Dutch language. The Dutch version was sold in the Netherlands in specialist game shops. The profit was used to cover the costs of the English language game.

The next step was to translate the multi-player board game rules into a single player experience suitable for the mobile phone. Game design is very much an emergent process, you can’t know before hand how the sum of the game rules will turn out as an experience, so you need to do a number of development rounds. We had to redraw all the graphics into small bitmap pixels.

Young people and downloads

The game targets young people in the age group of 15 to 28 years that live in urban areas, informal settlements and smaller towns in East Africa and specifically Nairobi and Kampala. A third version of the game targets young people in the Netherlands, but that game falls outside of this short case study. The mobile game was launched globally on September 21st, 2011 International peace day and was promoted in Kenya and Uganda, through Facebook, twitter, the online game platforms, GetJar and Nokia’s Ovi Store. In Uganda, city radio promoted the game calling users to text in for the game.

Although the game had more than 50,000 downloads globally in less than 2 months, and the 85,000 downloads in 8 months, the original plan was to reach 50,000 downloads in East Africa (Kenya and Uganda mainly). In fact there were only 5000 downloads from the online channels in Kenya and Uganda. The board game is played in 25 centers in Nairobi and 15 schools in Kampala. These are facilitated sessions called ‘Game Gatherings’ where a group of young people play together and discuss the issues that come out of the game. These sessions are organised by Tobias Ouma in Nairobi and ‘Reach a Hand’ in Kampala.

Social Impact

The learning goals of the game are to increase awareness and critical attitudes amongst young people in urban areas in relation to the bad conditions of people living in informal settlements and their relationship to conflict escalation.

And more specifically the goals are to:

• Raise awareness about conditions in informal settlements and how they can lead to conflict.
• Reflect on the responsibility of the individual to contribute to their community good.
• Raise awareness about the water shortages in informal settlements.

Board game versus Mobile game

Broadly speaking, the board game is more effective than the mobile game in reaching the learning objectives. This is due both to the multi-player nature of the board game and the space that affords for discussion and reflection. And it is also due to the better game dynamics of the board version. Practically speaking though, the board game is a much more expensive tool, due to it’s physical production and transport costs, while the digital version can be copied and sent for a negligible amount. There is also a Game Gathering kit for the mobile game, which has proved effective. It includes a phone with the game pre-installed and a booklet explaining the game and how to facilitate the ensuing discussions.

Lessons Learned

Below we present some of the outcomes of the recent game gathering event held in Kampala: More than 3/4 of participants played the game in pairs. Half of them enjoyed playing the game a lot and the other half just enjoyed it. All of the users discussed the game with the person who was playing with them while playing the game.

Conditions leading to conflict: Most of the users found the game’s situation similar to problems in their communities in real life. They named the stealing and lack of water as the main common issues between the game and real life. Before playing the game participants named poverty, corruption and child abuse as the main conditions that lead to conflicts in their community. Interestingly after playing the game most of the users also named misunderstanding as a main driver of conflict. After playing the game “over population” was also added to the list as an issue leading to conflict in the community.

Contributing to community good: All of the participants believed they could contribute to their community. Before playing the game majority of youth noted “friendship” and “helping people in need” as their contribution to their community. Few of them also named involvement in community works and guiding other people as their contribution. However, after playing the game participants also noted “building public toilets and community houses”, “protecting the resources like water” and “working together and cease revenge” as their possible contribution to the community as well as the other contributions they mentioned before.

Interestingly, the participants’ responses after the game directly reflect some of the options available in the “actions’ menu” in the game. The actions presented in the game are result of the collaboration with the youth living in the same context as the participants. They are facing the same issues in the game as they face in their day to day life and their answers show that the game had been helpful engaging the users to reflect on their community’s issues they face in their daily life.

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

Although the game had more than 50,000 downloads globally in less than 2 months, and the 85,000 downloads in 8 months, the original plan was to reach 50,000 downloads in East Africa (Kenya and Uganda mainly). In fact, there were only 5000 downloads from the online channels in Kenya and Uganda.

