MobileActive.org

We examine the growth of mobile phone technology over the past decade and consider its potential impacts upon quality of life in low-income countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. We first provide an overview of the patterns and determinants of mobile phone coverage in sub-Saharan Africa before describing the characteristics of primary and secondary mobile phone adopters on the continent.

We then discuss the channels through which mobile phone technology can impact development outcomes, both as a positive externality of the communication sector and as part of mobile phone-based development projects, and analyze existing evidence.

While current research suggests that mobile phone coverage and adoption have had positive impacts on agricultural and labor market efficiency and welfare in certain countries, empirical evidence is still somewhat limited. In addition, mobile phone technology cannot serve as the “silver bullet” for development in sub-Saharan Africa. Careful impact evaluations of mobile phone development projects are required to better understand their impacts upon economic and social outcomes, and mobile phone technology must work in partnership with other public good provision and investment.

In this comprehensive analysis, CGAP assessed whether branchless banking or mobile money services are more cost effective or cheaper for low income people than formal banking. The authors, McKay and Pickens, compared pricing of 16 leading branchless banking services across eight ways that customers use branchless banking. They subsequently compared the pricing of these services against 10 formal banks and other informal money transfers options.

The eight use cases refer to: 1) sending money transfer, 2) receiving money transfer, 3)short-term safekeeping, 4) medium term savings, 5) bill payments, 6) high usage, 7) m-PESA customer, and 8) kenya bank customer.

The results say that branchless banking is 19% cheaper than banks, and have a lower transaction value. Additionally, branchless banking is 54% cheaper than informal options formoney transfer.They also discuss in detail how pricing influences customer usage.

Research has shown that traditional Internet has not been successful in alleviating social exclusion in developing country. Since a significant number of the population in developing countries use mobile phones, others have suggested that mobile internet may be the solution to the problem. However, to date there has not been empirical studies in developing countries to explore that possibility. This study aims therefore to explore whether the mobile Internet may be a viable option for addressing social exclusion in a developing country context. Data for the study was gathered using semi-structured interviews with socially excluded individuals and the data was analysed using thematic analysis. The findings of the study show that usage of mobile internet amongst the socially excluded is low mainly because internet-capable cell phones are still beyond the reach of the socially excluded and because of limited awareness of what mobile internet is and what it can achieve. The study also shows that while mobile internet has significant impact in addressing exclusion from social participation, its impact on economic as well political dimensions of exclusions is still limited.

There is growing pressure for farmers in countries such as Uganda to accelerate their efforts to commercialize production in the face of increasing market competition from neighboring countries and across the world. To assist farmers, a new generation of low cost market information services is being developed that takes advantage of information and communication technologies such as FM radios, mobile phones, and internet-based communications systems, to enable farmers to monitor and adjust to dynamic market conditions in local, national, and export markets.

Although there is much interest in market information from farmers, other market chain actors, and service providers, there is skepticism from funding agencies to support such services over the long term, due to past failures. This study therefore aims to evaluate how farmers access and use market information to improve their market decision making. It also evaluates whether there are any advantages of collective action in using market information to improve marketing decisions. This is considered an important point of analysis as virtually all extension plans in Uganda currently use farmer groups as key element of their learning and intervention strategies.

Survey results found that all farmers interviewed were able to access market information through radio and mobile phones. In Uganda, up to 94 percent of farmers interviewed owned a radio and 25 percent of farmers owned mobile phones. Up to 52 percent of farmers indicated that receiving Market Information Services (MIS) had a positive impact on their business, and 39 percent stated that it had a lot of impact in terms of decision making and stabilizing incomes.

The study ascertained the level of usage as well as constraints to the use of information communication technologies (ICTs) among major stakeholders in the agricultural development process in Abia and Enugu States of Nigeria. Data for the study were generated from a sample of 110 respondents using structured interview schedule and questionnaire.

Findings indicate that majority (52.5%, 57.5% and 56.7%) of researchers; extension workers and farmers had high, moderate and low knowledge levels of available ICTs, respectively. Out of 24 information communication technologies in use among the respondents, 11 were frequently utilized by researchers, while only 4 and 3 of the facilities were frequently utilized by extension workers and farmers, respectively.

The study revealed major constraints to the use of ICTs to include lack of sufficiently trained computer personnel, lack of confidence in operating modern ICTs, erratic and fluctuating power supply, poor finance, lack of internet access in the rural areas and high cost of ICTs hard and soft wares, among others. The study concludes with the need to have a National Agricultural Extension Policy on the use of ICTs with major emphasis on access, availability and use.

