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.

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. 

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. 

I’ll post some additional thoughts soon.  In the meantime, here are links to the slides from the three sessions in which I participated –  Mobile Use by Small and Informal Businesses; Innovations in Social Marketing (miss calls); and M-Banking/M-payments for Social Impact.   Let me know if you have any questions.

There are a few glitches in the .prf files, but I will try to sort these out in the next few days and will refresh with cleaner files. 

Today’s example: the announcement that Grameen solutions and Obopay are launching a “bank a billion” initiative in India and Bangladesh, with m-banking at its core. It is a great story but one I don’t know much about beyond what I’ve seen in the press coverage, to which others have already linked.     

So, please note the new feed on the lower-left hand column of the blog.  This contains links to interesting posts I’ve recently read on other blogs about mobiles, ICTD, m-banking, etc.   Going forward, I’ll try to keep this feed stocked almost daily with good stuff, even if I don’t comment on the content in a standalone post.    

MIT’s X out TB program has gotten some attention lately. Check out MobileActive’s interview with some of the team members for details.

The program, piloted in Nicaragua, encourages daily compliance with the (very strict, very lengthy, very important) anti-TB medication regimen in a cost-effective and very innovative way.  Patients must urinate on a reactive strip every day. If the patient has taken the TB medication, the strip will change to reveal a code.  By sending that code via SMS to their health care providers, he or she can prove that they have taken the medication, without requiring a daily visit from a health care worker.

That’s cool enough already.  But then, to get at the behavioral part of the puzzle, the X out TB program offers cell phone minutes as rewards for patients who have successfully communicated with the health care center on say, 25 of 30 days in a month.

I tagged this post as m-health and m-banking because this is an example of a situation in which the easy and cost-free transfer of minutes/airtime/load is actually a better solution than m-banking funds delimited in actual currencies. This is a good cause and a specialized case, so operators can be approached to provide the minutes at a reduced rate, or even for free.  I’m sure a whole host of regulatory and accounting issues would prevent them from doing this with m-banking funds.

Also interesting – the MobileActive piece points to the ubiquity of cell phone minutes as something of value to participants.

The team also changed the incentives for the project. Initially, they had intended to give people who stuck with their treatment a microfinance loans. “The whole goal with microfinance is you get a peer system from your family,” said Gomez-Marquez. “But when we went to Nicaragua they really insisted on cell phone minutes.” The minutes can either be uploaded to the user’s phone or the team can pass out pre-paid phone cards.

The new paper will appear as part of a special issue of the Asian Journal of Communication on ICTD, edited by Mark Levy.  Here is a .pdf of the pre-publication draft, which will remain on this site until the special issue is available.

Title: Mobile banking and economic development: Linking adoption, impact, and use

Abstract:  Around the globe, various initiatives use the mobile phone to provide financial services to those without access to traditional banks. Yet relatively little scholarly research explores the use of these m-banking/m-payments systems. This paper calls attention to this gap in the research literature, emphasizing the need for research focusing on the context(s) of m-banking/m-payments use. Presenting illustrative data from exploratory work with small enterprises in urban India, it argues that contextual research is a critical input to effective “adoption” or “impact” research. Further, it suggests that the challenges of linking studies of use to those of adoption and impact reflect established dynamics within the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community. The paper identifies three crosscutting themes from the broader literature—amplification vs. change, simultaneous causality, and a multi-dimensional definition of trust—each of which can offer increased theoretical clarity to future research on m-banking/m-payments systems.