Going forward: The mobile game is a low cost way to engage young people in social discussions, through the use of games. That being said, a mobile game must present a casual game experience, that is: have almost no learning curve (it should be immediately obvious how to play; unlike a computer game where players will invest more time in order to learn how to play the game) and the game duration is about 3 to 5 minutes in duration.  This is a relatively narrow window of opportunity to engage the player in any complex issue while still delivering a fun experience. In the case of the GetH20 the game errs on the side of complexity, the complexity is needed for the topic at hand, at the same time this lessens its ease of play as a casual game, thus impinging on the greater spread of the game. For future games we are looking at a serial model, introducing game levels as new scenarios.

GetH2O Mobile Game Locations

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Mobile Apps for Development: Focus on Content By Users, Not Just For Users

(This blog post was co-authored by Rafael Anta, a Technology Specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank, and Ignacio Mas, an independent consultant.)

Most applications for development (m-whatever) are based on giving poor people access to information that the provider of that information thinks people need.  There is little interaction and no user-generation of content in many first. Does it need to be like that?

There are two basic attributes of mobile communication. First, it is immediate. A person with a phone can communicate right here and right now,  the result of the expansive mobile network coverage and our ability to carry a network end-point (a.k.a. a mobile phone) with us wherever we go. Secondly, the communication is interactive - a two-way communications, with equal capacity for sending and receiving. Both these factors – immediacy and interactivity— involve users not just as consumers but as contributors of content. In fact, the most widely-used mobile channels are purely user-generated:  voice and SMS, some picture messaging, more recently Facebook and Twitter. 

These applications implicate us in one more sense: we are also marketers of our content. User-generated content involves a level of audience targeting and content tailoring that no studio executive will ever achieve. Our content fills the airwaves in ever-growing quantities, but any bit of it has scarcity value – at least for the sender and for the intended recipient. Content is king, but our content is supreme.

M-governance: Exploratory Survey on Kenyan Service Delivery and Government Interaction

Activist Media from the Frontlines: Mobile, Strategic, and Much More Than Just at "The Right Place at the Right Time"

In Syria, activists and citizen journalists fill a media void and strategically inform the global conversation on the uprising by capturing and sharing their own footage. They are organized, trained, smart, strategic, and promote media - much of it mobile - with a purpose.

Mass demonstrations and continued state violence continue in Syria. Authorities are largely banning foreign reporters and have arrested Syrian journalists and bloggers. Outside of the country, news outlets report on the major events there citing “Syrian activists” as the source of information.  Day-to-day events in cities around the country come to our attention largely because of the activists and citizen journalists who are systematically providing information to news outlets worldwide.

Perhaps the way the term citizen journalism has been used to date is a misnomer in the context of recent events in Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain. Activists on the ground and online do not ‘just happen’ to capture and record media because they are in the "right place at the right time" but instead systematically gather, and strategically disseminate media. It may be time for a new term - ‘activist media' who are reporting from the frontlines - that describes the organized media campaigns waged by these activists in a place where traditional media is largely absent.

Please Call ME.N.U.4EVER: Callback and Social Media Sharing in Rural Africa

Mobile Money Savings Systems: What Do Users Think?

Editor's note: This post is co-authored by Lisa Kienzle, Olga Morawczynski and Ali Ndiwalana of Grameen Foundation and Ignacio Mas. Mobile money can provide a safe and affordable means of offering the poor in developing countries access to formal savings products and services. In this post, the authors introduce and user-test one concept of savings: deferred payments over mobile money. 

Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money believes that mobile money is essentially a liquidity-management platform. Put differently, it could be described as LiFi: Conncting people to an electronic payment system via their mobile phones that provides Liquidity with Fidelity. What does it take to turn mobile money systems into a full-fledged savings platform? A full savings proposition would address these additional key elements:

Sat Phone Insecurity, Sneaky Apps, and SMS Campaigns: News Mashup!

The MobileActive News Round Up is a collection of news stories and trends that are shaking up the mobile industry. If you'd like to get this content earlier and delivered right to your inbox, sign up for the MobileActive Newsletter.

