This article seeks to explore the influence of the mobile phone on the public sphere, in particular with regard to its effect on news agendas, gatekeepers and primary definers. Using the examples of the Chinese SARS outbreak (2003), the south-east Asian tsunami (December 2004), and the London bombings (July 2005), the author questions the extent to which the mobile phone is challenging conventional and official sources of information.
At times of national and personal calamity, mobile phone is used to document and report events from eyewitnesses and those closely involved. Using multimedia messages (MMS) or text messages (SMS) to communities of friends and families, as well as audio phone calls, mobile phone users may precede and scoop official sources and thwart censorship and news blackouts. They can also provide valuable evidence of what actually occurred. Users are able to take pictures and short films and transmit these rapidly to others along with reports of what is happening where they are; they are also able to access other media broadcasts and the internet. They are what have become known as `citizen journalists'.
The evidence suggests that mobile phone usage is contributing to the public sphere and in some instances is circumventing official repression or inadequate information. There is also an indication that the `mobcam' is capturing images that would otherwise be lost. However, the mainstream media has been quick to take advantage of this citizen journalism and mediate it within its own parameters.
We had another great Technology Salon today, this time on Cloud-based SMS applications that showcased four interesting applications -- ChildCount+, Jokko, Happy Pill, and Patatat. And, in big news of the day, Matt Berg succeeded in breaking the Tech Salon cardinal rule of no slideshow presentations (and I am making it public knowledge in case someone needs ammunition in the future).
The rapid adoption of mobile technology by end users has also resulted in a corresponding proliferation of pilot projects around the world. A number of projects discussed in this Salon have cross-over potentials not just across borders, but even across sectors. Here are some notes and links to applications, all in the interest of wider dissemination beyond the group that was at the Salon.
This guest post was submitted by Amanda McClelland, Emergency Nutrition and Food Security Manager, Concern Worldwide, Niger.
I arrived in Niger three months ago to help the Concern Worldwide country team scale up and roll out an emergency program to respond to the emerging food crisis. It’s hard to say when exactly this shifted from an “impending crisis” to a real humanitarian emergency, but we are there now. And we are putting every bit of the planning this team has done since December to the test. The official Food Security survey of April 2010 states that there are 7.1 million people facing hunger: 3.3 million of those are considered to be facing extremely food shortages and unable to feed their families’ without help. Concern’s program is in Tahoua, the second worst affected part of the country.
Every day, we are working at maximum capacity on initiatives to prevent rates of malnutrition from reaching emergency thresholds. We are distributing seed packs and fertilizer to help families plant crops in time for the next harvest; providing nutrition support to children under five, pregnant women and mothers; and are launching an innovative use of mobile phone technology (and manual transfers) to distribute emergency cash to the most vulnerable women. We have high hopes for this program—and we are starting to see its great potential. (Note of the editor: Concern conducted a similar mobile cash program in Kenya in 2008 that we wrote up on MobileActive.org here. Concern also published an extensive evaluation of the Kenya programme (PDF)
What we are doing sounds easy when I write it, but delivering aid in Niger is anything but easy.
This guest-post is by Arturo Morosoff who completed recently a project with D-Tree International and BRAC Tanzania to provide videos on mobile phones to assist Community Health Workers (CHWs) for health education. It is posted here with permission.
I recently completed a five week volunteer project working with Irene Joseph and Gayo Mhila of D-Tree International to provide videos on mobile phones to Community Health Volunteers with BRAC Tanzania in the Mbagala district of Dar Es Salaam.
A bit about me: I have no formal training in ICT or public health. My background is in technology and business and I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. I was on a two month trip in Tanzania and volunteered to help D-Tree with this project. As such, the project needed to be completed in a short time and we began with modest goals.
