MobileActive.org

Globally, huge investments are made in ICT as an undisputed and essential component of almost all activities – state and corporate. It is also an integral part of international development cooperation. The rapid spread of ICT – particularly the internet and mobile telephony – is making information available instantly and at low cost to a degree unprecedented in history. It can be used to seek, receive, create and impart information by anyone, at any time and for any purpose. The innovative use of the media has created new forms of citizen journalism which give space to a diversity of voices. In this way, ICT enhances freedom of expression and the right to information, and increases the possibilities for citizen´s participation in decision making processes.

This report examines the potential of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for advancing democracy and empowerment, with a special focus on Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Access to and the strategic use of ICTs have been shown to have the potential to help bring about economic development, poverty reduction, and democratisation – including freedom of speech, the free flow of information and the promotion of human rights. Based on signs of current democracy deficits in the case study countries, it is crucial that ICTs be made central to development cooperation and to approaches to advance democracy in the three countries.

Across both urban and rural populations, the predominant tool for communication is the mobile phone, while access to the internet is largely limited to urban areas. The high cost of international internet connectivity – itself a consequence of dependence on satellite connectivity in Uganda and Tanzania especially – means that even within urban areas internet connectivity is the purview of a small well-to-do elite.

Privacy by Design is a concept that is virally spreading around the globe. The powerful concept of engineering privacy directly into the design of new technologies, business practices and networked infrastructure, in order to achieve the doubly-enabled pairing of functionality and privacy, has gained significant adoption by governments, researchers and industry, in any number of sectors. Now that the PbD paradigm has achieved this high level of acceptance, the next major question to be addressed is – how can PbD best be operationalized?

In this guidance document, we focus on the solutions presented by the panellists – in particular, the parties to which responsibility for the implementation of each were assigned. Distinct trends were noted in the types of solution associated with each party, and it became clear that the panellists’ responses could be collected into a practical tool for developers, service providers and users – a Roadmap for Privacy by Design.

Here, we begin by describing the necessity for such a tool in the mobile industry, and then detail the Roadmap, which begins with the Device Manufacturer, travels through the OS/Platform Developer, Service Provider, and Application Developer, and ends with the responsibilities assigned to Users themselves.

This report uses AudienceScapes data from a nationally representative survey of Zambia to focus on how people of various social groups access and use mobile communications. The report also showcases how the AudienceScapes survey data can help members of the development community to design and implement more effective programs in technological access, communications and information empowerment.

Beyond measuring basic access and use levels, this report works to answer several key research questions regarding the role of mobile phones in economic and social development in Zambia. These include but are not limited to; what is the potential for SMS-based information services as a development tool, is the mobile market beginning to reach disadvantaged parts of the population, what are the continued barriers to mobile phone access and use, who is using mobile money and is their greater market potential for these services?

Stock-outs of malaria treatments at the health facility level in many sub-Saharan African countries have been a persistent problem for many years. A stock-out is the unavailability of medicine at the health facility. In Tanzania, 93 % of the population are at risk for malaria infection. The number of malaria cases is estimated to be 11 million resulting into 60-80 thousand deaths per year or 220 deaths per day in Tanzania alone. The goal of the SMS for Life pilot project was to develop a flexible and scalable solution to bring up-to-date visibility of anti-malarials within the Tanzanian Public Health Sector with a potential to reduce or eliminate stock-outs of five drugs (four dosage forms of ACTs and Quinine Injectable) in all health facilities in a pilot sample of three districts.

Initiated and led by Novartis, a public-private partnership was established with the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, IBM, Vodafone and the Ministry of Health in Tanzania. This unique partnership developed a solution using mobile phones, SMS messages, internet and mapping technology to visualize weekly stock inventory of Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACTs) and Quinine Injectable at 129 health facilities and 226 villages. Over the course of one year, the Project Team designed the system, created a data repository, trained key staff and implemented the solution for a 21-week pilot in three districts of Tanzania: Ulanga, Kigoma Rural and Lindi Rural. These districts are located in three different regions and supplied from different Zonal Stores with a catchment population of 1.2 million people.

We explore the potential of using camera phones and pico projectors in rapid creation and presentation of digital content in a development context. A camera phone based content authoring application was designed and deployed with three different user populations in the domains of classroom education and health care.

Our findings show that despite the variations in education levels, cultural background, and technology exposure, users successfully created and presented different forms of digital content using the camera phone and pico projector.

Agriculture can serve as an important engine for economic growth in developing countries, yet yields in low-income countries have lagged far behind those in developed countries for decades. One potential mechanism for increasing yields is the use of improved agricultural technologies, such as fertilizers, seeds and cropping techniques. Public-sector programs have attempted to overcome information- related barriers to technological adoption by providing agricultural extension services.

While such programs have been widely criticized for their limited scale, sustainability and impact, the rapid spread of mobile phone coverage in developing countries provides a unique opportunity to facilitate technological adoption via information and communication technology (ICT)-based extension programs.

