"Build it Kenny, and they will come..."

NEWS: Busy final conference quarter for kiwanja

2008-08-06T19:58:00.002Z

Ken Banks has been invited to attend a number of conferences and internal meetings over the next four months. Six of eight confirmed conferences include:

- Open Source in Mobile (OSiM), Berlin (September 2008)
- Pop!Tech, Maine (October 2008)
- “Technology: a platform for development?”, London (October 2008)
- 2008 Net Impact, Philadelphia (November 2008)
- A Better World By Design, Rhode Island (November 2008)
- National Endowment for Democracy public meeting, Washington (November 2008)

Further details of each talk, links to presentation materials and information on other confirmed engagements will be made available nearer the time

NEWS: kiwanja.net contributes article to Harvard "Publius" Project

2008-08-06T18:30:00.001Z

kiwanja.net was recently asked to contribute a short essay on mobile technology for "Publius", a Berkman Centre publication which seeks to bring together a "distinguished collection of Internet observers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, activists, technologists and still other experts, to write short essays, to foster an on-going public dialogue". kiwanja's article - "Time to eat our own dog food? Releasing the potential of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world" - sets out some of the challenges in developing appropriate, usable mobile applications for the grassroots NGO community. The article will be published, firstly online and later in a magazine, in the coming weeks

Chilubula 08.93 to Karuma 08.98

2008-08-03T19:12:00.001Z

This is no ordinary August. In fact, it's a bit of a double anniversary for me...

If you'd have come looking for me fifteen years ago, you'd have needed to get yourself to Chilubula, a small town about an hours drive from Kasama in northern Zambia, where I was working on a building project. In little over a month, about fifteen of us (aided by a fair number of children, it must be said) turned a pile of locally made bricks, more than a few bags of cement and a dozen tins of paint into a new school building. Pretty impressive stuff (assuming, of course, that it's still standing).

It was my first taste of any kind of overseas development work, my first ever trip to the African continent, and it really got me thinking. Chilubula turned out to be a major turning point in my life, and set the early seeds for kiwanja.net a decade later.

Five years after Chilubula - August 1998 - I was well into my journey and in the middle of studying social anthropology with development studies at Sussex University. It was my second year summer break, and the little money I'd saved from an IT job in Brighton and some programming work at Jersey Zoo got me to Karuma Wildlife Reserve in Uganda. For three months about ten of us camped out in the reserve, carrying out biodiversity and rural livelihoods research. (Karuma Wildlife Reserve hugs the southern boundary of Murchison Falls National Park, and is designed to act as a buffer zone between the people and the park).

But it wasn't all work. Here, Robert and I enter a small village during a two week break, and are greeted by a crowd of excited children. Part of the trip also saw us spending time in Masindi, a town I returned to earlier this year during my work with Grameen Technology Centre, and which also featured in the opening paragraph of my recent Vodafone receiver article.

My flat in Cambridge is littered with cassette tapes, masks, ornaments, paintings, photos, letters and memories from my many Africa trips over the past fifteen years. It's hard to believe that it started so long ago, hard to believe the places that journey has taken me, and hard to believe where it's landed me today. After all, none of this was ever planned.

Where next, I wonder?

Zimbabweans speak out through SMS

2008-07-31T09:40:00.006Z

International press interest may be on the wane following the heady heights of recent months, but the daily struggle continues for millions of people living in Zimbabwe. An inflation rate of over two million percent - usually a leading headline in itself - merely serves as a backdrop to the political manoeuvring taking place following the recent flawed presidential 'elections'.

It would be all too easy for people to lose hope, particularly in such a disempowering and disenfranchising environment dominated by fear, government harassment and a largely state controlled media which pushes out its own unique version of the truth. Freedom of speech is only freedom of speech when it comes with freedom from fear, something that many people don't yet have.

But hope, it turns out, is one of the few things many people still do have, and freedom of speech has found an ally in the humble mobile phone. I recently blogged about the use of mobile phones during the ongoing troubles, and highlighted the work of Kubatana.net, a grassroots organisation who have been pioneering the use of mobile technology in civil society work. Since 2005, Kubatana have been using a combination of kiwanja's FrontlineSMS platform, and a couple of other custom applications developed around the technology. Kubatana continue to use it, and continue to reach out to everyday Zimbabweans through the mobile channel - one of only a few available to them.

Back in April, at the height of the troubles, Kubatana asked everyday Zimbabweans: "What would you like a free Zimbabwe to look like?". Zimbabweans answered the call through their mobile phones, texting in their hopes for the future. Many people said that the question gave them hope in uncertain times.

Last week, while doubts lingered over the newly signed MDC/Zanu-PF deal, Kubatana reached out again to their SMS subscribers, asking them: "Kubatana! ZPF and both MDCs agree to talk to resolve crisis. Send yr thoughts on this & give us yr postal or email addr if u want a copy of their agreement". Zimbabweans responded with a range of comments and opinions, including:

The talks is good but MDC must be very clever - Zanu PF wants to swallow the MDC

Yes it’s a brilliant idea which shall help end crisis, poverty and all tribulations in Zimbabwe united we stand divided we fall Tsvangirai showed qualities of being a leader by agreeing to talk

Free and fair elections tomorrow with international observers!

