MobileActive.org

Mobile-based branchless banking has become one of the key mechanisms for extending financial services to disenfranchised populations in the world's developing regions. One shortcoming of today's branchless banking systems is that they rely largely on network-layer services for securing transactions and do not implement any application-layer security. Recent attacks on some of the most popular branchless banking systems show that these systems are not end-to-end secure.

In this paper, we make the case for designing mobile-based branchless banking systems which build security into the application layer of the protocol and guarantee end-to-end security to system users. Our main contribution is a threat model which effectively captures the goals of end-to-end authenticated transactions in branchless banking. This model, besides incorporating the obvious external threats to a protocol, also accounts for the possibility of insider attacks - those mountable by banking agents or other human intermediaries in the system. We then provide recommendations for solution design based on the security requirements of our model and the infrastructural constraints under which branchless banking systems operate.

Mobile Phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 23% if she lives in Africa, and 37% if she lives in South Asia. Closing this gender gap would bring the benefit of mobile phones to an additional 300 million women. By extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to women, a host of social and economic goals can be advanced.

Mobile phone ownership provides distinct benefits to women, including improved access to educational, health, business and employment opportunities. Women surveyed across low and middle-incoome countries on three continents believe that a mobile phone helps them lead a more secure, connected and productive life.

The rise of the mobile phone has challenged the predictions that many information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) specialists offered about information in the developing world. Instead of embracing community solutions that offered shared access to information, many poor people have been willing to pay large sums and others have documented, sometimes more than 50% of their disposable income) for personal access to communication tools.

Presented with a model that extends connectivity into many poor communities without government subsidy, often turning a profit (and thus being sustainable), the development community is rightly looking for ways to build tools that leverage these platforms to promote economic and community development.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof argues that “in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.” In this paper, we present a design model for empowering low income women in the developing world, in ways that cut across individual application areas. Specifically, this model characterizes a possible trajectory for NGOs and women to engage with each other and among themselves – potentially augmented by technology – to help women escape from poverty.

The fieldwork components in this study took place over 15 weeks in three phases, with a total of 47 NGO staff members and 35 socio-economically challenged women in rural and urban India. Interviews and co-design sessions with seven proof-of-concept prototypes showed that women appeared to belong to five distinct stages of “growth” in striving towards independence. We report the technology design lessons from our co-design sessions to illustrate how user readiness, relationship building at the community and family levels, and integration with state, national and international level programs, should be taken into account in the broader context of intervention design.

Populations in the rural developing world have just as many, if not more, information needs as people living in more affluent areas. But their constraints — intermittent power, intermittent connectivity, limited education, literacy and capital — make first-world approaches to accessing information systems inapplicable. Mobile phones are on the cusp of spurring an information revolution in such regions. Long battery life, wireless connectivity, solid-state memory, low price and immediate utility make this device better suited to rural conditions than a PC. However, current software on mobile phones makes them hard to use and to program.

In this dissertation, I present the design, implementation and evaluation of CAM — a mobile application framework designed to address the information needs of the rural developing world. Beginning with a two-month participatory design study, including users with varying levels of education, I propose some general guidelines for user interface and system design in this context. Motivated by these guidelines, I present CAM. CAM applications are accessed by capturing barcodes on paper forms using the mobile phone camera, or entering numeric strings with the keypad. Supporting one-step navigation, direct linkage to paper practices and offline multi-media interaction, CAM is uniquely adapted to rural device, user and infrastructure constraints. To demonstrate the usability of this framework, I implement and evaluate several distinct CAM-based applications (one of which has already been commercially deployed). I also provide preliminary motivation for fourteen other applications that could be implemented with the same, or similar, approach.

Service providers periodically publish different tariff offers with the objective of both customer acquisition and customer retention. Transparency in the provision of telecommunication services and tariff offers has always been and continues to be of prime concern to the Authority. TRAI has in the past taken several steps to enhance transparency in tariff offers. The Authority, however, is receiving several complaints and representations from consumers and their representatives seeking further effective transparency measures. In view of the increased competition as well as the spread of telecom activity to rural areas, the relevance of having a more transparent regime for tariff offerings cannot be overemphasised. At the same time, service providers and their associations have also raised certain concerns. This consultation paper brings out various issues that have a bearing on telecom tariff offers.

