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 A personal collection of thoughts, ideas, opinions and feelings on a range of
topics and issues - when time permits... A public version of this Blog - where
you can link to specific entries and post comments - can be found at
http://blogspot.kiwanja.netFor more general kiwanja.net news, check out
the News page. An
RSS feed
of this Blog is available along with a recently compiled
collection of favourite entries (pictured
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PDF, 1.5Mb)
Three years on, but still some way to go... I'm writing this from seat 7D at exactly 38,000 feet somewhere between Forssa and Cambridge. Normally seat 7D would be in first- or business-class, but unfortunately for me I'm on a Ryanair (low cost airline) flight. Nothing fancy here. I'm returning from a short combined work and pleasure trip to Finland, where exactly three years ago I was knee-deep writing the first version of FrontlineSMS.
A lot has changed in three years, and we're not just talking website banners. The initial launch, back in late 2005, went largely unnoticed. I remember spending my evenings trying to identify people who might be interested in writing about it, but it was new, was written by somebody nobody had heard of, had no users, nobody knew if it worked (not even me, to be honest) and nobody knew if anyone would want it. Talk about an uphill struggle. Mike Grenville at 160Characters was the first to see some potential in it, and his post got the ball rolling. A few other sites followed suit, most liking the thinking behind the program more than the program itself. Things slowly began to move, and a few enquiries came in from here and there. One was from Kubatana, who have the great honour of being the first organisation to take a punt on FrontlineSMS (they still use it to this day). Significantly, another email was from the MacArthur Foundation. The huge significance of that mid-November telephone conversation with Jerry wasn't to become apparent for another year-and-a-half or so. Today, news of the latest version is effortlessly working its way around the web and my Inbox is regularly hit with NGO and press enquiries, people wanting to know if they can help in any way, and a stream of messages of support (there are one or two negative individuals, but luckily they remain well in the minority). There are some great, hugely supportive Blog posts out there, including those by Erik Hersman, Mike Grenville, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Clark Boyd, but also some insightful, short and unusual ones. FrontlineSMS is work in progress, and people seem interested enough to want to come along for the ride.
Cellphone 9 described FrontlineSMS as "The NGO Twitter", while Unthinkingly thought it was "a thoroughly wonderful idea in many ways … If you’re into international rural research with mobile phones. A tool worth watching very closely, it’s what I think is the leading platform of the mobile research 'industry' if there is such a thing". Chromosome LK won the Dramatic Headline competition with their "FrontlineSMS and Sri Lankan Gays" (referring to its use in Sri Lanka by a gay rights group), while Aydin Design decided that one of the really exciting things about FrontlineSMS was "the speed of development - with low resources, putting it in the hands of people now - so they can do things to improve their lives - now", which is exactly what it is trying to do. Isis-Inc - who's strap line is "Technically, it's about sex" (?) - concluded their coverage with "Yay FrontlineSMS!! Access meets elegance!!". It was Clark Boyd, however, who hit the nail right on the head when he wrote: "Today, FrontlineSMS announced version 2.0. To get a handle on what goes into this, think about it. This platform has to work on hundreds of different handsets and modems, and in languages ranging from Swahili to Cantonese. And it needs to work with Windows, Mac and Linux. Not child's play, and not something that's been done with millions of dollars of backing from major funders" Not one to sit on my laurels, I'm already working on ideas for the next version of FrontlineSMS, and a number of exciting related initiatives, with the support of another major US foundation. FrontlineSMS is a major step forward in kiwanja's efforts to build affordable, appropriate technology solutions for the grassroots NGO community. But we're by no means there yet... WEDNESDAY, JUN 25, 2008 FrontlineSMS tackles rural healthcare in Malawi Today sees the official launch of the new version of FrontlineSMS. To celebrate, kiwanja.net invited Josh Nesbit - a Senior in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University - to talk about its use in east Africa where he's spending the best part of this summer introducing the system into a rural hospital in Malawi. You can read Josh's Blog here "St. Gabriel’s Hospital is no stranger to assaults on well-being spread by disease and illness. Located in Namitete, Malawi, St. Gabriel’s serves 250,000 rural Malawians spread throughout a catchment area one hundred miles in radius. With a national HIV prevalence rate of 15-20%, children orphaned by AIDS will represent as much as one tenth of the country’s population by 2010. With tuberculosis (TB), malaria, malnutrition and pneumonia ravaging immuno-compromised populations, the health system - including St. Gabriel’s Hospital - faces a disquieting burden. Malawi’s health challenges are compounded by its devastatingly low GDP per capita, by some measures the lowest in the world. With just two doctors and a handful of clinical officers, St. Gabriel’s Hospital is strikingly understaffed. This perennial state of affairs explains the shift of primary healthcare in other, similar settings, to Community Health Workers (CHWs), trained for specified tasks. Through the hospital’s antiretroviral (ARV) treatment program - drug therapy for HIV/AIDS - over 600 volunteers have been recruited. These volunteers are spread throughout villages in the Hospital's catchment area. Some CHWs are HIV and TB drug adherence monitors, while others accompany patients during long journeys (up to a hundred miles, often by foot) to the hospital. A few of the more inspired volunteers record their activities in notebooks, and travel to the hospital to have their good work acknowledged. The vast majority, however, remain disconnected from hospital activities, interacting with hospital staff only to pick up their drugs. It’s not that they don’t want to play a legitimate role in a community health system - there is no communication to foster such a role.
