Most mobiles…

For those interested in mobile banking, here are a couple of recent articles I’ve found particularly helpful:

1) Gautam Ivatury and Ignacio Mas at CGAP have released yet another insightful focus note, this one on “the Early Experience With Branchless Banking“ (related blog post here).  In part of the note, they integrate data from Brazil, Russia, and South Africa suggesting that (at this time) branchless banking customers use the payments and transfers features, more than the savings features.  To me, this starts to peel back the layers on both the behavioral and the “mental models” questions, where data has been notably scarce. These early findings suggest that users may initially understand the services as virtual post offices, rather than virtual wallets.  However we are still early in the domestication/structuration process - meaning, there is plenty of time for the social norms and use patterns to emerge in a different direction.

2) (via Jan Chipchase’s blog).  Bill Maurer at UC Irvine has a draft concept paper, Retail Electronic Payments Systems for Value Transfers in the Developing World.  Maurer presents a broad overview of the transfer functions of the m-banking space, and differentiates between emerging narratives (stories) that various interested communities apply to make sense of it.  (Note again my interest in the mental models of m-banking).  Depending on where one stands, the emerging story of m-transfers is one of empowerment, market share, new sources for fees, or the arrival of new strain of ‘tulips’.

I’m just finishing up a broad revision to this conference paper, and am grateful to have these two papers to draw on and reference.  I’ll post or link to the revision when it is ready.

Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on the research literature about mobile use in the developing world.   I first presented a version of this review at a conference in Hong Kong in 2005.  Now, thanks to Leopoldina Fortunati’s efforts to pull together a special issue of The Information Society, the review has finally been published.  Thanks also to the editors at the Information Society, and to the reviewers who provided such valuable feedback at various stages.

There’s a lot more of the literature to cover than there was when I started this back in 2005.  And, since it is an interdisciplinary review, I’m sure to have missed some citations.  Nevertheless, it has been a great exercise for me to get a sense of what’s out there, and to become familiar with the diverse work of an amazing set of researchers along the way.

I hope some of you find this review a useful input to your own work. 

Thanks everyone! 

Donner, Jonathan. (2008). Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature.  The Information Society 24(3), 140-159.

Abstract
This paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a subset of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research. 

A little while ago, Ken Banks and Kiwanja.net announced the winners of the first nGOmobile competition, designed to illustrate how grassroots use of mobile communincation (particularly SMS/text messaging) can be applied in creative and powerful ways.  You can find details on the winners in the announcement here.

Or, check out the press release

In Kenya, the Centre for Training and Integrated Research for ASAL Development
(CETRAD) will begin using SMS to work with local communities to promote the
protection and sustainable use of environmental resources.

In Uganda, NETWAS will launch an SMS-based service for rural communities allowing
them to ask a range of water-based questions on topics such as sanitation, hygiene,
water harvesting and water technologies.

In Mexico, The Equilibrium Fund will deploy a range of SMS services to help rural
Central American and Mexican communities solve problems of deforestation,
poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and the marginalisation of women.

In Azerbaijan, Digital Development will begin helping grassroots and politically
excluded people understand their human and legal rights, and to engage them
further in the political process, through their mobile phones.

Each of the winner’s models contains a plan to leverage the flexibility and interactivity of the medium in a way that extends beyond pushing bulk SMS messages to otherwise passive receivers.  The Uganda and Kenya models deepen the two-way interactions between the NGOs and their communities; in the Mexico case, the NGO will host a system that will allow small Maya Nut producers to coordinate with customers. In Azerbaijan, the messages start as get-out-and-vote reminders, but participants are encouraged to forward the messages to 5 of their friends/family, creating potentially powerful network effects.

It would be great to see updates from some of these winners as the projects go live. 

Sara Corbett just completed a lengthy piece on mobiles and economic development for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.   Its primary focus is the interesting and influential work of Jan Chipchase and his colleagues at Nokia, and it also touches on other exciting developments in the field, including Grameen Village Phone and M-Pesa to kiwanja.net, and the World Resources Institute. 
This paragraph, in particular, is a nice summary of what a lot of us are up to:

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

With over 250m lines in service, India is poised to surpass the US as the world’s second largest mobile market.   According to TRAI, this will happen sometime in mid-April.  Could be today….

A few years ago, the World Bank ICT Department estimated that nearly 80% of the world’s population lived under a mobile phone signal. I’m sure it is higher by now.  I also have often wondered what proportion of these people have access to mobile data (GPRS), since sometimes GPRS has been limited to cities and more prosperous areas.

I saw this on the DigAfrica listserv today — Celtel has announced that GPRS will be available nationwide on its network in Sierra Leone.  This does not mean that there is 100% coverage (by population or area) in Sierra Leone yet (see map), but it does help blur the rural/urban split, and provides a way to connect a laptop or community PC to the internet in some places where landline/dialup will not reach. 
 