Among BRAC’s programs to help alleviate poverty is its health program, which relies on an all-female team of Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) to conduct monthly home visits to provide health education and support. Each CHV visits 150 – 200 homes each month, asking health related questions and providing healthcare information. In Tanzania, D-Tree has been collaborating with BRAC to provide the CHVs with a mobile phone-based tool called Commcare, to help improve the effectiveness of their home-based programs. About a year ago there was discussion with the CHVs of providing them with health education videos suitable for use on phones to provide additional support for their home visits.
Recently, we’ve been seeing a lot of hype about citizen reporting with mobile phones during elections. It is often conflated with the term “election monitoring,” but this does a disservice to both citizen reporting and election monitoring, a discipline and field that has been around for some 20 years. These two approaches have markedly different goals, target audiences, and processes. We think it is time for readers to definitively understand what election monitoring is in contrast to citizen reporting, and what the role of mobile phone and mapping platforms are in regard to these two very different forms of engagement during elections. We aim to clearly differentiate between them once and for all.
We also urge the adoption of differing terms - citizen reporting during an election versus systematic election monitoring. Mobile phones, SMS, and mapping platforms play a role in both citizen reporting and election monitoring, of course.
June is exploding with events focused on mobiles for social change. Look at some of the places where the movers and shakers in the 'mobile world for good' will be gathering:
2 June, New York City, New York, USA: Personal Democracy Forum will host Mobilize Your Cause: A Bootcamp. The half-day event will provide insight into developing an effective mobile campaign, how to build an activist community, and new technologies that are making it easier to use mobiles for social causes. The event is followed by Personal Democracy Forum's two-day conference, (3-4 June) which will focus on exploring technology's impact on technology and government. MobileActive.org will host the mobile portion of the bootcamp.
The human and economic cost of malaria in Nigeria is staggering. There are currently 110 million clinically diagnosed cases in a population of 151 million. Malaria kills 250,000 children under five years old in Nigeria every year, and is the cause of 11% of maternal deaths. 60% of out-patient visits and 30% of hospitalizations in the country are malaria-related.
In addition to the enormous toll malaria takes on public health, it is also expensive. 132 billion Naira (USD $870 million) is lost every year in the form of malaria prevention and treatment costs and from the loss of overall economic productivity. And yet in spite of the risk malaria poses to the Nigerian people, health surveys from 2006 to 2008 indicated that only 8% of households in the country owned at least one insecticide-treated net (So-called ITNs).
This article was written by Bright Simons, Director at IMANI-Ghana and President of the mPedigree Network. It is re-posted here with permission.
Let’s face it: Africa is on the downward slope to perdition as far as technology is concerned.
Many people who are not directly confronted with this reality on the continent are usually lured into a false sense that things are looking up because of the fountain of good news that is the telecom sector.
The truth though is that the seeming proliferation of ICT success stories across the continent masks the real picture, which is one of a splattering of embers in a desolate patch of darkness.
For a casual browse through the latest International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ICT Development Index for instance should force you to conclude that ICT offers Africa no relief from its chronic state of technological pathology.
Branching out into the mobile space can have big rewards for media organizations that take the time to do it right. However, recognizing the right moments, investing in the right technology, and marketing to the right audience are tough to do. To learn how one mainstream media organization is doing it we called Robert Spier, Director of Content Development for NPR Digital Media, to talk about NPR’s mobile strategy.
Five years ago, NPR first entered the digital media space with podcasts. According to Spier, the lessons NPR learned from this first foray into the 'new' media world provided the jumping off point for later content dissemination and engagement via the mobile web and mobile application. He says,
Catholic Relief Services' maternal and neo-natal health monitoring program in Uttar Pradesh, India is incorporating mobiles into its work. The pilot project, which launched in June 2009, uses mobiles to increase volunteers' ability to share and gather health information.