This article outlines the potential mechanisms through which ICT could facilitate agricultural adoption and the provision of extension services in developing countries. It then reviews existing programs using ICT for agriculture, categorized by the mechanism (voice, text, internet and mobile money transfers) and the type of services provided. Finally, we identify potential constraints to such programs in terms of design and implementation, and concludes with some recommendations for implementing field-based research on the impact of these programs on farmers’ knowledge, technological adoption and welfare.

The world is experiencing a major shift from an economy and society based on mass production to one based on knowledge creation. The book examines the range of educational experiences, practices, and issues and presents them in a way that can be used by decision makers crafting ICT policy in education. The book begins by considering the broader technological, economic, and social trends that have been sweeping the globe and moving toward an information economy and knowledge society. It examines the dramatic increase in capabilities and use of ICT and their related social and economic impact – positive and negative – in both developed and less developed nations.

The cases analysed in this publication are taken from different regions of the world – Africa, Arab region, Asia and Latin America – illustrating the global dimension of the changes that ICT bring to education systems and policies. The wide diversity offered by the selected countries - Jordan, Namibia, Rwanda, Singapore and Uruguay – in terms of economic and educational development, suggests that the issues at stake are not limited to a particular group of privileged countries. ICT can have a transformative effect on education regardless of the economic conditions, in very advanced school systems as well as in poorly resourced ones. The choice of the policy mix varies according to particular circumstances but the vision and the potential of ICT to transform education is universal. This is the key message that this publication attempts to articulate.

The dissemination and use of information and communications technologies (ICT) in schools has come to be seen by education policy-makers as a significant opportunity. They are attracted to the prospect that ICT can improve student achievement, improve access to schooling, increase efficiencies and reduce costs, enhance students’ ability to learn and promote their lifelong learning, and prepare them for a globally competitive workforce. As the power and capability of computers have increased, as they have become interconnected in a worldwide web of information and resources, as they provide a conduit for participation and interaction with other people, as they have become linked to other devices, and as their costs have come down, policy-makers, particularly those in developing countries, have come to see ICT as a viable, and even dramatic, way of responding to the multiple challenges that they face.

Once policy-makers consider making significant investments in ICT, a host of questions emerge: How many computers are needed in a school? Where should they be located? How should the network architecture be structured? How should the computers be distributed equitably? What additional resources are needed to support their use? What kind of training do teachers need to take advantage of these resources? How can they use them in their teaching? Are these uses effective? Are these even the right questions?

The position taken in this book is that while these questions represent important implementation issues, they are not the questions that should frame ICT policy. ICT can have a greater impact when the policies and programmes designed to implement them are crafted in the broader context of social and economic goals and when they are implemented in support of coordinated change of all the components of the education system, aligned to a vision of economic development and social progress – that is, when ICT policies and programmes support educational transformation.

Fueled by renewed enthusiasm about the potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are implementing ambitious projects with mobile technology components in the developing world in a phenomenon commonly referred to as “Mobiles-for-development” or “M4D.”

A participatory approach that responds to the needs and realities of local communities is widely recognized as a necessary component of a successful M4D intervention. However, project failure-especially in sub-Saharan Africa- remains the norm, pointing towards the need for more thorough enumeration of best practices and more rigorous impact evaluation on the part of field-based practitioners. This thesis calls for greater attention to be given to the role of human capacity, which is a precondition for participation in M4D interventions but which also tends to be deficient in rural, poor communities. A greater focus on capacity would entail both assessing capacity- in terms of physical resources and human capabilities- at the local level and including capacity-building in project activities when necessary.

This study employs the human development and capabilities approach and the case study and participant observation methods to examine the efforts of the American NGO Tostan to integrate mobile technology into its non-formal education and empowerment program in rural Senegal. The findings of this study underscore the decisive role played by local capacity and intent and by effective, locally based intermediary organizations, conceptualized in this paper as grassroots support organizations (GSOs), that support the acquisition of the human capabilities needed to harness the empowering potential of mobile technology and other ICTs.

The application of mobile computing and communication technology is rapidly expanding in the fields of health care and public health. This systematic review will summarise the evidence for the effectiveness of mobile technology interventions for improving health and health service outcomes (M-Health) around the world.

To be included in the review interventions must aim to improve or promote health or health service use and quality, employing any mobile computing and communication technology. This includes:

(1) interventions designed to improve diagnosis, investigation, treatment, monitoring and management of disease;

(2) interventions to deliver treatment or disease management programmes to patients, health promotion interventions, andinterventions designed to improve treatment compliance; and

(3) interventions to improve health care processes e.g. appointment attendance, result notification, vaccination reminders.

A comprehensive, electronic search strategy will be used to identify controlled studies, published since 1990, and indexed in MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Global Health, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, or the UK NHSHealth Technology Assessment database. The search strategy will include terms (and synonyms) for the following mobile electronic devices (MEDs) and a range of compatible media: mobile phone; personal digital assistant (PDA); handheld computer (e.g. tablet PC); PDA phone (e.g. BlackBerry, Palm Pilot); Smartphone; enterprise digital assistant; portable media player (i.e. MP3 or MP4 player); handheld video game console. No terms for health or health service outcomes will be included, to ensure that all applications of mobile technology in public health and healthservices are identified.