Enter FrontlineSMS. The program, developed by Ken Banks and his team at kiwanja.net, is the cornerstone of a new, text-based communications initiative at St. Gabriel’s Hospital. Funded by the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University and the Donald A. Strauss Foundation, I'm currently knee-deep in a pilot program. FrontlineSMS is being used to connect the hospital with its CHWs, expanding the role of the volunteers. Drug adherence monitors are able to message the hospital, reporting how local patients are doing on their TB or HIV drug regimens. Home-Based Care volunteers are sent texts with names of patients that need to be traced, and their condition is reported. "People Living with HIV and AIDS" (PLWHA) Support Group leaders can use FrontlineSMS to communicate meeting times. Volunteers can be messaged before the hospital’s mobile testing and immunization teams arrive in their village, so they can mobilize the community. Essentially, FrontlineSMS has adopted the new role of coordinating a far-reaching community health network. The hospital sees intense promise in the formidable duo of FrontlineSMS and the cell-phone-yielding health worker. The usefulness of a well-managed communications network is undeniable, particularly when the information is so vital. In the first hours of the pilot program, a deceased patient’s extra ARVs were secured, the Home-Based Care unit was alerted of ailing cancer patients, and a death was reported (saving the hospital a day-long motorbike trip to administer additional morphine). Rural healthcare has found, in FrontlineSMS, a powerful protagonist". SATURDAY, JUN 21, 2008 Restricted mobility On my travels it's not unusual for me to find a dozen or more Village Phone operators in a single village. It's also not unusual to find them with pretty-much the same phone, quite often the same price plan, and the same signs and posters. And just to rub it in, their shops and kiosks are often the same colour, too. Standing out from the competition can be quite a challenge in an environment like this, but it can be done.
Making a phone call on a Village Phone can hardly be called a private affair. First of all you're likely standing out in the open, the phone owner usually hangs around a couple of feet away, and children crowd around because that's what children do. In an attempt to break the mould - and gain a little competitive advantage - this Village Phone operator decided that customers should be allowed to put some space between her, the children and their private conversation. So her customers can take the phone 'away' somewhere where it's a little more private. To stop them running off with it, she attaches a length of wire which leads back into her shop. Simple, but clever. Maybe the wire could double up as an aerial extension for places with poor reception (now there's one for Nokia to consider, or Motorola in this case)? Sometimes, living in a wired world can have its advantages...
Further reading "Unplanned adolescence", a Fast Company article on what happens to Village Phone operators when local mobile ownership increases (and my response to that), and "Africa's grassroots mobile revolution - A traveller's perspective", a photo essay I wrote recently for the June edition of Vodafone receiver WEDNESDAY, JUN 18, 2008 FrontlineSMS "action plan" FrontlineSMS has so far managed to achieve quite a lot with really very little, but that's about to change. After two-and-a-half years of promise, it's finally beginning to look like the software I dreamt of that wet Saturday evening in Cambridge back in early 2005. I've spent the past couple of weeks putting seven months of development through its paces, whilst writing the new User Guide, and am as excited as ever about what this thing can do. One of the most exciting new features are things we've called "FrontlineSMS actions". Here's what they do. "FrontlineSMS actions" are triggered by keywords which arrive via incoming text messages from patients, farmers, staff, fieldworkers, members of the public or whoever. Once a keyword or phrase is detected, FrontlineSMS can be told to do one of a number of things. These are our "actions": Auto Reply Auto Forward Join Group Leave Group Survey Email External Command As I speak - or should that be write? - FrontlineSMS is being tested by around twenty-five NGOs around the world. Almost a hundred requests to use the new version have been submitted via the website in the past month. Right now we're just ironing out the last few kinks before we make it more widely available to the NGO community next week. These are exciting times, and going by the feedback we're receiving, we're not the only ones getting excited... TUESDAY, JUN 10, 2008 Race for the canopy
Mobile phone masts join the millennia-old "race for the canopy" in what remains of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest. Taken during a road trip, Sao Paulo to Rio, June 2008 THURSDAY, JUN 05, 2008 Mobiles in Africa: A Travellers Perspective This essay was originally commissioned in April 2008 by Vodafone receiver, Vodafone's "neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting and future-oriented aspects of communications technologies". All images taken from the kiwanja Mobile Gallery
In many places I’ve seen handsets used primarily as phone books, torches or even once as a method of keeping track of bad debts, but despite some ingenious offline applications mobiles are not much use as a communications device without a signal. On the whole, operators are doing what they can, but with geographically disbursed populations, often with little disposable income, it’s sometimes difficult to make a business case for increasing coverage to an area with a minimal, and scattered, population. But where networks do exist, operators in East Africa are blazing a trial, doing something unheard of in Europe and in many other parts of the world. We’re talking roaming, and we’re talking “one network”.