It is long over due but we want justice

May be worth the effort but MDC must keep their eyes open. You can’t trust these guys. I agree with Tsvangirai that people have suffered enough

I believe it’s a good idea if they can reason together in order to solve this crisis. But they must recognise the results of the election done on 29 March

We don’t need masters, colonial or nationalist. We want public servants. So respect our votes of March 29. You asked for them

That’s better because we are suffering. We are stuck and something must be done to save the lives of Zimbabweans

The talks are okay but Mugabe must not lead the government & must step down

For as long as it is something that will result in the fulfilment of our wishes and solve our problems no hard feelings

I think it is a very bad idea for ZPF and MDCs to talk coz they are like water and oil as far as policies are concerned. What happened to ZAPU when it merged with ZPF? I dnt approve of the talks unless they start on the March 29 election which means MDC T would be the winner

No problem as long as the talks result in the formation of transitional authority & fresh, free & fair run-off being conducted thereafter

The talks are very important but MDC must not at all accept a gvt of national unity. They must go 4 a transitional gvt and pave way 4 fresh elections. Zanu PF plans 2 destroy MDC just as they did to ZAPU

In addition to direct comments and opinions, over 300 requests came in for the document to be posted to people, and over 200 for it to be emailed. This, according to Kubatana, is a small indication of just how starved most Zimbabweans are for news about their own country.

The numbers may not yet be huge, but mobiles are certainly beginning to make their mark.

NEWS: kiwanja's latest PC World column online

2008-07-29T18:16:00.001Z

kiwanja's latest article has just been posted on the PC World website. "Mobile Phones and the Digital Divide" takes a look at some of the challenges the industry is going to have to work through if mobile phones are truly going to be the devices that close the digital divide. The article can be read here

Three is not the magic number...

2008-07-26T11:22:00.003Z

It's 1.4.7...

One month ago the new version of FrontlineSMS was released. Well over three hundred NGOs responded and downloaded the software, and over a hundred of them have joined the new online community. Apart from the excitement surrounding the software itself, the new community is already proving its worth. I'd easily have settled for a hundred members after one month - hopefully the other two hundred will also see the value and sign up and engage soon.

I'd also have settled for the level of enthusiasm among the practitioner community. As you'd expect, many of the smaller NGOs won't have had a chance to do much with FrontlineSMS in such a short space of time, other than get familiar with the software and maybe run a few internal tests and trials. Some of the larger or better resourced projects have made some headway, however.

One of the most active users is Josh Nesbit in Malawi, who's using FrontlineSMS to drive field communications between a local hospital and its six hundred roaming community health workers (CHWs). He's also managed to set up a number of innovative services, such as automatic cellphone top-ups and a facility which allows CHWs to text in drug names and automatically receive responses on recommended uses and doses. A lot of people seem to be watching what Josh is doing very closely. What makes it so exciting is the fact that it's so highly replicable, not to mention the immediate impact it's having on the hospital and the community it is seeking to serve.

In one of the first microfinance-related applications of the new version, FrontlineSMS is being used by Grameen in Uganda to open up text-based communications with their Village Phone Operator (VPO) network. According to the project:

... We have been using FrontlineSMS to survey VPOs on their experiences at our training sessions and events, distributing information to them ranging from airtime to announcements to outages, and inviting feedback on other selected items through SMS. It really makes our lives easier by giving us a clear record of what’s been sent and responded to that can be reproduced and re-used elsewhere. It also helps us promote a culture of SMS use for communications

FrontlineSMS is also being lined up by the Cambodia Crop Production and Marketing Project (CCPMP). Funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, their aim is to improve agricultural value chains as a key to sustainable growth and poverty reduction in Western Cambodia. CCPMP plan to begin workshops and trials of FrontlineSMS in August and September. Further details are available on their project wiki. (FrontlineSMS is already being used to provide coffee prices to smallholder farmers in Aceh, something I blogged about a while ago).

Another project considering FrontlineSMS implementation is a text-based SOS/distress facility for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). The programme attempts to maximize the widespread ownership and use of mobile phones by Filipinos at home and abroad, and provide a 24/7 service in case of emergency. Incoming SOS text messages will be forwarded to numerous organisations and agencies capable of responding to various emergency situations. The project has just completed a round of comprehensive testing on the latest version - 1.4.7 - and posted the results on the FrontlineSMS community web pages.

Finally, Ushahidi have just completed their own period of FrontlineSMS evaluation, and are now putting together plans to integrate the platform into their web-based "crisis alert system". Ushahidi was recently listed as one of "Ten Web Startups to Watch" by MIT's Technology Review.

Behind the scenes there's also considerable activity, and we're working with a number of large donor organisations and academic researchers to help them understand the FrontlineSMS user base. Expect some interesting field-based research in the coming months. And in a couple of weeks or so we're releasing the software source code, with a number of developers looking to build on the work we've already started.

I've always believed in the immense value of building an NGO community around a single powerful, shared, open, flexible mobile-messaging solution. After a couple of years it finally looks like it might actually be happening.

Anthropologists! Anthropologists!

2008-07-18T07:14:00.004Z

Found this today on Facebook - by the "Far Side" creator, Gary Larson - a day after posting my latest PC World column on the application of anthropology in ICT. Very funny - and no doubt just how it is... =)

NEWS: kiwanja's latest PC World column posted online

2008-07-17T19:35:00.002Z

kiwanja's latest article has just been posted on the PC World website. "Anthropology's Technology-driven Renaissance" looks at some of the mystery surrounding the discipline, and examines the role anthropologists continue to play in the ICT4D and wider development fields. The article can be read here

Resting on our laurels?

2008-07-16T17:53:00.006Z

Three weeks have passed since we took the new FrontlineSMS out of an extended period of beta testing and made it widely available to the NGO community. Three weeks ago we also launched the new website, and a new community section, and today we stand just one registration short of hitting a hundred members.

It's been exciting, interesting, informative and hectic since the launch, and we've learnt a lot. Releasing a mobile application to the world is no easy task, particularly when there are so many parameters out of your control. Just talk to anyone in the industry.

