Your reports can assess the availability of pay-as-you-go (prepay) mobile data in Africa

July 6th, 2010 Africa, m-internet, travel

In a hurry? Jump to the site or, even better, submit a report.

Got a minute? Read more below….

Kevin Donovan and I are asking people to supply first-hand reports about the availability and ease of use of prepay, “pay as you go” mobile data in Africa.

In places like South Africa and Kenya, accessing the internet via your mobile phone seems to be relatively straightforward – just pop in your SIM, buy some airtime, point your phone’s browser or app toward the internet…and off you go.  The key is that there is no data plan to sign up for, no monthly bill, and lower barriers to use. But is it that easy everywhere else? We first tried to do this assessment based directly on operators’ websites, but information is sparse and the terminology varies.

Kevin blogged about this last week.  We’ve gotten some great tweets and/or blog coverage by folks like ICTworks and MobileActive.  But this is a not an overnight project…we need lots of you not just to visit the site, but to post your experiences, and to ask your friends and colleagues across every corner of the continent to do the same.  Got a cousin in Burkina Faso or Angola? Know a student in Khartoum or Dakar?  Ask them to submit a report.   If we can get at least one or two firsthand reports from each major mobile operator in the region, we will be able to get a much clearer picture of where mobile access to the internet is easy, and where it remains difficult.

On the one hand, this is useful for international travelers who want to know if they can get access to cheap data while on the road.  Take it from me, it is depressing to come home to a fat bill thanks to international data roaming changes.  

But perhaps more importantly, this is useful data for the ICT4D and M4D community.  The availability of prepay data is important for widespread adoption of the mobile internet in the same way that pay-as-you-go (prepay) airtime was/is important to voice telecom – prepay/satchel pricing is a mainstay of pro-poor approaches for “Bottom of the pyramid” customers.  There is a great deal of hope (and hype) right now that mobile access to the internet will help “close the digital divide”, but if such access is locked up behind monthly plans, or behind confusing sign-up procedures, unreliable GPRS settings or high minimum balances, this divide won’t close anytime soon.

We’re using Ushahidi for this crowdsourcing exercise.  It was a snap to set up and, although nothing we’re doing resembles a crisis situation, the core functionality has been really helpful.

Finally, we have more to say on this in this working paper, A Note on the Availability (and Importance) of Pre-Paid Mobile Data in Africa.  The goal of this project is to deepen the evidence underpinning this paper, and to help make getting online easier for would-be mobile-only users around the region.

So again, Jump to the site or, even better, submit a report. Thanks!

screen grab via ICTworks

mobile livelihood services

March 15th, 2010 Africa, Agriculture, microenterprise, publications

So it appears that Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol and Adela Ros can turn around an edited volume — Communication technologies in Latin America and Africa: A multidisciplinary perspective — in the time it takes me to update my blog.  Kudos to them…and apologies for my taciturn ways.

In any case, I’m happy to say that the paper I mentioned in my last post,  Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments, now appears in this book.

The landscape of mobile services with relevance to the ICTD/development community is changing rapidly, as innovative pilots and full blown deployments are appearing throughout the continent.  In this paper, I categorize some of the existing services related to livelihoods, and offer some thoughts on next steps for research.

In a way, it bridges the gap between two of my earlier review papers – with Marcela Escobari on Mobile use by Micro and Small Enterprises, and with Kentaro Toyama and Katrin Verclas on the state of M4D research.

There is a also a youtube video of my paper presentation at the original conference in Barceona.

Here is the abstract

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

And the citation

Donner, J. (2009). Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments. In M. Fernández-Ardèvol & A. Ros (Eds.), Communication technologies in Latin America and Africa: A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 37-58). Barcelona: IN3. http://in3.uoc.edu/web/PDF/communication-technologies-in-latin-america-and-africa/Chapter_01_Donner.pdf

Conference and paper: Mobile Phones and the Internet in Latin America and Africa

November 5th, 2009 Africa, Agriculture, Latin America / LAC, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise, publications

