Paper published: A review of evidence on mobile use by micro and small enterprises in developing countries

July 6th, 2010 conferences, microenterprise, publications

Richard Heeks has edited a special section of the Journal of International Development, drawing on some papers from the 2009 ICTD Conference in Doha, Qatar. Thanks to helpful suggestions from Richard and from other anonymous reviewers, my paper with Marcela Escobari has been significantly updated since the conference version.

Here is a link to a pre-peer review version of the paper, which Wiley lets us host on a personal site like this.  It is suitable for general reading. However, for citations, and particularly for direct quotations, please refer instead to the final and definitive version, available online from Wiley-Blackwell:

A review of evidence on mobile use by micro and small enterprises in developing countries

Jonathan Donner and Marcela X Escobari

The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises’ internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available, and indentifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and assessments of use of advanced services such as mobile banking and mobile commerce.

Donner, Jonathan, & Escobari, Marcela X. (2010). A review of evidence on mobile use by micro and small enterprises in developing countries. Journal of International Development, 22:5, 641-658. doi: 10.1002/jid.1717, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123566679/abstract

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.

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.

Mobiles in the developing world – 2008 literature review (re)posted

June 18th, 2009 conferences

I have created an ”author post” version of the literature review published last year in the Information Society.  The authoritative version (for citation, redistribution and archive purposes) is still here, but for your personal perusal you might want to use this version instead.

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

Abstract:  The 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 sub-set of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research.

ICTD2009, Doha

April 21st, 2009 conferences, microenterprise

The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development is in the books.  Congratulations and thanks to the conference organizers, hosts, and sponsors for giving the community such a comprehensive event.  It was wonderful to see so many colleagues and friends from around the world.  In particular, I want to thank Stéphane Boyera for inviting me to speak on a panel on the mobile web. 

A lot of the usual dichotomous themes in ICTD appeared during the event: qualitative/quantitative, practitioner/researcher, pilot/evaluation, ICTD/ICT4D, income/choice, etc. If anything, discussion of these themes were more diverse and orthogonal than in earlier events. As a whole, I think these tensions are fantastic. They certainly make the conference lively, but more importantly, they reflect the essence of a growing interdisciplinary field.  

I presented a literature review paper, written with Marcela Escobari, on mobile use by MSEs.

Donner, J., & Escobari, M. (2009, 17-19 April). A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Paper presented at ICTD2009, the Third IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development, Qatar. (prepublication paper) (slides)

The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises’ internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available to ICTD researchers, and indentifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and assessments of use of advanced services such as mobile banking and mobile commerce.

Feedback from the audience suggested that this might become a living document, with new citations added to this framework via a wiki-style interface. I will explore this and see if I can get it rolling. In the meantime if there are citations you might suggest be incorporated into future drafts, let me know.

Speaking of collaborative content and rolling updates, please check out and contribute to http://africansignals.com/ for a great comparative resource on telco costs and options in Africa.  Thanks Erik! 

(palpably) absent presence

April 7th, 2009 conferences, hybrid media

I haven’t been travelling very much over the past few months–the Maputo W3C workshop was my first professional trip since December–so it ended up as the first conference I’ve attended with this kind of tag scrawled on the flipchart. 

Tweets emerging out of a conference don’t function all that differently than the more established practice of liveblogging, but it’s a bit odd to be aware, in almost real time, of (for example) who else is not at the conference, but following it.

There are some great advantages to these dispatches–the week before, the tables were turned and had I learned a lot following tweets at a conference I could not attend–however it does seem that the temptation to tweet, or to follow other’s tweets, may draw people’s attention further from the community in the room towards the imagined, virtual, overlapping communities to which they each belong. 

Kenneth Gergen considered the implications of Absent Presence long before Twitter was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. However, as I think John Traxler mentions, Gergen’s chapter may worth another look; it seems to apply very, very well to this newest of tools/disruptions.

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. 

ICTD2009 programme details available

February 16th, 2009 conferences, microenterprise

The next set of details concerning the programme for ICTD2009 is now available:

Speakers Bill Gates and Carlos Braga keynote the confirmed programme for the forthcoming ICTD2009 conference, to be held 17-19 April 2009 at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar: http://ictd2009.org/program.html

The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development brings together the latest ideas on ICTs-for-development from both technical and social science perspectives.  Alongside academic paper presentations, we have poster sessions, workshops, panels and application demonstrations.

Marcela Escobari and I submitted “A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs)”. I’ll try to post a temporary pre-camera draft once we finish up a few last edits.

M4D conference, Karlstad

January 21st, 2009 conferences

Just before the holiday break last month, I attended a great conference in Sweden, dedicated specifically to “Mobiles for Development” (M4D).  The conference sparked some interesting discussions, particularly and notably around the issues of affordability and even ‘addictiveness’ of mobile telephony.  Richard Heeks (one of the keynote speakers) offers a detailed and judicious post on this. Forgive the teaser – the whole post is worth the read.

If you had to choose three words to sum up the future of ICT4D, they might well be “mobiles, mobiles, mobiles”.  And the way to that future is being more clearly indicated as the promise of mobiles-for-development research comes to fruition; reflected, for example, in the recent 1st “m4d” international research conference. But such research is starting to throw up some perplexing – even worrying – findings about mobiles.  At its bluntest, such research suggests mobiles are doing more economic harm than good, and sometimes making poor people poorer.  Let’s have a look…

In other news, Katrin Verclas (of MobileActive.org), Kentaro Toyama, and I presented a paper, Reflections on MobileActive08 and the M4D Landscape, Here’s the abstract:

We identify four common choices facing individual M4D projects (intended users, technical accessibility, informational links, and market links) which collectively mark the current landscape of M4D. Discussions of M4D projects have tended to be delineated by traditional development domain (health, education, agriculture, etc). By focusing on choices that cut across domains, we highlight elements which vary across M4D projects, but which to date have not been observed to correlate with project success. We discuss these four choices in light of the broader course of the field of information and communication technology and development (ICTD). Further, we argue that choices made at the project level may create different M4D landscapes, with implications for the breadth and depth of the technology’s impact on development.

Slides from Everyday Digital Money workshop

October 22nd, 2008 Uncategorized, conferences, m-banking

At the recent ‘Everyday Digital Money’ workshop, I presented my thoughts on the importance of linking research on adoption, impact, design, and use of M-Banking applications.  The slides are here.  This is a longer deck, and reflects the arguments from my paper with Camilo Tellez on the same topic, upcoming in the Asian Journal of Communication.

Congratulations and thanks to Bill Maurer, Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine and Scott Mainwaring from Intel’s People and Practices Group for putting together such a timely and informative event.