On the positive side the lessons learnt are going to come in real handy when I talk about mobile applications development at a number of conferences later this year, including the intriguing "A Better World By Design" event in November (where good friend Erik Hersman is also speaking). Our experiences will also be useful as we move forward with the exciting and equally challenging mobility project, announced last week.

FrontlineSMS is an interesting 'mobile' application in that, being PC-based its interface with the wider world is via an attached GSM device and not a much simpler internet connection. The core FrontlineSMS functionality has been thoroughly tested and, although not many of the new users have had much time to do anything with it yet, we know it holds up well. It's already doing great work in Malawi, and is even being used there to automatically and remotely top-up health workers' phones with airtime credit.The new HTTP POST functionality, and the ability to run external programs triggered by text messages, have gone down particularly well among the few developers who have had time to play with it. Ushahidi and InSTEDD are two of a number of high-profile organisations starting to think about how they might integrate FrontlineSMS into their wider projects.

Of course, it doesn't matter how much functionality you build in if FrontlineSMS isn't able to connect to the outside world. The first release, back in 2005, only supported a very limited range of phones, and this was always going to be an issue. We've expanded the list considerably by making FrontlineSMS fully AT-compatible, which means that any phone which communicates via standard AT (Hayes) commands will work. This covers a much wider range of phones on the market, but not all - Symbian phones, Windows Mobiles, Blackberry's and iPhones are not supported at the moment, but being largely higher-end devices we're not too worried about that. I've not seen too many iPhones floating around rural Uganda.

In just three weeks we've already come across a number of connectivity challenges caused by a range of driver problems (or no-driver-problems), faulty cables, fake cables, software locking communications ports and incompatible handsets, none of which technically have anything to do with FrontlineSMS. Most users have reached out to the online community to get their problem solved, and most have been resolved quickly thanks to help from a combination of other community members and the great team we have at Masabi. Once FrontlineSMS connects with the outside world most users have been quick to excitedly respond to its potential.

Developing something like FrontlineSMS was always going to be a challenge but, as my recent BBC article noted, if we're to really advance the use of mobiles for positive social change we need to stop talking and start building (something more and more people are beginning to do). Thankfully the software has a strong following in the ICT4D space, a dedicated and growing user base and an engaged blogger community. It has also received incredible support from the MacArthur Foundation and, more recently, the Open Society Institute.

The next step is to engage the wider open source community.

Time to rest on our laurels? Never.

NEWS: kiwanja.net guest article published on BBC News website

2008-07-14T19:40:00.001Z

BBC News have just published a guest article by kiwanja.net on the "Technology" and "Science/Nature" pages of its website. Ken Banks was approached to write the article after the recent launch of the latest FrontlineSMS, and increasing exposure of kiwanja's work. The article looks at the broader use of mobile technology in conservation and development work, and highlights the current use of FrontlineSMS in Malawi. The full article - entitled "Mobile development rings true" - can be read here

NEWS: New "mobility" project unveiled

2008-07-11T12:06:00.001Z

How do we unlock the full potential of mobile applications development for users in the developing world? What would a mobile-based programming environment look like? "mobility", a collaborative project announced by kiwanja.net, hopes to find out. Check out the website for details

More on the kiwanja.net News page

NEWS: kiwanja.net lined up to appear at Rhode Island conference

2008-07-10T10:51:00.004Z

Ken Banks has been invited as one of only 25 speakers to present at a conference at Brown University in Rhode Island this November. The conference, A Better World By Design, "asks the question today’s designers, engineers, and economists should be asking. How can we use technology to improve the world? Hear answers from world-class professionals and academics in this milestone conference that will change the way you think about global crises and push the limits of user-centric, affordable design"

Erik Hersman, a friend and supporter of kiwanja's work and the man behind the highly regarded White African and AfriGadget websites, is also lined up to speak

More on the kiwanja.net News page

NEWS: kiwanja guest chapter in new digital learning publication

2008-07-10T10:48:00.003Z

kiwanja.net was recently invited to contribute a chapter on mobile learning for a new book, "Education for a Digital World". Described as a guide, resource, textbook and manual for policymakers and practitioners in developing and developed countries, the book has been published as a collaborative effort by fifty contributors from around the world representing the research, administration and business communities. Publication is by BCcampus and the Commonwealth of Learning

kiwanja's chapter - "Mobile Learning in Developing Countries: Present Realities and Future Possibilities" - looks at the emerging use of mobile phones as an educational tool, discusses a number of case studies and examines some of the technical challenges faced by organisations looking to develop or use mobile technology in support of education initiatives in the developing world. The book can be downloaded in full (PDF, 13Mb) or as a single kiwanja chapter (PDF, 350Kb)

More on the kiwanja.net News page

NEWS: Silverback mobile game featured on National Geographic Channel

2008-07-10T10:45:00.002Z

National Geographic are profiling kiwanja's "Silverback" mobile phone game as part of their promotion of "Gorilla Murders", a new programme about the plight of the mountain gorillas in Central Africa (showing in July on their cable channel in the US). The website has also republished kiwanja's earlier Blog post on the thinking behind the game.

More on the kiwanja.net News page

The Social Mobile Long Tail 2.0

2008-07-07T16:53:00.002Z

A few months ago I finally got round to diagramming what I thought mobile applications development in the not-for-profit space looked like. I came up with this, and called it "Social Mobile's Long Tail". It was based on the original Long Tail concept, first talked about by Chris Anderson in a Wired Magazine article, when he used it to describe consumer demographics in business (something quite different).