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering support via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 26 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

The paper suggests that research on the role of mobile telephony for socioeconomic development (M4D) draws on two frames. One frame stresses the relative freedom of telephone users to do whatever they choose. The other stresses how technologies and technology-led interventions are embedded in recursive, context specific relationships with user communities. Together these frames support M4D’s “dual heritage”. After detailing current M4D archetypes representing each heritage, the paper introduces a conceptual and practical synthesis, that is, large-scale platforms for distributed, semi-constrained interaction.

This paper considers two examples of such platforms—MXit, South Africa’s mobile social networking service and M-PESA, Kenya’s mobile money transfer system—including both anticipated and unanticipated consequences of operating “at scale” and beyond the confines of a controlled M4D intervention. Finally, this paper introduces implications of the dual heritage and of the rise of hybrid platforms for research and practice.

This paper explores the reach and use of m-money among the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in the Philippines using survey data from LIRNEasia’s 2008 Mobile 2.0 surveys. It looks at m-money’s potential and actual use for remittance among internal and external migrant workers and their families. The results are triangulated with focus group data and literature on mobile and electronic money, and framed using Van Dijk’s (2006) Stages of Access to digital technologies.

Although usage of m-money among the BoP remains low, the ICT infrastructure for this is in place. Compared to other Asian countries where the survey was also conducted, Filipinos are more familiar and have higher trust in mobile electronic transactions. Managing their resistance to change from current offline remitting practices remains a challenge.

This paper examines how to evaluate mobile services’ intervention impact on socio-economic development of rural India. The existing literature shows multiple ways of studying mobile services impact through different frameworks. The results are non-comparable due to applied methods are different and the problem domain is quite complex. A uniform framework is felt need to undertake research on socio-economic impact studies. Various user-centric mobile services are launched across rural markets. India becomes a field testing ground for most of the multinational firms who want to test their innovative business models. The proposed mixed-method framework, based on the existing literature, may well suit to the present research work. A survey adopting socio economic criteria (SEC) used by Indian marketers for its randomized stratified sample collection is adopted. The sample well represents the entire rural population, as it looked upon head of the family’ education and type of house (s)he possessed.

Rural areas lack sustainable electrification solutions. Although solar solutions hold promise, they are fundamentally constrained by high maintenance costs (due to low user densities,equipment failure, poor handling) and a complete lack of accountability. In this paper, we describe our experiences deploying more than 5,000 Solar Home Systems in Ethiopia and the sustainability problems we faced.

Towards developing a decentralized and sustainable solar solution, we have designed SIMbaLink,an extremely low-cost real-time solar monitoring system that significantly reduces both the maintenance costs and the time to repair. By explicitly exposing the real-time status of a solar system to all parties concerned, SIMbaLink addresses the lack of accountability and trust concerns. SIMbaLink can be easily integrated with existing solar systems and can reduce equipment failure rates through early detection of system malfunctions. The SIMbaLink module uses the existing mobile network to send Solar Home System health updates to a technician located in an urban or rural center. Remote monitoring reduces the amount of visits that the technician needs to make to a certain household. Also, when the technician does make a visit, he or she will already know what the problem is.

This paper examines the proposed framework for evaluating the impact of the intervention of mobile-based services on socio-economic development of Indian rural areas. Framework suitability has been studied using case study method with pilot test data. Existing literature shows multiple ways of studying mobile impact through different frameworks. The need for uniform framework is the felt need as various user-centric mobile services launched across rural markets. India becomes a field testing ground for most of the multinational firms who want to test their innovative business models. This framework provides a testing method for socioeconomic development impact on rural areas. This study adopted socio economic criteria (SEC) used by Indian marketers as basis for sample selection. The pilot study clearly shown that field is ready to test the proposed framework.