M‐PESA is a small‐value electronic payment and store of value system that is accessible from ordinary mobile phones. It has seen exceptional growth since its introduction by mobile phone operator Safaricom in Kenya in March 2007: it has already been adopted by 9 million customers (corresponding to 40% of Kenya’s adult population) and processes more transactions domestically than Western Union does globally. M‐PESA’s market success can be interpreted as the interplay of three sets of factors: (i) pre‐existing country conditions that made Kenya a conducive environment for a successful mobile money deployment; (ii) a clever service design that facilitated rapid adoption and early capturing of network effects; and (iii) a business execution strategy that helped M‐PESA rapidly reach a critical mass of customers, thereby avoiding the adverse chicken‐and‐egg (two‐sided market) problems that afflict new payment systems.

M-PESA an agent-assisted, mobile phone-based, person-to-person payment and money transfer system, was launched in Kenya on March 6, 2007. This study is the first of its kind to explore the economic effects of M-PESA in Kenya at the community level.

The findings from the first stage of the study indicate that M-PESA affects the economic outcomes of community members, both users and non-users of M-PESA, through direct and externality effects, and identify 11 economic effects within the broad categories of local economic expansion, security, capital accumulation and business environment after 2.5 years of M-PESA’s use in these communities. The research also shows that effects were not visible in all the study communities and among all the population segments within the communities; they tended to be influenced by gender and geographic location of the communities.

Also, the effects were not always perceived as mutually exclusive, but as interwoven with each other to produce overall community effects.

Poor farmers often lack credit to purchase agricultural inputs, and rely on their buyers to provide it. This paper considers the effects of mobile phones on traders of perishable foodstuffs operating between Tanzania’s Southern Highlands and Dar es Salaam’s wholesale market, with a particular focus on the importance of credit in the relationship between potato and tomato farmers and their wholesale buyers.

It argues that the ability to communicate using these new information and communication technologies (ICTs) does not significantly alter the trust relationship between the two groups. It also suggests that farmers, in effect, often have to accept the price they are told their crops are sold for – irrespective of the method of communication used to convey this message – because their buyers are also their creditors. In this situation, many farmers are unable to exploit new mobile phone-based services to seek information on market prices, and potential buyers in other markets. Doing so runs the risk of breaking a long-term relationship with a buyer who is willing to supply credit because of their established business interaction.

It is suggested that, under a more open system than currently exists in Tanzania, mobile-payment (‘m-payment’) applications should target these creditor-buyers as key agents in connecting farmers to the credit they so often require.

In this paper we present a study comparing speech and dialed input voice user interfaces for farmers in Gujarat, India. We ran a controlled, between-subjects experiment with 45 participants. We found that the task completion rates were significantly higher with dialed input, particularly for subjects under age 30 and those with less than an eighth grade education. Additionally, participants using dialed input demonstrated a significantly greater performance improvement from the first to final task, and reported less difficulty providing input to the system.

During a study conducted in January 2010 by researchers of the Columbia University Mechanical Engineering Department in New York City, approximately 300 farmers were surveyed in rural Mali. Farmers were randomly sampled via standard proportional, stratified, cluster techniques. Data collection took place through the use of HTC G1 smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. The phones were equipped with Open Data Kit (ODK) software; a system that immediately digitizes data for analysis, allows for remote monitoring of the collection progress, and facilitates the gathering of data, eliminating the need for paper surveys and therefore significantly reducing survey times. ODK has the potential for a profound impact on the future of data gathering, particularly in development applications where locations may be remote and budgets tight, yet where mobile phone use is rapidly increasing with the expansion of service
coverage.

Governments make regular payments to at least 170 million poor people worldwide—far more
than the 99 million or so who have active microloans. In this Focus Note, we look at government-to-person (G2P) payments, which include social transfers as well as wage and pension payments. With appropriate experimentation, these payments have the potential to become a vehicle for extending financial inclusion and improving the welfare of poor people. Yet in most countries, far fewer than one-quarter of G2P payments to the poor land in a financially inclusive account—i.e., one that enables recipients to store G2P payments and other funds until they wish to access them and make or receive payments from other people in the financial system, and one that is accessible, in terms of cost and distance.

The first section of this Focus Note reviews the state of G2P payments today, including how we arrived at a figure of at least 170 million poor G2P recipients and a country example (Colombia) showing that several types of G2P payments reach the poor. The second section looks at the early experience with providing financial services to poor G2P recipients. We find that 45 percent of G2P programs launched in the past 10 years use an electronic payment mechanism that creates a foundation on which a financially inclusive account can be offered. Examples where this is already being done (Brazil, India, and South Africa) are discussed. The third section deals with five common concerns of policy makers and social development program managers. Recommendations to government, the financial industry, and donors are
summarized in the conclusion.