(A larger image is available via the kiwanja.net site here)

My thinking was this. Looking at the mobile applications space today we have a number of high-cost, well-publicised, large-scale mobile-related projects which tend to cover national (and sometimes international) needs. These "large" systems play a crucial role in helping larger bodies, sometimes as big as government departments, provide mobile services to their target audiences. They are generally aimed at the higher-end of the market, where only the larger or resource-rich NGOs reside. Way out there on price, complex to develop (assuming you wanted to) and near-on impossible to replicate, they're almost completely out-of-reach of your average grassroots NGO. These applications and platforms sit in the red part of the Tail.

In the orange section we move into the more mid-range systems - solutions developed by individual NGOs for a specific need, campaign or project. These are generally less complex, which makes their chances of replicability slighter better, but still difficult for many grassroots non-profits with few technical resources or hardware at their disposal.

Finally, in the green section - the truly long part of the long tail - we have the low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. From my own experiences the number of NGOs present in this space is by far the greatest, making it the area to focus on if we want to create the highest amount of mobile-enabled social change. Add up all the value here, and it easily outweighs the rest along the higher (more lucrative) parts of the tail.

I use this diagram in many of my conference talks and presentations, and it seems to go down very well. It was interesting to see some of the staff at Nokia Research, where I spoke last month while I was in Palo Alto, grabbing their camera phones to snap a picture of it. I'm always thinking about ways I can refine it though, and Jim Witkin - a colleague - suggested adding an extra axis. This is now the one on the right, representing the number of NGOs in each of the Long Tail segments.

There are probably better ways of depicting this, but for now I'm happy with this. Suggestions, however, are always welcome.

Three years on, but still some way to go...

2008-07-03T21:38:00.003Z

I'm writing this from seat 7D at exactly 38,000 feet somewhere between Forssa and Cambridge. Normally seat 7D would be in first- or business-class, but unfortunately for me I'm on a Ryanair (low cost airline) flight. Nothing fancy here. I'm returning from a short combined work and pleasure trip to Finland, where exactly three years ago I was knee-deep writing the first version of FrontlineSMS.

It was seat-of-the-pants stuff back then. I remember giving a very early interview about the software to Charity Times, even though it was only a third complete and it wasn't totally clear what it was or wasn't going to do. If that wasn't enough, I was also asked for a URL so people could go online for more information. "Of course", I said. With no website yet in place, programming was quickly put on hold for an afternoon while one was hastily deployed. In the absence of an obvious graphic to use for the main banner, and no logo to speak of, I took the liberty of taking a photo of the forest outside (the same forest I used to stare into while trying to decipher numerous unfriendly VB.NET error messages). My forest banner - which did resemble something of a 'frontline', I guess - held firm for two-and-a-half years until it was finally replaced when the new website - properly planned and commissioned, I hasten to add - went live in May.

A lot has changed in three years, and we're not just talking website banners. The initial launch, back in late 2005, went largely unnoticed. I remember spending my evenings trying to identify people who might be interested in writing about it, but it was new, was written by somebody nobody had heard of, had no users, nobody knew if it worked (not even me, to be honest) and nobody knew if anyone would want it. Talk about an uphill struggle. Mike Grenville at 160Characters was the first to see some potential in it, and his post got the ball rolling. A few other sites followed suit, most liking the thinking behind the program more than the program itself. Things slowly began to move, and a few enquiries came in from here and there. One was from Kubatana, who have the great honour of being the first organisation to take a punt on FrontlineSMS (they still use it to this day). Significantly, another email was from the MacArthur Foundation. The huge significance of that mid-November telephone conversation with Jerry wasn't to become apparent for another year-and-a-half or so.

Today, news of the latest version is effortlessly working its way around the web and my Inbox is regularly hit with NGO and press enquiries, people wanting to know if they can help in any way, and a stream of messages of support (there are one or two negative individuals, but luckily they remain well in the minority). There are some great, hugely supportive Blog posts out there, including those by Erik Hersman, Mike Grenville, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Clark Boyd, but also some insightful, short and unusual ones. FrontlineSMS is work in progress, and people seem interested enough to want to come along for the ride.

Cellphone 9 described FrontlineSMS as "The NGO Twitter", while Unthinkingly thought it was "a thoroughly wonderful idea in many ways … If you’re into international rural research with mobile phones. A tool worth watching very closely, it’s what I think is the leading platform of the mobile research 'industry' if there is such a thing". Chromosome LK won the Dramatic Headline competition with their "FrontlineSMS and Sri Lankan Gays" (referring to its use in Sri Lanka by a gay rights group), while Aydin Design decided that one of the really exciting things about FrontlineSMS was "the speed of development - with low resources, putting it in the hands of people now - so they can do things to improve their lives - now", which is exactly what it is trying to do. Isis-Inc - who's strap line is "Technically, it's about sex" (?) - concluded their coverage with "Yay FrontlineSMS!! Access meets elegance!!".

It was Clark Boyd, however, who hit the nail right on the head when he wrote:

"Today, FrontlineSMS announced version 2.0. To get a handle on what goes into this, think about it. This platform has to work on hundreds of different handsets and modems, and in languages ranging from Swahili to Cantonese. And it needs to work with Windows, Mac and Linux. Not child's play, and not something that's been done with millions of dollars of backing from major funders"

Not one to sit on my laurels, I'm already working on ideas for the next version of FrontlineSMS, and a number of exciting related initiatives, with the support of another major US foundation. FrontlineSMS is a major step forward in kiwanja's efforts to build affordable, appropriate technology solutions for the grassroots NGO community.

But we're by no means there yet...