Bibliographies of primary studies and review articles meeting the inclusion criteria will besearched manually to identify further eligible studies. Data on objective and self-reported outcomes and study quality will be independently extracted by two review authors. Where there are sufficient numbers of similar interventions, we will calculate and report pooled risk ratios or standardised mean differences using meta-analysis.

This systematic review will provide recommendations on the use of mobile computing and communication technology in health care and public health and will guide future work on intervention development and primary research in this field.

Besides the work of Jensen (2007), there is little quantitative evidence on the impact that mobile telephony has had on household welfare. In considering the rural household welfare, the possibility is open of finding impacts of information that is accessed via mobile phone in several markets where rural households are usually inserted: agricultural product markets, agricultural services markets, agricultural byproducts; but also in labor markets that often supplement income diversification strategies of these households.

Using a database collected to measure the impact of mobile telephony in the welfare of rural households in Puno, Peru, this paper seeks to focus attention on the markets for agricultural products and by-products. The aim is to measure the contribution that has the use of mobile telephony in the profits resulting from the development of agricultural activities, using econometric techniques associated with quasi-experimental methods of impact assessment. How much does the mobile phone contribute to agricultural earnings? What is the differential impact of mobile phone use vis-a-vis scale variables such as farm size or the number of cattle, or diversification, as the total number of crops, or vertical integration, as the production of agricultural products, on the results of farming?

We expect to find different impacts depending on the type of use of mobile telephony, ie if used for information to affect the agricultural production function or is used to make marketing decisions. The results can help justify public policy efforts to include mobile telephone service as a basic service as well as the development of specific mobile livelihood services for farmers from the mobile communication technology, yet absent in Latin America.

‘Aarogyam’ is a Sanskrit word which means "complete freedom from illness”. Aarogyam is an ICT based responsive system which ensures and involves active participation of all key stakeholders viz. local administration, health facilities and doctors, frontline health workers (ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists), ANM (Auxiliary Nurse Midwife), and AWW (Angan Wadi Workers)), village heads and beneficiaries, to ensure that a pregnant woman is provided with ANC, PNC and complete immunization throughout the continuum of care.   Aarogyam maintains a village wise database of all the beneficiaries (pregnant/lactating women, children up to 5 years) of an area, which gets continually updated with new data generating on the field with the help of front line health workers. The database thus generated is the backbone of the software system used by Aarogyam. This system generates automated alerts in the form of vernacular voice calls/SMS to the beneficiary thus enabling the beneficiary with vital information at their door step.   The system not only provides beneficiary with the information to be acted upon but also ensures that the services are delivered to the beneficiary by generating automated alerts (vernacular voice calls/SMS) for the ANM and Block level health officials, informing them of due services in their area.  

The use of mobile banking is an increasingly important component of national and regional economic development in Southern Africa. Mobile banking can help bring the large unbanked population into the formal financial sector, and can facilitate cross-border trade by easing the difficulty for small businesses and traders to make financial transactions.

For mobile banking to reach its full potential in Southern Africa, however, African governments must establish more efficient regulatory frameworks and implement well-designed pilot programs to gain more insight into the challenges facing a full rollout of mobile banking

New media platforms are changing how people communicate with each  other around the world. However, there is great variation in both the kind of 

communication platforms people make use of as well as in how they access these  platforms. Computer ownership and internet access are still the prerogative of  the wealthy few in wide swathes of the African continent. All the same, mobile internet access is on the rise and if current growth rates continue, African mobile phone penetration will reach 100 per cent by 2014. Mobile phone penetration rates, in particular, have resulted in a plethora of ideas for new media platforms aimed at bridging the information divide between the well-connected and the disconnected. Topic areas range from agriculture and conservation to health and human rights. In addition to mobile phone-based platforms, there is also a number of promising internet-based ones.

 We present a low-cost, energy-efficient system to remotely monitor the temperature and location of vaccines in a countrywide “cold-chain”. Our system is based on FoneAstra [11] – a low-cost, microcontroller-based, programmable device that extends capabilities of low-tier mobile phones that are commonly used in developing countries.

In the system discussed in this paper, FoneAstra is enhanced with a digital temperature sensor and integrated with a vaccine cold-box used to store vaccines in a temperature controlled environment. FoneAstra continuously monitors the temperature of the cold-box, aggregating readings over a period of time.

It uses the mobile phone to which it is coupled to send periodic SMS messages with routine temperature reports or immediate alerts if  it detects abnormal temperature conditions. Additionally, it enables location-tracking of vaccines in transit, based on the mobile phone’s cell tower-IDs.

We present results from an ongoing lab-deployment done at PATH [18], our Seattle-based partner NGO for this project. Over the next few months, we will deploy this temperature and location monitoring system for vaccine cold-chains in several countries in which PATH operates.

The client in this system, which includes a temperature sensor, FoneAstra and a mobile phone, costs $50; while the server, which includes a Netbook and a GSM modem, costs $500. We discuss how our system can scale up to enable large-scale monitoring while incurring low overhead costs.