IN BRIEF: Mobile Phones and International Development
There are nearly four billion mobile subscribers, more than half the world's population. New phones cost as little as USD$20 and require very little education or technical literacy to operate. And with users in developing countries now outnumbering those in the developed countries, development practitioners and social entrepreneurs are beginning to leverage the power of mobile technology to reach development objectives. Sophisticated devices and data services remain most accessible in the wealthiest countries, but usage in the developing world is significantly altering business and social behaviors around the world.
Not surprisingly, mobile phone owners in the developing world are making the most of their devices. In most of the world, the calling – or texting – party alone pays for communication. As a result, mobile users in low-resource geographies tend to prefer low-cost SMS communications and incoming calls. But many of these users also tend to get the most out of their devices, maximizing the convergence of multiple life tools: calculator applications to support business transactions, built-in cameras to take and share photographs, music storage solutions and applications to take tunes anywhere, note-taking applications to forgo paper, and so on.
New mobile-friendly tools are being used in concert with existing technologies and behaviors to foster civic engagement, social change, and economic development. And more and more resources exist for those interested in taking advantage of this technology, like this USAID-funded report by MobileActive on mobile phones, DigiActive's support for international digital activists, and Tactical Tech's online toolkits.
Garnering much attention these days from donors, mainstream media, and blogs is Ken Banks' free FrontlineSMS software, which turns a laptop computer and a mobile phone into a portable, low-cost, two-way SMS communications platform. With this tool, it is efficient and economical for health organizations to monitor patients' medical condition, for instance, or for market information providers to share commodity price information with farmers.
Another frequently lauded and highly useful tool is Ushahidi, which through SMS contributions and an intuitive web site facilitates location-specific data contributions from citizens and real-time event monitoring for development actors. Initially deployed during Kenya's 2008 elections, Ushahidi is currently engaged in a variety of projects, including tracking violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Many more mobile-friendly tools exist, and many more are sure to be developed and deployed with encouragement and funding from the Knight Foundation's News Challenge, Google's Android contest, and USAID's very own Development 2.0 Challenge. From humanitarian relief and economic development to citizen journalism and news distribution, mobile phone tools are rapidly unlocking new tools for collaboration, monitoring and evaluation, and information dissemination.
Paul Goodman of DAI is a guest contributor to the Global Development Commons blog.
Have a good example of mobile phone use in the developing world? Please leave a comment.
Learn more about mobile phones for development...
If you haven't noticed our Delicious button on the right side of the screen yet, be sure to take a look at what we've tagged for mobile technology.
Check out Ken Banks' reflections on ICT4D for some quick learning projects and tools available for people working in the development space. Be sure to check out some of the links.
Are you a mobile phone innovator? Need funding to get your idea off the ground? MobileActive has some ideas for you in 2009.
UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge
The Human Rights Center is sponsoring a challenge to encourage innovations for applying mobile technologies for human rights investigations and advocacy. Through a NetSquared Community vote, 10 finalists will be chosen...
New Media Women Entrepreneurs Grants
The McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs program will give one-time funding of $10,000 to women who have the vision, skills and experience to launch a new venture. These can be solo ideas or team projects spearheaded by women. Deadline: March 31, 2009.
N2Y4 Mobile Challenge
The N2Y4 Mobile Challenge is a call for Project submissions that engage the use of mobile technology for progressive social change. The Top Three Finalists will be selected by conference attendee vote, and announced May 27...
Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows Program
Each year, Pop!Tech selects 10-20 high potential change agents from around the world who are working on highly disruptive innovations in areas like healthcare, energy, development, climate, education, and civic engagement, among many others. Fellows work in both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds, have a minimum of 3-5 years experience, and are working in organizations that are well positioned for sustainable growth. Apply or nominate someone here.
Learn about the mHealth alliance, Check out the health submissions (there are two sections) from the 2008 Development 2.0 Challenge,
Mobile phone diagnosis approaches field trials
From SciDevNet -- By Katherine Nightingale, 15 April 2009
Two innovative devices that use modified mobile phone technology to diagnose disease now have funds for more research and field tests in developing countries.
The 'CelloPhone' and the 'CellScope' — diagnostic imaging tools made from everyday camera phones — were winners of the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project prize, announced last week (8 April).
The CelloPhone team will use their share of the US$700,000 prize money to begin field trials later this year, Aydogan Ozcan, head of the laboratory developing the device, told SciDev.Net. Ozcan is assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the team will use UCLA's existing collaborative networks to carry out trials at large hospitals in Africa, South America and South Asia.
The CellScope team, from the US-based University of California, Berkeley, also intend to use their prize money to develop and test field-ready prototypes to diagnose malaria and tuberculosis.
CellScope harnesses traditional optical microscopy, clipping a small microscope onto a camera phone, then sending the captured image for diagnosis. In contrast, CelloPhone works by interpreting the 'shadows' of cells.
read the original at SciDevNet
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Coming Soon to Africa: XLBrowser, a Mobile Browser Powered by SMS
By Sarah Perez -- February 16, 2009
From ReadWriteWeb
"Mobile-XL, a mobile technology company, have just announced a partnership with Nokia, one of the world's top mobile handset manufacturers, to embed their company's XLBrowser into some handsets that will ship to parts of Africa beginning in March. The XLBrowser, designed for use in emerging markets, lets users search for information like news, currency conversion, finance information, weather, and more from their mobile phones. But don't be fooled - this is no ordinary web browser - it's powered entirely by SMS.
For most of us in the developed world, browsing the mobile web means whipping out our new favorite smartphone and launching a web browser that nearly mimics the one we have on our home computer. Unfortunately, other parts of the world aren't so lucky. In emerging markets, you're more likely to see SMS used for information retrieval - not mobile browsers - for reasons that include everything from lack of infrastructure to the high costs of mobile internet data plans.
In parts of Africa, there simply is no mobile internet access available...but there is the ability to send SMS. Enter Mobile-XL. With their browser's graphical, easy-to-use interface, people with limited or no internet access finally have an entry point to vast resources of the web. The application, which works on Java-based phones with either GPRS or Bluetooth functionality, provides access to news, weather, flight status, package tracking, dictionary, thesaurus, translations, local 411, games, music, access to email, and more."