The International Herald Tribune has an article this week which suggests that a rapid increase in mobile use (65 million lines) and mobile coverage (half of Pakistan’s geography, 70% of its people), are “Bringing Pakistanis Together”.  But despite the headline, the article is not about the millions of ’everyday’ calls made on the network, but rather about the links between mobiles and search for bin Laden 

People all around Pakistan now have handsets,”   Zouhair Khaliq, chief executive of Mobilink, Pakistan’s largest mobile operator, said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress, an industry convention. “It is getting increasingly difficult for anyone to hide in Pakistan, even bin Laden.”

The same article also looks at India:

Sunil Bharti Mittal, the chief executive and managing director of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile operator,  with 60 million customers, said the rapid spread of wireless technology in southern Asia was changing life across the Indian subcontinent, bringing with it the chance for increased security.

“It is hard to put a concrete figure on this, but I do believe that there has definitely been a decrease in terrorism in India since mobile phones have become more widespread,” said Mittal, whose company is adding two million to four million new customers every month. The number of mobile users in India is expected to  double from 240 million at the end of 2007 to 500 million by the end of 2010, Mittal said.

I agree with Mittal’s assessment about the chance for increased security, but I’m not sure about his second point about the decrease in terrorism in India.  Landlines and mobiles alike reduce isolation and improve the ability of governments, including the police, to coordinate activities. But what struck me about the article is how different it sounds from many other discussions of mobiles and terrorism, which focus instead on how terrorists use mobiles.  Here are two other stories from 2005 about mobiles and terrorism, both also from the IHT.

Police in Indian city crack down on ‘Osama’ video clips

The two clips, which run for a total of 57 seconds, have been circulating in Kanpur city in Uttar Pradesh state. They show edited portions of videos purportedly released by bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist group, Senior Superintendent of Police Prabhat C. Meena said by telephone from Kanpur. “Orders have been issued to start random checking of cell phones. If anyone is found carrying the Osama MMS, he will be charged with sedition,” Meena said. He added that the MMS, or multimedia message, could be used to win sympathizers for al-Qaida and spread religious hatred.

Wireless: In Thailand, on the trail of cellphone terrorists

From May 10, the government wants Thailand’s four mobile phone operators to start registering the identity of people buying prepaid SIM cards, the so-called subscriber identity module that identifies a phone to its network. That means collecting data on close to one million people a month. The impetus for this initiative apparently came from a series of bomb blasts in Thailand’s mainly Muslim southern provinces, where security forces face an insurgency. The bombs were mostly detonated by cellphones, Thai authorities say.

Indeed, all these assessments can be correct and contradictory at the same time. Mobiles are powerful tools, which are used for a variety of purposes by a variety of actors.  But perhaps the 2008 story is tapping into a more nuanced insight about how things are different in societies with high teledensity than in societies with low teledensity, and how quickly these things can change.

Note/Edit on 4 March:  - The New York Times today briefly reports that the Taliban have blown up some mobile phone towers in Afghanistan, “because, they said, American and NATO forces were using phone signals to track Taliban movements.”
 

Most mobiles, indeed.   A recent BBC news story cites fresh statistics from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and suggests that 58% of the world’s mobiles are in the developing world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the brief piece describes how Keralan fishermen are using mobiles to check prices, thus leapfrogging the digital divide.   

MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2^nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore.   It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.

Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative.  This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones.  The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.

Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana.   This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic.  Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana?  If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.

Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.

Warner Brothers is releasing a re-make of the 2003 Japanese horror film “One Missed Call” (Chakushin ari) in early January.  I haven’t seen either version of the film, but I gather that the mobile occupies a central spot in the plot, allowing unfortunate folks to hear voicemail messages left by their future selves.   The messages are not good news.

On the missed call theme, the film draws from a form of the practice called Wangiri or “one and cut”. At the time of the 2003 film, Wangiri was frequently used to deliver random solicitations for pay-per-call telephone sex line services.  The use of missed calls to drive people to recorded messages (sexy or otherwise) is not so common in India, since it seems that relatively few people use voicemail. 

As for the phantasmal, there are scholarly assessments of the mobile handset as magic device or portal to the afterlife by Jim Katz (see chapter 2) Bart Barendregt, and Jane Francis Agbu, among others. Bart’s paper, The Ghost in the Phone and other Tales of Indonesian Modernity, was originally presented at a conference on Mobiles and Asian Modernities in 2005, and will appear in an upcoming special issue of the Information Society. 

By the way, my literature review on mobiles in the developing world will appears in the same issue; in the meantime, an updated/temporary/working version of the review is available here.