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.

student M4D projects at MIT

July 4th, 2009 Agriculture, m-health, m-learning

MIT’s NextLab and Legatum center host student M4D projects, ranging from transport to m-health to agriculture.  There’s a nice summary of some of the projects here.

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.

Vodafone on the impact of mobiles in India

January 23rd, 2009 Agriculture, India, microenterprise

Vodafone has released a new set of studies on mobiles in India as part of their Policy Paper Series. This follows important earlier volumes in the same series on Africa and M-transactions (among others). The document includes four research papers:

Kathuria, Uppal, and Mamta offer an econometric analysis of the impact of mobile.  The background sections of this paper present a clear and remarkable history of the rapid spread of mobile telephony in India.  Their theoretical contribution is a model linking mobile penetration to GNP growth at the state level (similar to what Waverman, Meschi & Fuss did in the 2005 Africa Volume in the same series.  I’m not enough of an econometrician to offer an opinion on the strength of the model, but the attempt is made to control first for the (strong) impacts of gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) on mobile use, thus isolating the impacts of rising mobile penetration on GSDP.  They suggest that “a 10% increase in mobile penetration delivers, on average a 1.2% point annual increase in output”.  They also find a threshold effect, suggesting that the positive benefits of mobiles on growth kick in disproportionately in states with higher-than-the-median penetration of 25%.

Gandhi, Mittal, and Tripathi, explore the impact of mobiles on agricultural productivity. This paper presents the results of interviews and focus groups with the users of Reuters Market Light (RML) and another market information system, IKSL, run by the Indian Farmers Cooperative Limited. It is a helpful paper, describing the priorities farmers and fishermen have for information services.  They also delve into farmers’ basic uses of mobiles for work purposes, breaking out benefits of content, mobility, and connectivity (time and travel savings). This offers a significant improvement over some other papers, which tend to conflate mobility and connectivity.   Finally, I like the way the paper mentions constraints – both that phones do not replace face to face interactions (see also Donner and Molony and Overå), and that for all the connectivity in the world, some farmers and fishermen would still face significant infrastructure barriers to acting on that information, such as the lack of roads to transport goods to market.

Sarin and Jain report the results of a survey of usage of mobile in poor urban areas. This paper has some interesting elements, particularly around observed differences in mobile use by gender (men own the phones in many households), and in the assertion that “users and non-users in some sense inhabit different networks, with users much more likely to be in networks with higher mobile usage”.  However, some methodological choices made by the researchers make it difficult to draw many generalizable insights from the survey. Users and non-users are demographically different (a point they acknowledge), but the report is just a series of comparisons of users and non-user self reports, with no statistical controls to account for demographic differences. In addition, (and unless I’m mistaken in my read of the paper), in many cases, users and non-users were asked distinctly different questions. While nonusers were asked ‘baseline’ questions about changes to productivity, earnings, social networks, etc. over the last year, users were asked specifically how the mobile altered these various elements.  This makes comparison quite difficult, and I would have preferred to see the same baseline wording used in the nonuser and user groups.  That said, there is probably a lot that can be done with the survey data (1700 cases!) 

Uppal, M., & Kathuria, R. (2009) consider the impact of mobiles in the SME sector. They touch on a question near and dear to me, so I’m happy to see other researchers focusing on SMEs and microenterprises.  However, while, there are a few anecdotes on subsectors of the informal economy (such as vegetable vendors) and some good sidebars on the mobile-power success stories of individual entrepreneurs. This is more of a forward-looking commentary than a traditional research paper. Perhaps its most important contributions are the examples of mobile-enabled businesses such as labornet, just dial, and radio cabs. These are larger organizations than MSEs, but mobile connectivity is at their core. The paper is worth a read if only for these examples.

Nokia life tools

November 4th, 2008 Agriculture, India, hybrid media, m-learning, text messaging

Nokia announced its intentions to provide agricultural information and education content to lower-end feature handsets in India.  The service, called Nokia Life Tools, will wrap an SMS data channel with a graphic-rich interface.   Reuters Marketlight is the content partner for the agriculture side.  Idea Cellular is the first operator to sign up. OnMobile, another Indian mobile content provider, is also on-board, contributing astrology and ringtone services. 

Over time, it will be interesting to see the relative take-up of the various instrumental and expressive services on offer.  In the meantime, think the fusion of a graphic interface and the SMS channel is particularly notable for developing-world contexts. (Also see the mobile-XL browser).  These forms bypass the need for a GPRS-enabled handset or data plan, and stretch the capabilities of the ‘humble’ SMS. 

Ken Banks at kiwanja.net has a longer write-up.