You may not see a Bodafone on your street anytime soon, but you may see a single European-wide network. And if you do, just remember where it happened first...
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It
was seat-of-the-pants stuff back then. I remember giving a very early interview
about the software to
FrontlineSMS
will automatically send a pre-determined SMS back to the sender of the message
(maybe a "Thank you for your message", for example, or clinic opening
times, or the current price of matoke)
It
didn’t take us long to find it. After all, mobile phone masts aren’t that easy
to hide, and Masindi is a tightly-knit, flat little west Ugandan town. After a
few short minutes, driving past countless mobile phone dealerships, internet
cafes and village phone operators, there it was. I was last in Masindi in 1998,
not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but a lifetime in the short
history of the mobile phone. Back then this mast wasn’t there, and neither were
any of the mobile phone shops, internet cafes and village phone operators. The
only phone line out of town – if and when it was working – was courtesy of the
local post office. Every couple of weeks we would drive here to collect our post
from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, post our letters, have a cold beer, buy a
few ‘luxuries’ and occasionally attempt to phone home. No text messaging in
those days.
Just
as I had done ten years earlier, I sat in the Travellers Rest drinking coffee,
watching Masindi life go by. Unfinished buildings littered the edge of town, a
scene not unlike the last time I was there, except this time endless mobile
advertising banners broke the view. In a bold marketing ploy the entire café was
branded “Celtel red”, yet it was only just managing to compete with the “MTN
yellow” across the road. People were busy in their shops, busy carrying goods,
busy ferrying passengers on their bikes, and busy on their phones. The mobile
revolution is here, there and everywhere for all to see. What has happened in
Masindi is happening all over Africa, a continent which now boasts almost 300
million subscribers and a penetration rate fast approaching 30%.
And
the beauty is that no-one expected it. Back in 2004 I co-authored one of the
earlier reports on the potential of mobile phones in conservation and
development work. Focused mainly on Africa and funded by the Vodafone Group
Foundation, we wrote it at a time when most people believed that rural Africans
on a couple of dollars a day would never be able to afford a phone, let alone
the credit to keep it going. Of course, four years ago mobile phones were
expensive, but in many places the rampant growth of second hand markets made
affordable handsets available for the first time. Nothing is thrown away here.
At the same time, getting new phones into the hands of the masses was a key goal
of the GSM Association’s “Emerging Market Handset Initiative”, announced back in
2005, an objective which continues to this day with the handset manufacturers
themselves, many of whom are working hard to develop sub-$20 phones for this
very unique “bottom of the pyramid” market.
Understanding
consumers in emerging markets – many of whom have very different requirements of
a phone – has spurned the development of handsets with multiple phone books,
phones marketed as torches and even handsets with no screen. If you think that
most of the innovation is going on in the West, take a moment to look at what’s
happening in India and Africa. Even operators are getting in on the act,
providing services such as “Call Me”, which allows Vodacom subscribers in South
Africa to send up to five messages per day, free of charge, requesting a call
back from the receiver. Services such as these have emerged in response to
consumer behaviour, users who would have previously “flashed” the person they
wished to speak to by ringing their phone once and hanging up. “Call Me”
formalises the process, helps minimise network traffic through fewer prematurely
disconnected calls, and allows operators to add value by differentiating their
service from rival operators. A lot of the research, often the catalyst for
these new devices and services, is increasingly lead by fellow anthropologists
Jonathan Donner at Microsoft Research and Jan Chipchase at Nokia, both of whom
spend considerable amounts of their time studying mobile phone use in the field
and, in Jan’s case, working his way through a fair number of bicycles in the
process.
When
it comes to mobile innovation, the gap between developed and developing
countries is not much of a gap at all. Mobile innovation in the West, largely
technology-lead, sits in contrast to that in the developing world where
combating the geographic, economic and cultural constraints of users is
considered a more sensible way to go. This explains the emergence of the torch
phone, for users who live in areas with little or no regular light, or multiple
phone books for users who share their phones with family members. On the
heavyweight side, a plethora of financial applications have hit the streets,
with Safaricom’s m-Pesa service getting by far the biggest press to date.