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending a conference hosted by the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Cataluña in Barcelona. The conference, Mobile Phones and the Internet in Latin America and Africa: What Benefits for the Most Disadvantaged?  was a great opportunity to exchange insights between researchers working across disciplines and geographies. There were a number of good papers on migration and the condition of human mobility (not just wirelessness). Other highlights for me included meeting Judith Mariscal and Roxana Barrantes of DIRSI. Roxana has been gathering some excellent data in Peru on changes in household agricultural earnings pre-and post- mobile acquisition. It was also great to see Mirjam de Bruijn and Inge Brinkman, editors (w/ Francis Nyamnjoh) of Mobile phones: the new talking drums of everyday Africa. Their work, and that volume, explores mobile adoption in regions which do not appear often in the literature on ICT use, including Southeast Angola, Northern Cameroon, Chad, and Sudan.

I gave a talk based on a new paper reviewing mobile livelihood services in Africa (crop prices, virtual marketplaces, agricultural extension, etc). The paper is in draft form right now – I will be doing revisions in a few weeks before resubmitting for the conference publication. So, any comments, additions, or questions are most welcome.

Donner, J. (2009, 23-24 October). Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments. Paper presented at the Conference on Development and Information Technologies. Mobile Phones and Internet in Latin America and Africa: What benefits for the most disadvantaged? Castelldefels, Barcelona.

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering various forms of support functions via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 24 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

conference paper: exploring first-time internet use via mobiles in a South African women’s collective

September 1st, 2009 Africa, m-internet, mobile social software, publications

Shikoh Gitau, Gary Marsden and I have submitted a paper on first-time mobile internet use to the upcoming (3rd) conference of the International Development Informatics Association, to be held at Berg-en-Dal in Kruger National Park here in South Africa on 28-30 October 2009. The paper is in many ways a continuation of Shikoh’s previous fieldwork with mobile-centric internet users. Indeed, we called this study ‘phase II’. But here, we focus specifically on two questions:  what happens when the first and only means of accessing the internet is via one’s mobile?  What are the implications for M4D and ICTD?

The conference is at the end of October. So, this is only a pre-publication version and further edits are likely. But we’d welcome any comments or suggestions.  Abstract below:

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Gitau, S., Donner, J. and G. Marsden. (2009, 28-30 October). “i-Internet? Intle” (beautiful): Exploring first time internet use via mobile phones in a South African women’s collective. Paper to be presented at the 3rd Conference of the International Development Informatics Association, Kruger National Park, South Africa. 

Microsoft OneApp

August 25th, 2009 Africa, hybrid media, m-banking, m-internet, mobile social software

Yesterday Microsoft announced the launch of OneApp.  It was developed by Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group.  UPG has been doing some great work on Shared PCs, digital literacy, and computers in education. This is one of UPG’s first big efforts in the mobile space.

Microsoft OneApp is a new software application that enables feature phones—commonly found in emerging markets—to access mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other popular apps and games. Now, people around the world who own feature phones will be able to do more and enjoy a better mobile experience with their existing phones. Microsoft OneApp will be offered initially through partners in emerging markets worldwide.

If you have seen or read any of my research in the past (particularly this newer stuff on mobile-centric internet use), you’ll quickly see why I am excited about OneApp. 

Smartphones are fantastic but remain out of reach of most people in the world. Feature phones, on the other hand, are more broadly accessible.  OneApp is small (150KB download), and runs on many of the world’s most popular handsets. It makes it much easier and cheaper, due to lower bandwidth requirements, for partners to offer and individuals to access the kinds of applications and web functionality that a lot of people with PCs take for granted. Furthermore, because it is flexible, I think we’ll see developers building locally-relevant applications, with the confidence that they can be used on the phones that so many people already have. 

Counselling via mobile social software

July 6th, 2009 Africa, conferences, hybrid media, m-health, m-internet, mobile social software

Drug counselling via MXit, a popular mobile chat program in South Africa.

From a longer article outlining Marlon Parker’s project, on mybroadband.co.za

MXIT, the cellphone instant messaging service best known for chatting teenagers, is now being used to help drug users on the Cape Flats kick their habit.
In the service, based in Bridgetown in Athlone, former drug users who counsel tik addicts use the messaging service as a primary method of support.

