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

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, conferences, Latin America / LAC, 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.

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! 

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.

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.

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.

Links to Mobileactive08 presentations

October 14th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise

Greetings from day 2 of the fantastic Mobileactive08 conference. It is a rare treat to have so many people interested in mobiles and social change under one roof.  For details on the conference, check the live blog coverage here.  

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. 

headed to Mobileactive 2008

October 10th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise, travel

I’m travelling this week to Johannesburg for the Mobileactive 2008 conference.  It promises to be a great gathering of people and organizations doing innovative things with mobile technologies.  I’ll certainly try to get some reactions up during the week, but don’t count on any liveblogging…..

4S panel on mobiles in Africa

August 26th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, microenterprise, sharing behavior, Uncategorized

Thanks to Jenna Burrell of UC Berkeley for putting together a great panel “On the Ground Accounts of the Mobile Phone Revolution in Africa” at the 4S/ESST meeting in Rotterdam last week.  

Jenna spoke about her current fieldwork (with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing) in Rural Uganda. Wesley Shrum of LSU shared some initial findings about increased sociability among mobile users in Nairobi.  Tom Molony of the University of Edinburgh spoke about mobile use on the streets of Dar es Salaam, with an emphasis on how some small enterprises took advantage of the ‘mobility’ as opposed to simply the connectivity functions of the device.

I did a bit of a re-synthesis of my Africa studies, combining the small enterprises surveys with the open-ended interviews to illustrate how varied (and incomplete) our understanding of mobile’s role in development remains.   I contrasted the kinds of high-clarity results available from narrowly focused papers like Jenson’s Digital Provide (which focuses narrowly but so effectively on one independent variable (mobile Use) and one depended variable (price of fish) with broader explorations. These broader approaches so far either place mobile use in context of other communication behaviors like face to face interactions and internet use,  or expand the range of behaviors under examination to include both instrumental (enterprise/developmental) uses and intrinsic and/or social uses.  This broadening comes with a cost, of course, as the ‘impact’ of mobile use is harder to isolate.  Initial slides are here.

Unfortunately, a few others Mohammed Mohammed from Intel, Hsain Ilahiane from  Iowa State University and our discussant Don Slater were unable to attend the panel and were each missed, both during the session and during the lively chats occurring afterward, over coffee.

Congrats to Jenna, by the way, for winning the Nicholas C. Mullins Award,  given by the Society for the Social Studies of Science for “an outstanding piece of scholarship by a graduate student in the field of Science and Technology Studies.”  Her paper explored “West African Internet Scams as Grassroots Media Production”