Most mobiles…

Some perspectives today from the Hindu Business Line on the needs of rural mobile phone users in India. The article covers a lot of ground; missed calls, sharing, livlihoods, and text-free user interfaces figure prominently.  I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

If you thought missed calls is a purely Indian phenomenon, think again. Says Sarup [from Nokia], “I too thought so but was amazed to see this phenomenon in Africa. There they call it ‘flashing’, and the basic message is ‘Call me back’.

Having spoken to users in both spots (India and Africa) about beeping/flashing/missed calling, I’ve been impressed by how people want to describe the practice as something unique to their region.  One of my interview participants started his explanation of beeping with: “you see, in Rwanda, we have a culture…”.  I think it has to do with how people learn to beep/flash/miss call.   They’re introduced to the practice by friends and family, not by websites or manuals.  Beeping is therefore perceived as a social practice, as a (re) creation of the people they know, rather than a property of the handset or even the network to which it connects.

The BBC reports that Ericsson is providing equipment to bring mobile coverage to the Millennium Villages in Africa.  These villages are the foci of major pilots/experiments in holistic approaches to poverty reduction.  The partnership is great news, as ICTs (and mobiles in particular) are part of the puzzle.

Many of my former colleagues at the Earth Institute at Columbia University are working on the Millennium Villages Project, which is coordinated in collaboration with the UN.

Thanks to a (rare?) confluence of market forces, steady innovation and careful regulation, Most of the world’s population now lives under mobile phone signal, yet the economics of reaching the remain poor rural populations remain challenging. Experiments and pilots like the one announced by Ericsson and the Millennium Villages will be very helpful at this stage.  It is imporant to carefully track how phone ownership and use takes off in the villages, since the patterns that emerge will give us more information on the strength of demand, and the conditions under which any micro/targeted interventions might be necessary (and feasible). 

While perusing Balancing Act (Issue #365), I found a link to this story on m-banking in Namibia and Botswana, centered on an interview with First National Bank (FNB) cellphone banking CEO Len Pienaar.  Among the quotes:

“In SA, we have a high density of banking options, such as ATMs, card-accepting devices, and even branches. In Namibia, for example, this is much lower and you have a huge rural population,” explains Pienaar.

He says the bank’s approach to cellphone banking has adapted to the needs of different countries, with customers in Namibia and Botswana having to register for mobile banking in-branch so they can be shown exactly how to use the technology.

“Mobile networks are well-established in most of the countries we are in, and the technology, such as SMSes, is well-known,” says Pienaar.

In the space of just a few lines, Pienaar has touched on many of the factors which will influence m-banking’s trajectory in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world:  an awareness of what m-banking offers, relative to alternatives, the need for some hand-holding to get new users comfortable with the system, and the relative familiarity that people have with the technology (SMS) already.  Sounds like a diffusion of innovations case study, and I mean that in a good way.

A recent piece in the Economist highlights the increasing importance of information technologies, particularly mobile communication technologies, to international aid and disaster relief efforts.  Most of the piece details the nuts-and-bolts of logistics, for which mobile ICTs are clearly a helpful new arrival. Responders can stay in touch and better coordinate their efforts. So too can displaced or fragmented families, who can find each other via electronic databases.

The article contains two other elements which make more sweeping claims about the “shifting balance” or reconfiguration of relationships between the aid community and those they are trying to help.  The more grounded example is that of the role of large remittance flows via m-payments systems and shop-at-a-distance sites like Makuru.com. I think this raises an important point: as families with overseas members become increasingly connected via mobiles and other ICTs, there are real opportunities for micro-level, family-centric responses to macro-level events like floods and famines.

The second point is less clear-cut.  The article leads with a quote from the Horn of Africa, in the form of an SMS delivered to UN officials in London and Nairobi. 

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

It’s a great anecdote–though perhaps still more aspirational than descriptive–which the author(s) use to assert that “a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.” It will be interesting to watch how, over time, donors and other actors in the humanitarian space integrate mediated feedback and participitory input from ‘recipients’ into relief response. 

In the meantime, we can draw a different theme from the anecdote: the author of the SMS found the contact numbers at an internet café. And, conversely, you and I are reading the quote via the internet again.   This hybridity of media—an intermingling of SMS messages and internet content—is something I expect we’ll see more of in the developing world.

Shareideas.org  and the ICT4D section of the World Bank’s Development Gateway both recently highlighted an application called MobilED.  It is a mobile-learning application, piloted in South Africa, which allows students to (a) query Wikipedia via SMS messages (b) hear the results of the query played back to them as audio text and (c) post new entries to their own class’s wiki by recording audio off their handsets.

I haven’t seen the system first hand, but I think it is interesting for two reasons:

1) It is a hybrid media form, which complicates all the theorizing some of us like to do about text messages, mobile calls, internet sites, etc.  What is it? A web application? A mobile application? A mobile web application? My bet is the kids don’t care as long as it helps them learn and is easy to use.

2) Its hybridity accomplishes something still relatively rare: it breaks down the walls between web content and SMS content. In doing so, it demonstrates a way in which some rich, dynamic internet content can be made accessible to (and can be created by) communities using relatively affordable & common basic mobile handsets. Since the worldwide ratio of mobile users to internet users is roughly 2:1, this is a good thing for both groups.