The article suggests that they are now counselling 6500 members of the community. I saw Marlon present an overview of this fascinating project at a recent UCT workshop on Researching Mobile Media in South Africa.  Marlon’s blog is here.

At the W3C workshop in Maputo

April 2nd, 2009 Africa, conferences, m-internet

I’m very happy to be back in Mozambique, attending the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. Highlights so far have included presentations by kiwanja, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone, FARA (agriculture, also slides) and John Nesbit (SMSmedic). Keynotes from Steve Bratt, (head of the new WWW foundation) and Sean Krepp (describing Nokia’s life tools) helped kick us off well.  Congratulations and thanks to Stephane Boyera of the W3C for convening this great event. For more, see the agenda and links to papers. 

I presented an early report (slides) of work I’m doing with Shikoh Gitau, a graduate student at the ICT4D lab at the University of Cape Town.  For the past few months, Shikoh has been interviewing mobile-only (and mobile primary) internet users in low-income neighborhoods in Cape Town.  We’ve been finding that a combination of factors, some social/expressive, some instrumental, are linked to the adoption and use of the mobile internet by a broad and growing community of users – some estimates suggest there are upwards of 9 million mobile internet users in a country of just over 40 million.

We will be revising and expanding this analysis in time for the ICA preconference on mobile communication in May in Chicago. In the meantime, our initial paper can be found here

Donner, J., & Gitau, Shikoh. (2009, 1-2 May). New paths: exploring mobile-only and mobile primary internet use in South Africa. Paper presented at the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development, Maputo. 

Mobile use and agricultural markets: new study from Uganda

January 28th, 2009 Africa, Agriculture, sharing behavior

Last month, Kathleen Diga at IDRC pointed out a very interesting paper by Megumi Muto and T. Yamano at the Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute, called “The impact of mobile phone coverage expansion on market participation: panel data evidence from Uganda”. The paper joins earlier work by Jensen and Aker in examining the mobile’s role in transforming agricultural marketplaces via quantitative analysis.  Abstract here:

Uganda has recently experienced a rapid increase in the areas covered by mobile phone networks. As the information flow increases due to the mobile phone coverage expansion, the cost of crop marketing is expected to decrease, particularly more so for perishable crops, such as banana, in remote areas because the increased information allows traders to collect perishable products more efficiently. We use panel data of 856 households in 94 communities, where the number of communities covered by mobile phone networks increased from 41 to 87 over a two-year period between the first and second surveys in 2003 and 2005, respectively. We find that the proportion of banana farmers who sold banana increased from 50 to 69 percent in the communities more than 20 miles away from district centers after the expansion of the mobile phone coverage. For maize, which is another staple but less perishable crop, we find that the increased mobile phone coverage did not affect market participation. These results suggest that mobile phone coverage expansion induces market participation of farmers who are located in remote areas and produce perishable crops.

Although, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m not a sufficiently skilled econometrician to assess the quality of the statistical models employed in the paper, I found both the paper’s underlying rationale and findings interesting for a number of reasons.

1. They “explicitly consider pathways in which better access to information increases income” (p50), distinguishing between changes to prices and market participation. In this case of bananas (plantains I think), they find no clear effects of mobile use on prices, but rather on market participation (the proportion of agricultural households in a given region who sell part of their crops in the market. They suggest that in the absence of competition between traders, households were more likely to participate in the markets (marketing the availability of ripe bananas for sale to traders), but that traders were able to keep prices paid to these homes relatively low.

2. They back up their model with field surveys, learning how, for example, “traders use mobile phones to set up a time and place to trade banana”, whereas in the absence of mobiles they just arrive unannounced and buy what’s available, waiting until their trucks are full (See Overa). 