FrontlineSMS takes on rural healthcare in Malawi

2008-06-25T07:54:00.007Z

Today sees the official launch of the new version of FrontlineSMS. To celebrate, kiwanja.net invited Josh Nesbit - a Senior in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University - to talk about its use in east Africa where he's spending the best part of this summer introducing the system into a rural hospital in Malawi. You can read Josh's Blog here

"St. Gabriel’s Hospital is no stranger to assaults on well-being spread by disease and illness. Located in Namitete, Malawi, St. Gabriel’s serves 250,000 rural Malawians spread throughout a catchment area one hundred miles in radius. With a national HIV prevalence rate of 15-20%, children orphaned by AIDS will represent as much as one tenth of the country’s population by 2010. With tuberculosis (TB), malaria, malnutrition and pneumonia ravaging immuno-compromised populations, the health system - including St. Gabriel’s Hospital - faces a disquieting burden. Malawi’s health challenges are compounded by its devastatingly low GDP per capita, by some measures the lowest in the world.

With just two doctors and a handful of clinical officers, St. Gabriel’s Hospital is strikingly understaffed. This perennial state of affairs explains the shift of primary healthcare in other, similar settings, to Community Health Workers (CHWs), trained for specified tasks. Through the hospital’s antiretroviral (ARV) treatment program - drug therapy for HIV/AIDS - over 600 volunteers have been recruited. These volunteers are spread throughout villages in the Hospital's catchment area. Some CHWs are HIV and TB drug adherence monitors, while others accompany patients during long journeys (up to a hundred miles, often by foot) to the hospital.

A few of the more inspired volunteers record their activities in notebooks, and travel to the hospital to have their good work acknowledged. The vast majority, however, remain disconnected from hospital activities, interacting with hospital staff only to pick up their drugs. It’s not that they don’t want to play a legitimate role in a community health system - there is no communication to foster such a role.

Enter FrontlineSMS. The program, developed by Ken Banks and his team at kiwanja.net, is the cornerstone of a new, text-based communications initiative at St. Gabriel’s Hospital. Funded by the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University and the Donald A. Strauss Foundation, I'm currently knee-deep in a pilot program.

FrontlineSMS is being used to connect the hospital with its CHWs, expanding the role of the volunteers. Drug adherence monitors are able to message the hospital, reporting how local patients are doing on their TB or HIV drug regimens. Home-Based Care volunteers are sent texts with names of patients that need to be traced, and their condition is reported. "People Living with HIV and AIDS" (PLWHA) Support Group leaders can use FrontlineSMS to communicate meeting times. Volunteers can be messaged before the hospital’s mobile testing and immunization teams arrive in their village, so they can mobilize the community. Essentially, FrontlineSMS has adopted the new role of coordinating a far-reaching community health network.

The hospital sees intense promise in the formidable duo of FrontlineSMS and the cell-phone-yielding health worker. The usefulness of a well-managed communications network is undeniable, particularly when the information is so vital. In the first hours of the pilot program, a deceased patient’s extra ARVs were secured, the Home-Based Care unit was alerted of ailing cancer patients, and a death was reported (saving the hospital a day-long motorbike trip to administer additional morphine).

Rural healthcare has found, in FrontlineSMS, a powerful protagonist".

Restricted mobility

2008-06-21T15:16:00.005Z

On my travels it's not unusual for me to find a dozen or more Village Phone operators in a single village. It's also not unusual to find them with pretty-much the same phone, quite often the same price plan, and the same signs and posters. And just to rub it in, their shops and kiosks are often the same colour, too. Standing out from the competition can be quite a challenge in an environment like this, but it can be done.

Making a phone call on a Village Phone can hardly be called a private affair. First of all you're likely standing out in the open, the phone owner usually hangs around a couple of feet away, and children crowd around because that's what children do. In an attempt to break the mould - and gain a little competitive advantage - this Village Phone operator decided that customers should be allowed to put some space between her, the children and their private conversation. So her customers can take the phone 'away' somewhere where it's a little more private. To stop them running off with it, she attaches a length of wire which leads back into her shop. Simple, but clever.

Maybe the wire could double up as an aerial extension for places with poor reception (now there's one for Nokia to consider, or Motorola in this case)?

Sometimes, living in a wired world can have its advantages...

Further reading: "Unplanned adolescence", a Fast Company article on what happens to Village Phone operators when local mobile ownership increases (and my response to that), and "Africa's grassroots mobile revolution - A traveller's perspective", a photo essay I wrote recently for the June edition of Vodafone receiver

Race for the canopy

2008-06-10T13:51:00.002Z

Mobile phone masts join the millennia-old "race for the canopy" in what remains of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest. Taken during a road trip, Sao Paulo to Rio, June 2008

Mobiles in Africa: A Travellers Perspective

2008-06-05T23:26:00.004Z

This essay was originally commissioned in April 2008 by Vodafone receiver, Vodafone's "neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting and future-oriented aspects of communications technologies". All images taken from the kiwanja Mobile Gallery

It didn’t take us long to find it. After all, mobile phone masts aren’t that easy to hide, and Masindi is a tightly-knit, flat little west Ugandan town. After a few short minutes, driving past countless mobile phone dealerships, internet cafes and village phone operators, there it was. I was last in Masindi in 1998, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but a lifetime in the short history of the mobile phone. Back then this mast wasn’t there, and neither were any of the mobile phone shops, internet cafes and village phone operators. The only phone line out of town – if and when it was working – was courtesy of the local post office. Every couple of weeks we would drive here to collect our post from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, post our letters, have a cold beer, buy a few ‘luxuries’ and occasionally attempt to phone home. No text messaging in those days.