Regularly used by hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, you often hear it described
as the “Kenyan Debit Card”, allowing users to transfer money through their
mobile phones to help out family and friends, or to buy and sell goods and
services across the airwaves. For the tens of millions of Kenyans without bank
accounts, m-Pesa represents both a revolution and a revelation. It is now being
rolled out in other countries, with Afghanistan next on the list.
Innovation
is not always as official or formalised as this, however. People in developing
countries are rarely simple, passive recipients of a technology, and rarely wait
for outsiders to provide solutions to their problems. The entrepreneurial spirit
is alive and well, evident by the masses of thriving small businesses you find
on the street corners of every village, town and city. Last summer, in “A Review
of The Postal and Telecommunications Sector: June 2006 to June 2007”, the
Executive Director of the Uganda Communications Commission presented some quite
incredible statistics. Official employment in Uganda’s ICT industry – dominated
by telecommunications workers – sat at a little over 6,000. Informal, unofficial
workers not directly employed, but who were making a living on the back of the
industry, was estimated at a whopping 350,000. Amazing as it may be, Uganda is
no exception. This is happening all over the African continent.
These
‘informal’ businesses come in all shapes and sizes, as do the kiosks many of
them operate from, manufactured using anything from wood to metal sheeting, or
made up of simple tables and plastic chairs. Mobile phone repair shops, often
equipped with just a handful of basic (and frighteningly large!) tools, have
sprung up to help owners squeeze the maximum life out of their devices, many
being used in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. Mobile phones are
attached
to bikes (two and three wheelers), and even boats, and taken to where
the business is. In Uganda these bikes, known locally as boda boda’s, are hooked
up with spare batteries
and desktop mobile devices
to create what are affectionately known as “Bodafones”. I met the owner of one
on Kampala Road last summer, and got talking to him through the universally
accepted language of English Premier League football. He also accurately
predicted the result of the Liverpool match later that day – I should have got
his number.
In
"Mobile Telephony: Leveraging Strengths and Opportunities for Socio- Economic
Transformation in Nigeria", Christiana Charles-Iyoha sheds some fascinating
light on the barriers to mobile ownership among Nigerian market traders. Erratic
power supply, and difficulty charging, came top with a staggering 87%. Of
course, Nigerians are not alone with this problem, and entrepreneurs are coming
up with ingenious methods of meeting this crucial consumer need. Today, in some
rural areas, users are able to charge their phones from a car battery which is
taken to the nearest town, charged up and dragged back. In more urban areas with
better mains supply, charging kiosks
have sprung up allowing users to recharge their phones while they wait. Soon,
with the continuing drop in the cost of solar chargers, many users will be able
to do what I did last weekend
down my local village green, and charge their
phones using the most plentiful renewable energy source available – the sun
(yes, we do occasionally get some in England). Interestingly, the total cost of
this entire set up came to just over $40 - $22 for the ZTE handset (as being
sold by MTN in Uganda), and $20 for the solar panel. Suddenly, with solar, there
is light at the end of the charging tunnel.
Any
discussion on mobile telephony, developing countries and economic opportunity
would not be complete without a mention of Village Phone, Grameen’s pioneering
work in Bangladesh which has recently taken root in Africa. A number of
competing Village Phone schemes have since sprung up, providing business
opportunities to mostly women, usually in rural areas, who borrow a small amount
of money to purchase a phone. Members of the community, or passers-by, pay a
small fee to make a call, or send a text message. Some of these schemes use
desktop-style phones, which many owners prefer because of their ruggedness and
the fact they are less likely to go walkabout. Culturally, bigger is also
generally seen as better, a view somewhat at odds with how we feel about mobile
devices in the Western world.
Other
schemes use standard mobile phones, such as Nokia’s entry-level 1100 (for a
while the best selling phone on the planet), while Motorola developed their own
“pay phone” specifically for the job, allowing operators to enter the number of
units to be used before handing the phone over to the caller. This helped ensure
customers didn’t talk for longer than they’d paid for, and negated the earlier
practice of operators having to rudely grab phones back with their clients in
mid-sentence, or having to smack their hands down on the hang-up button of a
desk phone before they’d had the chance to say goodbye.
Celtel,
MTN and Vodacom are just three of a growing band of African operators tearing
down national boundaries to allow their customers seamless mobility as they
travel from country-to-country. Advertising boards are scattered everywhere.
"One SIM card. 6 countries" proclaims Celtel. "Travel with your Vodacom SIMcard
and enjoy Vodacom tariff in Kenya and Uganda" boasts Vodacom. The speed of
change in the mobile industry – more so it seems in developing countries –
continues unabated. Again, the telecommunications gap between the so-called
developed and developing countries looks a little blurred. Travelling across
central Africa with a single SIM, on a single tariff, is a business person’s
dream.