Click through to read about reaching multi-lingual audiences with an SMS campaign, new research on the efficacy of mobile tools for health work, SIM card registration requirements in Ghana, and much, much more.

Mobile Trends

• Does branchless banking reach the poor and the unbanked? CGAP investigates new evidence on how mobile banking is being used by poor individuals.
• A study from Kenya looks at how citizens currently interact with the government, and how mobile tools could affect service delivery and government participation.
• If you're sending an SMS campaign to a multi-lingual audience, you need to know about accents and accented characters. Sending a text with accents or different characters means you may have to adjust the length of your message, so choose carefully.
• If you read a right-to-left language, Twitter is now much more accessible. Thanks to help from 13,000 volunteers, Twitter is now available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu.
• What's going on with the African tech scene? Check out this collection of the top ten African tech tweeters.
• A new infographic breaks down the ways people are using mobile devices for health, government participation, and financial services.
• Mobile phones allow farmers to check market prices and get the latest information to sell their goods at a fair price. This photo story looks at how cashew farmers in Cote d'Ivoire are using mobile technology to stay connected.
• If you think mobile Internet is growing, you're right – global Internet usage on mobile devices has almost doubled from 2011 to 2012.
• Gallup has released a report on mobile and social media trends and telecommunication techniques drawn from surveys in 44 countries.
• Which country has the most mobile phone users? Saudi Arabia has 180 phones for every 100 residents, making it the per-capita winner for mobile connectivity.

SaferMobile: Better Mobile Security and Privacy

• SaferMobile, a project of MobileActive, helps activists, human rights defenders, and journalists understand the security risks of mobile technology and use mobile tech more securely in their work. Below are security and privacy-related news stories that highlight some of the threats in the current mobile environment.
• After the deaths of journalists in Syria in late February, reports surfaced that the Syrian government was tracking journalists through satellite phone activity. SaferMobile has a breakdown on why satellite phones aren’t secure.
• In other government surveillance news, Mexico’s legislative branch has adopted new legislation that will grant the police warrantless access to mobile phone users’ location data in real time.
• Want to have a phone in Ghana? You’d better register your SIM Card soon – the government deadline for mandatory SIM Card registration was just pushed back by a month. If you don’t register, your phone will be cut off. We write about the global trend.
• A US Senator is pushing for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the latest smartphone application privacy breaches after news broke that some Apple and Android applications are allowed to copy private photos and address books.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls for a privacy bill of rights for wireless users in the hopes of raising public awareness about mobile application privacy issues.

Social Networking in Developing Regions

On The Relationship Between Socio-Economic Factors and Cell Phone Usage

"Doing the Internet:" How Young People in a Slum in India are Using the Internet on their Mobile Phones

While there's often discussion about the promise of mobiles for development, an important aspect of developing projects that focus on mobile tech is a deep understanding of how individuals already use their mobile devices. "Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India" takes a close look at how young people in India use their mobile phones.

Drawn from interviews with twenty randomly selected young people in the Hafeezpet slum of Hyderabad, the study looks at how they use the mobile web. The mobile Internet has become a key feature in the participants' days, with a heavy focus on games, music, movies, and other entertainment options. The authors explain that the focus on entertainment is a new way to look at how ICT4D can reach populations. They write:

...The ICT for development community tends to privilege what are and what are not desired/legitmate developmental impacts of technology. [...] From an anthropological perspective, this distinction is arbitrary, even harmful, because it unnecessarily blinkers the ICTD community into looking only at a narrow slice of the full range of human experience of the people who are using the technologies.

In the study, young people describe in their own words how they access the Internet with their mobile phones, discussing the fun of discovering new games, music, and videos. Participants who discovered new music or games would share them with friends, and those with higher-end phones would pass along discoveries to those with lower-end phones. The participants referred to using the web on their mobile phones as "doing the Internet," as it was viewed as a social and entertaining activity.

Exploring Mobile-Only Internet Use: Results of a Training Study in Urban South Africa

Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth and the Mobile Internet in Urban India