The program uses SMSs to allow ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists who are local volunteers) to report statistics on maternal and neo-natal health metrics. According to O.P. Singh, who gave a presentation on the program as part of the SHOPS/mHealh Alliance online conference, several problems in the current system led to the adoption of mobiles: the existing paper system was difficult to use, workers at village and block levels had limited access to information from headquarters, and the paper system was slow. The organization hoped that incorporating mobile phones would give the volunteers a better sense of the health landscape, since they would have access to real time information and be able to instantly share their results. During the presentation, Singh illustrated the system with the following graph:
To increase communication flow and collect data via community health workers
To teach local health workers to incorporate technology into their work
To more accurately track births and deaths
Brief description of the project:
Catholic Relief Service's "Texting with a Purpose" gave mobile phones to community health workers (ASHAs) in the Uttar Pradesh region of India in order to track live births and deaths. The ASHAs filled out mobile forms and submitted them via SMS to a central database in order to better monitor maternal and neonatal health in the region.
Target audience:
The target audiences are:
36 volunteer accredited social health activists
Pregnant women and newborns in Uttar Pradesh, India
Length of Project (in months) :
10
Status:
Ongoing
Anticipated launch date:
What worked well? :
The project has raised the level of reported births to almost 100%. Because the data is compiled instantly, less children are missed than under the old system. The Catholic Relief Service has also seen that the ASHAs view the SMS system as a viable plan for the future or reporting on maternal/neonatal health and that they are working hard to master the system.
What did not work? What were the challenges?:
So far, 65% of the ASHAs still need support from family members or the Catholic Relief Services staff in order to manage the SMS texting; reasons for this include a lack of familiarity with mobile technology and low literacy. Another challenge is the coded SMS system; it has to be filled out very precisely, which can lead to errors.
Texting with a Purpose: Catholic Relief Services in India Locations
In Kenya, a partnership between the non-profit organization Text to Change and the telecommunications company Zain used SMS mobile quizzes to keep Zain’s employees up-to-date on the latest HIV/AIDS information.
For four weeks in November and December of 2009, Zain’s Kenyan employees were part of a pilot program for SMS mobile quizzes. Employees received three multiple choice questions each week that focused on different aspects of HIV/AIDS such as prevention and treatment. The quizzes also directed participants to testing centers in order to learn their HIV/AIDS status. Says Bas Hoefman, co-founder and managing director of Text to Change, the choice to partner their mobile program with a telecommunications company was logical: “We thought, ‘why isn’t Zain using its own products – mobile telephony and SMS – to educate its own employees?’ Use your own product for your own employees.”
Use interactive quizzes to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS among Zain employees in Kenya.
Brief description of the project:
Text to Change partnered with telecommunications company Zain to run an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. The pilot used interactive SMS quizzes based on Text to Change's existing SMS platform to get employees to answer questions about HIV/AIDS, and to encourage them to get tested for HIV/AIDS. The pilot ran for four weeks in November and December of 2009, and had an overall response rate of 43%.
Text to Change offers interactive mobile SMS quizzes, combining knowledge transfer with incentives in the form of airtime. The SMS Quiz is designed to raise and help resolve key issues around local development programs.
Target audience:
The target audience was 506 Zain employees in Kenya.
The 43% response rate was considered encouraging, and the fact that there was a 10% increase in employees who sought health services during the course of the pilot.
Text to Change also found that the partnership was a good foundation for setting up telecommunications contacts in order to launch future projects outside of their home-base country, Uganda.
What did not work? What were the challenges?:
The pilot faced several challenges:
Employees didn't want their co-workers to see them going to the on-site testing center because of the stigma of HIV/AIDS.
Due to the sensitive nature of some questions, Text to Change had to ensure the privacy of the employees' responses.
Adapting Text to Change's technology from Uganda (where the company is based) to run in Kenya.
Mobile Quizzes For HIV/AIDS Awareness: Zain and Text to Change Locations
John-Harmen Valk, Ahmed T. Rashid, and Laurent Elder
ISSN/ISBN Number:
1492
Publication Type:
Journal article
Publication Date:
1 Mar 2010
Abstract:
Despite improvements in educational indicators, such as enrollment, significant challenges remain with regard to the delivery of quality education in developing countries, particularly in rural and remote regions. In the attempt to find viable solutions to these challenges, much hope has been placed in new information and communication technologies (ICTs), mobile phones being one example.