Just as I had done ten years earlier, I sat in the Travellers Rest drinking coffee, watching Masindi life go by. Unfinished buildings littered the edge of town, a scene not unlike the last time I was there, except this time endless mobile advertising banners broke the view. In a bold marketing ploy the entire café was branded “Celtel red”, yet it was only just managing to compete with the “MTN yellow” across the road. People were busy in their shops, busy carrying goods, busy ferrying passengers on their bikes, and busy on their phones. The mobile revolution is here, there and everywhere for all to see. What has happened in Masindi is happening all over Africa, a continent which now boasts almost 300 million subscribers and a penetration rate fast approaching 30%.

And the beauty is that no-one expected it. Back in 2004 I co-authored one of the earlier reports on the potential of mobile phones in conservation and development work. Focused mainly on Africa and funded by the Vodafone Group Foundation, we wrote it at a time when most people believed that rural Africans on a couple of dollars a day would never be able to afford a phone, let alone the credit to keep it going. Of course, four years ago mobile phones were expensive, but in many places the rampant growth of second hand markets made affordable handsets available for the first time. Nothing is thrown away here. At the same time, getting new phones into the hands of the masses was a key goal of the GSM Association’s “Emerging Market Handset Initiative”, announced back in 2005, an objective which continues to this day with the handset manufacturers themselves, many of whom are working hard to develop sub-$20 phones for this very unique “bottom of the pyramid” market.

Understanding consumers in emerging markets – many of whom have very different requirements of a phone – has spurned the development of handsets with multiple phone books, phones marketed as torches and even handsets with no screen. If you think that most of the innovation is going on in the West, take a moment to look at what’s happening in India and Africa. Even operators are getting in on the act, providing services such as “Call Me”, which allows Vodacom subscribers in South Africa to send up to five messages per day, free of charge, requesting a call back from the receiver. Services such as these have emerged in response to consumer behaviour, users who would have previously “flashed” the person they wished to speak to by ringing their phone once and hanging up. “Call Me” formalises the process, helps minimise network traffic through fewer prematurely disconnected calls, and allows operators to add value by differentiating their service from rival operators. A lot of the research, often the catalyst for these new devices and services, is increasingly lead by fellow anthropologists Jonathan Donner at Microsoft Research and Jan Chipchase at Nokia, both of whom spend considerable amounts of their time studying mobile phone use in the field and, in Jan’s case, working his way through a fair number of bicycles in the process.

When it comes to mobile innovation, the gap between developed and developing countries is not much of a gap at all. Mobile innovation in the West, largely technology-lead, sits in contrast to that in the developing world where combating the geographic, economic and cultural constraints of users is considered a more sensible way to go. This explains the emergence of the torch phone, for users who live in areas with little or no regular light, or multiple phone books for users who share their phones with family members. On the heavyweight side, a plethora of financial applications have hit the streets, with Safaricom’s m-Pesa service getting by far the biggest press to date. Regularly used by hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, you often hear it described as the “Kenyan Debit Card”, allowing users to transfer money through their mobile phones to help out family and friends, or to buy and sell goods and services across the airwaves. For the tens of millions of Kenyans without bank accounts, m-Pesa represents both a revolution and a revelation. It is now being rolled out in other countries, with Afghanistan next on the list.

Innovation is not always as official or formalised as this, however. People in developing countries are rarely simple, passive recipients of a technology, and rarely wait for outsiders to provide solutions to their problems. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, evident by the masses of thriving small businesses you find on the street corners of every village, town and city. Last summer, in “A Review of The Postal and Telecommunications Sector: June 2006 to June 2007”, the Executive Director of the Uganda Communications Commission presented some quite incredible statistics. Official employment in Uganda’s ICT industry – dominated by telecommunications workers – sat at a little over 6,000. Informal, unofficial workers not directly employed, but who were making a living on the back of the industry, was estimated at a whopping 350,000. Amazing as it may be, Uganda is no exception. This is happening all over the African continent.

These ‘informal’ businesses come in all shapes and sizes, as do the kiosks many of them operate from, manufactured using anything from wood to metal sheeting, or made up of simple tables and plastic chairs. Mobile phone repair shops, often equipped with just a handful of basic (and frighteningly large!) tools, have sprung up to help owners squeeze the maximum life out of their devices, many being used in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. Mobile phones are attached to bikes (two and three wheelers), and even boats, and taken to where the business is. In Uganda these bikes, known locally as boda boda’s, are hooked up with spare batteries and desktop mobile devices to create what are affectionately known as “Bodafones”. I met the owner of one on Kampala Road last summer, and got talking to him through the universally accepted language of English Premier League football. He also accurately predicted the result of the Liverpool match later that day – I should have got his number.

In "Mobile Telephony: Leveraging Strengths and Opportunities for Socio- Economic Transformation in Nigeria", Christiana Charles-Iyoha sheds some fascinating light on the barriers to mobile ownership among Nigerian market traders. Erratic power supply, and difficulty charging, came top with a staggering 87%. Of course, Nigerians are not alone with this problem, and entrepreneurs are coming up with ingenious methods of meeting this crucial consumer need. Today, in some rural areas, users are able to charge their phones from a car battery which is taken to the nearest town, charged up and dragged back. In more urban areas with better mains supply, charging kiosks have sprung up allowing users to recharge their phones while they wait. Soon, with the continuing drop in the cost of solar chargers, many users will be able to do what I did last weekend down my local village green, and charge their phones using the most plentiful renewable energy source available – the sun (yes, we do occasionally get some in England). Interestingly, the total cost of this entire set up came to just over $40 - $22 for the ZTE handset (as being sold by MTN in Uganda), and $20 for the solar panel. Suddenly, with solar, there is light at the end of the charging tunnel.

