Steve Song has done it again. A fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, he critiques Nathan Eagle's new txteagle venture to tap into the 'cognitive resources' of millions of mobile-phone users in developing countries. Nathan recently gave a talk at eTech, presenting texteagle. Here is the video of Nathan's presentation.
In short, txteagle, in the words of the BBC, is "a new scheme that distributes simple tasks via text messages is being used to target a potential untapped work force in developing countries. Txteagle is making it possible for many people in countries like Kenya to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks like translations or transcriptions."
I have been meaning for a while to respond to a paper Rebekah Heacock, a graduate student at Columbia, wrote last year. Hancock describes in Mobile Activism in African Elections (PDF) three recent elections in Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and how mobile technology was used for both crowd-sourced and systematic election monitoring.
She poses that:
The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa is transforming the political and social landscape of the developing world, empowering people to source and share their own information and to have a greater say in what comes to international attention. This paper compares the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.
In 2006 alone, aid organizations such as the Measles Initiative and UNICEF distributed almost 20 million bed nets to prevent Malaria submission in ten African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria. The distribution and supply management of bed nets, and the follow-up surveys of recipients of bed nets --insecticide-treated nets that can reduce malaria transmission of as much as 90% in areas with high coverage rates--is a daunting logistical challenge.
Aid organizations everywhere are discovering that mobile phones are an essential part in managing supplies and distribution of nets, food, and other aid. Rapid Android is a new tool now being tested in Nigeria by UNICEF for the distribution of bed nets. Rapid Android is a supply chain management and data collection tool built on Android, the open source operating system developed by The Open Handset Alliance and Google.
Jeffrey Sachs, the noted and at times controversial development advocate, spoke to All Africa about the significance of mobile phones in Africa. Sachs is also the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York which runs the Millennium Villages in 12 locations across Sub-Saharan Africa. Sachs' assertion that has often been repeated is that "the cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development." Asked by All Africa about this claim, he noted that rural poverty especially has been characterized by isolation. Mobile phones have 'broken that isolation', as Sachs notes.
The guys of ICT4D.at shot some great videos of the two key people at Souktel and at Ushahidi -- Jacob Korenblum and Eirk Hersman -- describing their respective projects. Even though filmed a few months ago, both describe vividly how they are using mobiles in their work. Well worth watching!
Jonathan Donner has been studying mobile phone use in the developing countries for several years. We have written previously about his fascinating work on the phenomenon of missed-calls as a way of communicating.
Jonathan is a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore and an astute social scientist. At MobileActive08, Donner will be speaking in a panel where participants will brainstorm innovations in social mobile marketing.
Erik Hersman, our excellent colleague and friend over at White African writes about a new mobile data collection tool for Africa focused right now on survey and field data capture. His review is reposted here with permission. Great stuff, thanks, Erik!
I was contacted about a month ago by Mark Fowles who works at Clyral, a web and mobile development company based in Hillcrest, outside Durban, in South Africa. He was emailing me to let me know about a new mobile data collection platform called Populi.net.
Post-election violence has exploded in Kenya in the wake of the December 27 presidential elections. Ethnic killings -- which today's New York Times suggests may have been carefully planned -- have increased, and estimates of the death toll range from 650 to over 1000. In the midst of this, people both in and outside the country are using mobile phones in innovative ways to communicate political knowledge and circumvent the media blackout.
Several civil society groups in Africa are using SMS messages as part of the global "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence." The campaign, hosted by the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGET) in collaboration with Women'sNet and APC-Africa Women (AAW), has the theme "Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence Against Women." The groups will send an SMS on each of the 16 days of the campaign with a message relating to gender-based violence.
The campaign website lists three ways to partipate:
The rural mobile market is growing, and carriers are working to meet the unique demands and challenges of this sector of the population. Even in the poorest countries -- like Sierra Leone, which ranks 176 out of 177 countries on the UN's 2006 Human Development Index -- mobile phones have become a growing necessity, creating a unique set of cultural norms and practices. According to a recent article in Africa News, "It is no secret that Sierra Leone has one of the largest mobile network services although said to be the least developed country in the West African Sub-Region." Mobile service in Sierra Leone is covered by three carriers -- Mobitel, Celtel and Millicom. Although the network has increased dramatically since the civil war ended in 2000, there is still demand from rural customers for more comprehensive coverage in poor rural areas.
We are starting a series of articles on mobile phones in economic development this week and to kick it off, Business Week in its current issue published a few interesting summaries of the state of affairs in mobiles in economic development. This apparently just to make it easy for us to get MobileActives around the world up to speed!
Upwardly Mobile in Africa describes farmers in Kenya using mobiles to bring their products to market and mobile payments using the Keyan mobile payment system M-Pesa. The article describes Grameen Foundation's Village Phone Program that we will be featuring in our next article that is expanding into Uganda in collaboration with the local carrier MTN where there are now 13,000 Village Phone Operators renting out a mobile phone with the help of microcredit and discounted airtime.
"This remarkable growth — the African market is expanding nearly twice as fast as Asia’s — has confounded analysts and even service operators. As recently as 2003, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) forecast that there would be only 67 million users by the end of 2005.
“Many of us underestimated the strength of the informal sector in Africa,” said Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest operator, with four million customers. “And the huge need and desire for people to communicate.”
According to a GSM Association spokesman quoted on the BBC Online website today, "The mobile phone is the only viable technology that can bridge the digital divide". This is quite a bold statement in a debate which has been running for a fair old time. It goes along the lines that by putting something digital – a mobile phone in this case – into the hands of the worlds poor you can economically empower them, among other things. If it were only this simple.