3. By accounting for distance, they tackle the complex interaction between mobiles, transport costs, and the availability of alternate face-to-face channels for information exchange — indeed they find clearer effects on market participation levels among households situated at least 12 miles away, and even more so at 20 miles away

4. by running the model for different products, and finding different results, Muto and Yamano illustrate the degree to which the mobile’s impact on agriculture, and on enterprise in general, remains quite context-specific.  They find the participation model predictive in the case of perishable bananas, but not for less-perishable maize. Reconsidering the Jensen results in light of the Muto&Yamano study illustrates how the presence of multiple (competitive) markets and the pressure of a highly perishable product may have made the Keralan fish market particularly receptive to  improvement via mediated communication. Thus the Uganda paper is a helpful cautionary note to those who might be tempted to make generalizable claims about the impact of mobiles in agriculture based on a handful of undeniably excellent studies.

And a couple of minor points for mobile phone researchers:  

5. Their model actually does not offer much predictive power at the level of  individual households; rather, the results are interpreted at the sub-regional level, comparing places with mobile coverage to those without, rather than homes with mobile coverage to those without.  One could ‘unpack’ this a little more than the authors do in their article– perhaps once the trader is summoned by one household with a mobile, others nearby share the benefit of that call and can also sell ripe bananas.  Or, perhaps there is more explicit sharing of handsets, such that even farmers without phones of their own can access one and use it to call traders to purchase and transport ripe bananas.  We’re making strides on handset sharing but there is room for greater attention to it in our quantitative assessments of impact

5. Finally, despite the attention to mobile telephones and network coverage, this is still a paper about connectivity and the compression of distance, rather than mobility per se. While it is possible that the traders at the other end of the calls from the producers would be unreachable by landlines, the model can’t account for that.  We have to look to Overa for that assessment.

In summary,  Mutu and Yamano  identify greater impacts of the mobile on the marketplace for perishable bananas than for not-so-perishable maize, and find larger effects for distant/remote farmers, for whom information exchange via face-to-face channels is less possible, and for whom the appeal of replacing travel with a phone call would be higher.   Studies like these help the ICTD field develop a better understanding of which marketplaces are  likely to be impacted by a step-change in the accessibility and affordability of telecommunications services, and which ones are not.

texting Julliet

December 13th, 2008 Africa, hybrid media, text messaging

A nice story of love and courtship in Nigeria, via SMS

My friend Thomas Alo had two problems. Though he had been friends with Juliet, a colleague, for years, he hadn’t had the guts to tell her that he loved her and wanted to marry her. His second problem was that he had refused to buy a cellphone.

One day, I sat him down and told him that if he had a phone his problems with Juliet would be over. He asked me how. I told him that he could send her a text message, telling her he loved her and wanted to marry her. He said love affairs were not conducted through text messages.

Later I put pressure on him for a while; he eventually decided to act on my advice and went to buy a cellphone. Rather than face Juliet, who worked in the same office as him, he sent her an SMS declaring his feelings and requesting a date.

Into(context), Kiva.org and an MMS application

November 7th, 2008 Africa, hybrid media, microenterprise

I have been meaning to mention this project by Into(context) for a while. It has a great website, with lots links, images, and documentation that exceeds that of most ICTD pilots. 

Into(context) is a design research project developed by the Design for Sustainability group of Delft University of Technology and funded by Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion Initiative. The project reflects the initiative’s goal to understand what role information & communication technology (ICT) can play in creating solutions for overcoming the myriad barriers facing the developing world.

During six months in 2006 design researchers worked directly with Kiva.org and four of its existing microfinance partners in Uganda and Kenya to develop an appropriate technology solution to facilitate the use of their online lending platform. The solution needed to meet the needs of their users and be congruous with the context of East Africa.

The outcome was the development of a cell phone based application dubbed ‘The Miracle Mobile Solution’ or MiMoSo. The MiMoSo effectively eliminated some of the most significant barriers facing the staff in delivering content to the Kiva website. Critical partner information including text and images, can now be sent via Multi-Media Message Service. It allows MFIs the ability to expand their technology resources affordably to accommodate their operations with Kiva. Users submit updates directly over the mobile network without the need for an internet connection. 

The design of this project interests me, as it has been developed to suit a particular niche, to provide an the organizational interface between the loan officer of an MFI and Kiva itself. Driven by MMS, of all things, it is another example of a hybrid process–through it, images and text which start their lives on mobiles in the developing world end up appearing on the PC screens of would-be Kiva users in the developed world.