Any discussion on mobile telephony, developing countries and economic opportunity would not be complete without a mention of Village Phone, Grameen’s pioneering work in Bangladesh which has recently taken root in Africa. A number of competing Village Phone schemes have since sprung up, providing business opportunities to mostly women, usually in rural areas, who borrow a small amount of money to purchase a phone. Members of the community, or passers-by, pay a small fee to make a call, or send a text message. Some of these schemes use desktop-style phones, which many owners prefer because of their ruggedness and the fact they are less likely to go walkabout. Culturally, bigger is also generally seen as better, a view somewhat at odds with how we feel about mobile devices in the Western world.

Other schemes use standard mobile phones, such as Nokia’s entry-level 1100 (for a while the best selling phone on the planet), while Motorola developed their own “pay phone” specifically for the job, allowing operators to enter the number of units to be used before handing the phone over to the caller. This helped ensure customers didn’t talk for longer than they’d paid for, and negated the earlier practice of operators having to rudely grab phones back with their clients in mid-sentence, or having to smack their hands down on the hang-up button of a desk phone before they’d had the chance to say goodbye.

In many places I’ve seen handsets used primarily as phone books, torches or even once as a method of keeping track of bad debts, but despite some ingenious offline applications mobiles are not much use as a communications device without a signal. On the whole, operators are doing what they can, but with geographically disbursed populations, often with little disposable income, it’s sometimes difficult to make a business case for increasing coverage to an area with a minimal, and scattered, population. But where networks do exist, operators in East Africa are blazing a trial, doing something unheard of in Europe and in many other parts of the world. We’re talking roaming, and we’re talking “one network”.

Celtel, MTN and Vodacom are just three of a growing band of African operators tearing down national boundaries to allow their customers seamless mobility as they travel from country-to-country. Advertising boards are scattered everywhere. "One SIM card. 6 countries" proclaims Celtel. "Travel with your Vodacom SIMcard and enjoy Vodacom tariff in Kenya and Uganda" boasts Vodacom. The speed of change in the mobile industry – more so it seems in developing countries – continues unabated. Again, the telecommunications gap between the so-called developed and developing countries looks a little blurred. Travelling across central Africa with a single SIM, on a single tariff, is a business person’s dream.

You may not see a Bodafone on your street anytime soon, but you may see a single European-wide network.

And if you do, just remember where it happened first...

FrontlineSMS gets active

2008-05-30T19:45:00.003Z

FrontlineSMS has so far managed to achieve quite a lot with really very little, but that's about to change. After two-and-a-half years of promise, it's finally beginning to look like the software I dreamt of that wet Saturday evening in Cambridge back in early 2005. I've spent the past week putting six months of development through its paces, whilst writing the new User Guide, and am as excited as ever about what this thing can do. One of the most exciting new features are things we've called "FrontlineSMS actions". Here's what they do.

"FrontlineSMS actions" are triggered by keywords which arrive via incoming text messages from patients, farmers, staff, fieldworkers, members of the public or whoever. Once a keyword or phrase is detected, FrontlineSMS can be told to do one of a number of things. These are our "actions":

Auto Reply
FrontlineSMS will automatically send a pre-determined SMS back to the sender of the message (maybe a "Thank you for your message", for example, or clinic opening times, or the current price of matoke)

Auto Forward
FrontlineSMS will automatically forward the incoming message to all members of a pre-determined Group. This can be useful for users who want Group members to be able to contact each other via SMS with latest news, or with urgent announcements (Auto Forward does a similar thing to Twitter)

Join Group
FrontlineSMS will automatically add the sender of the SMS to a pre-determined Group. Again, this is useful for users running a series of user Groups or clubs, and who want people to be able to join automatically by publicising the keyword without them having to make direct contact. A campaign, for example, could say "To join our Control Arms Campaign, text in the word JOIN to 123456789"

Leave Group
Members of Groups can leave any time they like by sending an SMS with a pre-determined keyword or phrase (for example, LEAVE GROUP)

Survey
Allows the running of competitions, Surveys or the soliciting of opinions from people. Any time a message comes in which starts with the pre-determined Survey keyword, FrontlineSMS will keep track of it and allow all responses to be analysed in the SurveyAnalyst module. Surveys or competitions could ask people, for example, to text in the word OPINION followed by their opinion on a certain topic or subject

Email
Keywords can be used to instruct FrontlineSMS to automatically forward an incoming text message to a pre-determined recipient, by email. This might be useful if a Project Manager, or someone in a different country or office, needs to receive emailed details of incoming Survey or campaign text messages, or if users want their messages to be backed up in an email system such as Outlook or Google Mail, or held somewhere for wider forwarding

External Command
To provide maximum functionality, keywords can be set up to trigger the running of external commands or programs on the computer (for example, a batch file or a script). Advanced users could write a batch file which finds out how much free disk space is left on the computer, for example. An incoming SMS with, say, the keywords FREE SPACE could then be set to trigger the running of this batch file, with FrontlineSMS texting the result (i.e. the amount of free disk space) back to the message sender. The External Command function can also be used to instruct FrontlineSMS to send incoming messages to remote servers over the internet, which may be useful as a method of backing up data, or for a website with a news ticker which needs to display all incoming messages for a campaign or event

As I speak - or should that be write? - FrontlineSMS is being tested by around twenty-five NGOs. Over seventy requests to use the new version have been submitted via the website in the past three weeks. Right now we're just ironing out the last few kinks before we make it more widely available to the NGO community. These are exciting times, and going by the feedback we're receiving, we're not the only ones getting excited...

Whose "revolution" is it anyway?

2008-05-18T16:10:00.005Z

Revolution (rĕv'ə-lū'shən)
A drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving

One thing that's particularly struck me over the past couple of years - in addition to the onward march of the mobile phone - has been the way its impact has been described by the press, academia and the blogosphere. Although some people take objection to the term mobile revolution, it's probably the best we've got, particularly if we're describing the impact from a developing country user perspective.