This article reviews the evidence of the role of mobile phone-facilitated mLearning in contributing to improved educational outcomes in the developing countries of Asia by exploring the results of six mLearning pilot projects that took place in the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, India, and Bangladesh. In particular, this article examines the extent to which the use of mobile phones helped to improve educational outcomes in two specific ways: 1) in improving access to education, and 2) in promoting new learning. Analysis of the projects indicates that while there is important evidence of mobile phones facilitating increased access, much less evidence exists as to how mobiles promote new learning.
Mobile phone text messaging is a potentially powerful tool for behavior change because it is widely available, inexpensive, and instant.
This systematic review provides an overview of behavior change interventions for disease management and prevention delivered through text messaging. Evidence on behavior change and clinical outcomes was compiled from randomized or quasi-experimental controlled trials of text message interventions published in peer-reviewed journals by June 2009. Only those interventions using text message as the primary mode of communication were included. Study quality was assessed by using a standardized measure. Seventeen articles representing 12 studies (5 disease prevention and 7 disease management) were included. Intervention length ranged from 3 months to 12 months, none had long-term follow-up, and message frequency varied.
Of 9 sufficiently powered studies, 8 found evidence to support text messaging as a tool for behavior change. Effects exist across age, minority status, and nationality. Nine countries are represented in this review, but it is problematic that only one is a developing country, given potential benefits of such a widely accessible, relatively inexpensive tool for health behavior change.
Methodological issues and gaps in the literature are highlighted, and recommendations for future studies are provided.
Comprised of data from 17 articles representing 12 studies (five of which focused on disease prevention and seven of which focused on disease management), the authors draw conclusions on the effectiveness of using mobile phones (and more specifically, text messaging on mobile phones) to change health behaviors.
I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile last week. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world. While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media. I'd like to highlight some of the potential for mobiles in citizen media that were not adequately discussed.
At the recent Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile, I facilitated as session on "Mobile Phone as a Tool for Reporting." We started off the discussion with the question of whether SMS is useful for reporters.
David Sasaki of Global Voices expressed skepticism about SMS as a reporting tool. Sasaki noted that Rising Voices, a Global Voices project that provides small funds to budding citizen media projects, had tried to find an SMS or mobile-based reporting project to fund, but hasn't been able to. Instead, David saw projects using technologies like Twitter for reporting. The 160 characters of SMS messages is simply not enough, David proposed, and pointed out that similar technologies like Twitter are more useful because they are able to transcend the character limitations as they can include links to much lengthier content.
As we are completing an inventory of mobile date collection projects around the world that are focused on vulnerable populations and early warning, we've come across a few efforts that are worth highlighting. One is the SMS and PDA-based surveying of the World Food Programme (WFP). WFP's food security monitoring systems are set up in many countries. While some countries are still submitting paper records, there is a push to incorporate PDAs or SMS data transmission for faster and more reliable monitoring of food security.
The data collected includes both food security baseline data and food insecurity indicators. The bulk of WFP's data collected focuses on nutritional indicators, market prices, import, cross border trades, socioeconomic indicators, and health indicators. The UN agency is trialing both FrontlineSMS and RapidSMS, two mobile data collection software tools, in its current projects, as well as PDAs but is likely going to standardize its operations using one of the two with some custom gateway software.
In the process of collecting data, WFP always collaborates with governments and other UN partners. WFP staff are involved with the supervision, training and coordination but but the people who conduct interviews and collect the data are usually government staff, university students, or NGO workers As one WFP staffer noted, "We have huge armies of data collectors."
The scope of the work is accordingly large. Some of the efforts cover an entire country. In Senegal, for example, WFP has 250 numerators covering the country – 22 teams of 11 people each who are collecting data for six weeks, visiting 2,000 villages.
The video below features George Muammar of the WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping Unit. He describes rapid data collection in an Emergency Food Security Assessment in Goma, N. Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
