Grameen Foundation's Village Phone program has long been touted as the poster child for using mobiles in the economic empowerment of poor women. The program gives villagers in Bangladesh-- and now in several other countries -- access to microcredit to buy a mobile phone that can then be rented to other villagers who do not have a mobile of their own.
Much has been written about Village Phones in the media and in research reports, often describing in glowing terms the economic impact and gain in social status that the women in the program have achieved. Yet, most of these studies are fairly old at this point, predating the exponential growth of mobiles around the world.
Now questions are being raised in some mainstream media about whether renting out minutes on mobile phones is economically beneficial to the so-called village phone operators -- at a time when mobiles have become so much more ubiquitous, even in remote rural areas.
Editor's Note: This post is written by Ibrahim Mothana who is an Atlas Corps Fellow with MobileActive.org in 2011/2012. He is a Yemeni citizen from Sanaa.
In Yemen it’s difficult to know just how many wars are raging in the country at any one time. For centuries the country has been plagued by revenge killings and tribal conflict and the result is hundreds of deaths each year with many more injured. These localized wars can last for decades and are one of the most serious issues facing the country today.
In rural regions of Yemen, formal legal systems and a legal infrastructure do not exist, and tribal law has significant legitimacy as the only effective and efficient means of conflict resolution. Tribal laws are based on consensus, and conflicts are resolved through complex mediation processes and appeals procedures presided over by tribal elders and leaders (sheikhs). Due to the lack of many formal legal channels and the corruption in the legal infrastructure that exists, tribal law is faster, more efficient, and enjoys greater legitimacy.
Yet one of the biggest obstacles in using tribal law as a tool for conflict resolution is the lack of communication -- which is, in fact, often the root cause of many of the disputes between tribes. Creating dialogue between communities becomes an extraordinary challenge in a country with 24 million people dispersed over 150,000 human settlements.
Missed our last Mobile Tech Salon? Have no fear! We focused on how artists and activists using mobiles in their work: Urban Speaker broadcasts phone calls in public spaces over a loudspeaker; TXTual Healing and SMS Slingshot plaster text messages on walls; Pathways to Housing encourages people on the street to interact with a light projection via text; and Amphibious Architecture allows people to send text messages to and receive messages from animals in the rivers surrounding New York City. Watch the video below to get a taste of the artists' presentations:
The event was a great way to explore how mobiles can bring a new level of interactivity to art, and how art can be used to inspire activism. Presenters remarked on how the ubiquity of mobile devices make them ideal for encouraging people to interact with their surroundings. If you want to learn more about these projects, check out our posts on TXTual Healing, Amphibious Architecture and Pathways to Housing here, or watch an interview with Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena (creator of the Urban Speaker) here. Urban Collective, creators of the SMS Slingshot couldn't join us in person for the tech salon, but check out a video of their presentation here.
Thanks to Idealist.org for hosting us in their space, and thanks to the artists for showing their work!
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on how mobiles are helping farmers in India, jquery on mobile, a comparison of patterns between mobile and desktop Twitter usage, and a mobile-only magazine.
[Updated with images] In Grahamstown, South Africa, getting and sharing news is a mobile experience.Grocott’s Mail, a local paper, incorporates mobile phones into many aspects of its news service – from disseminating headlines via SMS, to encouraging readers to text in their opinions, to a Knight Challenge-winning citizen journalist training program.
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.
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.
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.
Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a global celebration that raises awareness about the enivronment. To do our part to celebrate this day, we’ve put together a look at some of the mobile tools and organizations we’ve covered recently that are doing their part to help the Earth. If you have any suggestions about tools or organizations that are doing great environmental work with mobiles, please leave a comment and let us know – and have a good Earth Day!
Water Quality
We recently covered the Water Quality Reporter, a program in South Africa that uses mobiles to test the health of water supplies. The program allows field workers to use mobile forms or SMSs to cheaply and effectively transfer data about water quality to a centralized database, while receiving feedback about how to handle local water problems.
Mobi is a java-enabled application allowing users to send and receive market information and other data over SMS, all from a user-friendly interface. For example, users can request commodity prices in nearby markets by choosing a location and commodity from menus. Mobi is highly extensible, allowing third party applications on the Esoko platform to include a mobile component, or to add free-form polls to the existing application.
On November 3, 2007 Pakistan's President Musharraf declared a state of emergency and martial law in Pakistan, suspending the Pakistan constitution. During the next three months, during the short-lived emergency rule, Bhutto's assassination, and the general election in February of 2008, there was an unprecedented outpouring of citizen media, organizing and information sharing facilitated by new media -- blogging, mobile phones, and online video.
Huma Yusuf, an astute and eloquent journalist based in Karachi, has reported now on the convergence of old and new media during the 'Pakistan emergency,' as it is most often referred to in the country. It is a must-read document for anyone interested in citizen media, particularly in times of political turmoil, for the wealth of insights it provides on the current uses of digital media and the opportunities for future work in this area.
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.
Mobile phones are providing organisations and advocates with new ways to reach their communities. Now the Gender Based Violence Prevention Network in collaboration with Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) will use text messaging to create awareness about violence against women in Africa.
Brenda Zulu interviews Ndesanjo Macha, the Regional Editor for Sub Saharan Africa (Global voices) at Highway Africa.
He says: "Mobile technologies are cheaper, they do not require the infrastructure and investment other technologies need...Africa has the fastest growing number of subscribers....mobile phones are the key to producing content, sharing content, reading, looking at pictures and images, and even doing businesses."
He describes how mobile technology facilitates rural development and participation, linking rural farming communities with the global public sphere; mobile blogging; and mobile reporting.
Check out the blog at Web2fordev.net for other great content. Hat tip to Christian Kreutz!
I have a robot that constantly looks for select information online about my campaign. It sends me an SMS if and when it finds what I need.
The world today is clearly threatened by information overload, but that's far from the worst problem we face. The right tools for dealing with the barrage of information available can help us deal with the long list of other, more frightening problems facing humanity.
One new class of tools will do just that - by delivering new items in any RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to your mobile device by SMS or to your IM client. (If RSS is new to you, there are intro links at the end of this post.)