Studies to understand the impact that demographic and socio-economic factors have in the use of cell phones have been traditionally carried out by social and technical researchers through the use of questionnaires and personal interviews. In recent years, and due to the pervasiveness of cell phones in emerging and developing economies, large datasets with millions of interactions are generated, anonymized and stored in real time by telecommunication and internet companies. However, these datasets do not typically contain any socio-economic information that characterizes the users. As a result, in order to understand the impact of socio-economic parameters on the use of mobile phones at larger scales, researchers have typically correlated the behavioral analyses drawn from the anonymous cell phone usage datasets to aggregated demographic or socio-economic parameters compiled by institutions like the National Statistical Institutes (NSI) or the World Bank (WB). In order to compute these correlations, the approximate residential location of the anonymized users is required. In general, carriers only have such information for users with a contract, which in emerging economies accounts for less than a 5%.

In this paper, we propose a new technique to automatically predict the approximate residential location of anonymized cell phone users based on their calling behavior, assuming that we have a small set of users for whom their approximate residential location is known (the subscribers with a contract). Our results indicate that we can correctly predict the residential location of up to 70% of users with a coverage of 50%. By automatically associating cell phone users to geographical areas, we aim to provide a tool that facilitates the analysis – at a national or global scale – of the impact that socio-economic factors might have in the use of cell phones.

This paper describes an ongoing research project exploring the business practices of mobile entrepreneurs, specifically mobile food vendors, and the potential use of location aware and mobile phone-based application to support their information needs. Mobile food vendors are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the developing world and can be seen hawking their wares in carts, bicycles, or motorcycles.

In this paper we report findings from 28 interviews around business practices, challenges, personal histories, and economic wellbeing among mobile food vendors and 10 of their customers from five major Indonesian cities. Based on these findings, we point to characteristics and features of a mobile phone-based application that will enable these vendors to advertise their current location, accept orders from customers, enable customers’ recommendation of vendors, and inform fellow vendors of various special events.

We combine data from a field survey with transaction log data from a mobile phone operator to provide new insight into daily patterns of mobile phone use in Rwanda. The analysis is divided into three parts. First, we present a statistical comparison of the general Rwandan population to the population of mobile phone owners in Rwanda. We find that phone owners are considerably wealthier, better educated, and more predominantly male than the general population. Second, we analyze patterns of phone use and access, based on self-reported survey data. We note statistically significant differences by gender; for instance, women are more likely to use shared phones than men. Third, we perform a quantitative analysis of calling patterns and social network structure using mobile operator billing logs. By these measures, the differences between men and women are more modest, but we observe vast differences in utilization between the relatively rich and the relatively poor. Taken together, the evidence in this paper suggests that phones are disproportionately owned and used by the privileged strata of Rwandan society.

Research carried out by International Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). The ICRIER researchers looked at three segments of the population – the agriculture sector, the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector and urban slum dwellers. The research demonstrates that access to telecommunications is an important catalyst to realizing productivity and efficiency improvements and thereby making it possible for the benefits of economic growth. The research in this report on the uses and impacts of mobiles in agriculture show that improving productivity and rural incomes requires an array of enablers in the production cycle, which runs from planting to the final sale of produce; access to information is an important enabler.

The lack of adequate infrastructure is particularly acute in rural areas, home to 70% of India’s population and the 52% of the work force that is primarily engaged in agriculture and related activities. Agriculture in India accounts for 18% of national income, implying extremely low agricultural productivity. Until now, the focus of mobile operators’ attention has been on the more lucrative urban markets. The high cost of infrastructure rollout in less dense rural areas and affordability barriers for the rural population are likely reasons. But there are signs that this is changing. Infrastructure rollout in rural areas is now eligible for subsidy and all major providers have reported future plans for expansion in rural India.

Small farmers often struggle to access high-quality inputs such as advanced seed varieties, or services such as soil testing or credit, fertilizers, availability of loan options and efficient distribution networks and weather forecast. Therefore a very uneven access to information is seen currently. A national survey of farmers found that only 40% of farmer households accessed information about modern agricultural techniques and inputs while a lot of them still depend on other progressive farmers.