MobileActive.org

This compendium of articles (available at a cost) attempts to critically investigate the use and utility of mobile phones in Africa. Contributors include Nathan Eagle who writes about ‘Economics and power within the African telecommunication industry’,  Amanda Atwood’s report on Kubatana’s experiences in Zimbabwe setting up mobiles as a means of sharing news outside of government propaganda, to Bukeni Waruzi’s essay on collecting data on children’s rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2004.  SMS Uprising is published by Fahamu, a British-based organization with a focus on information services for Africa. For a critique of the book see our aticle here.

The purpose of this research is to empirically examine the ways in which Indonesian civil society organisations and groups engage in civic activism by means of the use of Mobile phones, Internet and social media; and how this civic engagement impacts upon the shaping of civil society in Indonesia.

With technology and its use continuously shifting and being shaped, the appropriation of the Internet and social media in Indonesian civil society is more about process than outcome. The technologies are continuously modified and adapted to bring them into alignment with the organisations’ routines. ‘Citizens in action’ are therefore never fixed in format, but rather ‘constituted and reconstituted’ through the everyday practices of the civil society groups and communities involving citizens and activists alike in ongoing actions – where technology serves as a convivial means.

The purpose of the Sudan Vote Monitor (SVM) project was to utilize simple information and communication technology (ICT) tools in the independent monitoring and reporting of the Sudan national elections held in April 2010. This initiative built on the successful recent experience of civil society organizations (CSOs) and volunteers in several countries (e.g., Ghana, India, Sierra Leone, Montenegro) in harnessing ICT to support the conduct of fair and credible elections. The project’s primary focus is the process of observing and reporting rather than the election results or their implications as significant as these are. Accordingly, SVM, and this report, is only concerned with the reporting activity with no regard to the political climate or political orientation of reporters, CSOs,or candidates. The main objective is to cooperate with and facilitate technological knowhow for civil society organizations in the Sudan (grassroots and other NGOs, media organizations, journalists, and interested private citizens and individuals in general).

The project was led by SIRP in collaboration with Asmaa Society for Development and several other Sudanese NGOs, with technical support from eMoksha.org, Ushahidi.com, and Khotawat Consultancy. During the April national elections, the Sudan Monitor website enabled reporting of the election process by many different organizations and individuals. Through the use of open source software civilians in Sudan were able to report general observations or irregularities via e-mail, short code text message (SMS), or by logging on to the Internet and visiting the sudanvotemonitor.com website. Using the Ushahidi platform reports could be aggregated along with direct feeds from news sites, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map. Users had up-to-date information including streaming video from election centers or polling stations around the Sudan, and were able to comment and rate the credibility of the submitted reports in collaborative manner. The site was accessible to all individuals and organizations regardless of their political affiliations or views. The reporting facility was available for public reporting from April 10 to April 30, 2010.

During the past ten years, we have witnessed how mobile phones and the simple functions of voice and text messaging (SMS) can empower citizens and affect the way citizens interact with each other and with the society as whole. Mobile phones are also thought to open up for a deepened democracy through citizen participation and insight into state affairs, through influencing the political decision making process, and helping in holding governments accountable. Is this the case?

So far, few East African government institutions have adopted the idea of using mobile phones as a tool for service delivery and a way to communicate with the citizens. This paper describes a few interesting cases and pilots, focusing on East Africa (mainly Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), where mobile phones and mobile applications have been used for improving governance, either independently or as a compliment to other methods and strategies. The paper will critically examine some of the challenges as well as the main opportunities for improving good governance through mobile phones and present ideas on how these projects could effectively be scaled-up.