For reasons I'll describe later, I'm quite happy calling it a mobile revolution. Not everyone agrees. In a recent id21 insights paper, Richard Heeks and Abi Jagun specifically warn us that "tempting though it may be, we should avoid talk of a mobile revolution", and in a Boston Review paper this very month, Edward Miguel asserts that, on a macro level at least, the impact of mobile telephony is "hardly revolutionary". Taken from a 'developed world' standpoint they're all correct. But this isn't a standpoint I share.

Phonetically, the words 'mobile' and 'revolution' seem to fit together so well we've been unable to avoid the temptation, and in a frenzy of over-use maybe we've stopped questioning whether or not there really is one to speak of. Suddenly, almost everything is a revolution.

• "Youth drives India's mobile revolution" (BBC News, April 2004)
• "Television's mobile revolution" (The Guardian, December 2005)
• "Mobile Linux revolution on the way" (Silicon.com, June 2006)
• "Mobile VoIP revolution" (CNET.co.uk, September 2006)
• "Free mobile call revolution" (Evening Standard, October 2006)
• "Leading the mobile revolution" (Growing Business, October 2007)
• "Microsoft will power mobile revolution" (Register, October, 2007)

Take the iPhone as a more recent example. Sure, its introduction was a significant event, but did it truly represent a revolution as many people assert? The continued misuse of the term leads us to question true revolution, such as that which is happening as we speak in much of the developing world.

For the majority of us in the 'developed world' with access to high-speed broadband internet connections, landline phones, public payphones, computers and laptops, televisions, city-wide wi-fi networks, and public transport and mains electricity, mobile phones are certainly a useful complimentary technology in our lives, but it would be hard to argue that, for many of us, they're revolutionary. Okay, so we don't have to wait until we get to the office to take that call, or read that email, and being 'always-on' makes business more efficient and nights out easier to organise. Mobiles, in this context, have done just what they say on the tin - taken our already available communications tools and made them mobile.

But if you've never had high-speed broadband, or a home phone, access to a landline, a computer, laptop, television or reliable mains power, and aren't likely to get them for some time, then I'd argue that a mobile phone does have the potential to be revolutionary. And I'm sure hundreds of thousands of people in the developing world would agree.

An SMS is an SMS in any language

2008-05-13T15:18:00.003Z

With users in over forty countries around the world - and growing - keeping FrontlineSMS an English language application was never going to be the way forward. Thanks to some great work from the developers, and with the new FrontlineSMS a matter of days from launch, we're turning our attention to widening language support. Volunteers and supporters from around the world - some of which are members of the FrontlineSMS Supporters Group on Facebook - have been helping us translate the software into other core languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French and Swahili. FrontlineSMS will support these at launch, with additional support in the pipeline for Filipino and Cambodian.

Of course, if we're talking about NGOs, activism and human rights, no SMS platform would be complete without Chinese language support. So here we have it - another one we're including at launch. It's going to be interesting to see how this impacts adoption in China, a country which, so far, has no FrontlineSMS users.

FrontlineSMS and the culture of the goodie-bag

2008-05-04T10:02:00.002Z

This week sees the launch of the new and improved FrontlineSMS (or, at the risk of jumping on the bandwagon, FrontlineSMS2.0 as I prefer not to call it). As well as support for Windows, Mac and Linux, we're also launching a new website and, through a growing band of global volunteers, gearing up our awareness-raising campaigns. Although this feels like something of a fresh start, FrontlineSMS already has users in over forty countries around the world and continues to generate a buzz of excitement among NGOs who come into contact with it.

Next week will also see the new FrontlineSMS debut at Global Messaging Congress 2008 in Cannes, where I'm doing a keynote address on the use of mobiles - text messaging, more specifically - among the global NGO community. This follows on from my February talk at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Although most mobile industry events continue to be dominated by money-makers, aspiring money-makers and deal-breakers, it's refreshing to see NGO work finally gaining traction. Clearly, as more and more companies turn their attention towards emerging markets we'll see an increasing emphasis on the 'bottom of the pyramid' at these kinds of events.

With the exception of my twenty-five minute talk, the remainder of the two-day conference turns its attention back to mobile advertising, the mobile web, user experience, messaging business models, the role of IM and the future of mobile messaging. There will also be the chance to unwind with colleagues at the Global Messaging Awards bash, which I helped judge last month. It's going to be a very interesting couple of days, and I'm looking forward to hearing from some of the leaders in their field and exploring ways of leveraging some of this innovation for the benefit of the non-profit community.

And, just to be sure that on their way home no-one forgets the considerable impact of mobile technology to promote positive social and environmental change around the world, delegates will get a FrontlineSMS goodie-bag. I won't spoil the surprise, but let's just say that the contents will help remind them of the considerable challenges many mobile users face in the developing world.

Thanks to Wieden+Kennedy for the cute photo.

Lost in translation?

2008-04-23T07:34:00.001Z

A posting - if that's the right word - on the recently launched Silverback game, taken from the Gadget Blog:

It turns away that this migrant undertaking, Silverbackers, has universe to transact coupled with gorilla upkeep. Hike to the location to download the project prep added to learn by heart concerning these amazing creatures subsistence newest the forests of Vital Africa - their social order totals binding completed 700. Here’s the provocative tool: these gorillas are unguarded by reason of they keep body and soul toge in vogue a residence moneyed now Coltan, a man-made old en route for the acquire of jug phones. What bigger pathway to move keeping to this enigma than by our can phones?

It certainly looks like English... =D