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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2007

Overwhelming. Perspective.

I'm just back from the first night of the Stanford leg of the United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF). From the opening documentary about the atrocities, lies, deceit and mystery surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, where respect for individual human life was almost non-existent, to the incredible work of a team of dedicated doctors and nurses in a Lesotho HIV/AIDS clinic where respect for individual human life could not have been greater, the immense diversity of the worlds problems were really driven home. Sandwiched between these two incredible films was a third, made up of 5-minute snapshots of six ordinary people who fought - and won - environmental battles in their communities armed with just passion, commitment, drive and a sense of injustice.

If there are two things that I came away with tonight from the festival, they're this. When you're overdosed with visual images of suffering, despair and corruption like many of the audience tonight, the problems of the world seem totally overwhelming. But this can also help put things in perspective, and force us to look more closely at ourselves, how we live our lives, how effectively we focus our own individual efforts, and why so many people turn a blind eye to everything happening around them. Each and every life has value, yet we sometimes lose this in a world where scalability and sustainability rule and the shear numbers of real people suffering is lost in the huge numbers thrown at us by the statisticians. For the young boy who was told at the Tsepong Clinic in Lesotho that his father was dying (captured in the photo above), only one thing mattered. And it wasn't statistics.

It was Margaret Mead who once famously said that we should "never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has". It is with that comforting thought that I drift off to sleep tonight.

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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2007

The unpicking of FrontlineSMS

Going by the title of this Blog post you might be expecting a little online session for prospective FrontlineSMS users. You know the kind - what it is, what it does, where it's been used and so on. Well, however useful that might be, this posting is more for my benefit. It's time for a spot of thinking out loud...

FrontlineSMS started life in 2005 as a classic example of evolutionary prototyping - in other words, the act of throwing something together and then sticking it out there and waiting to see what happens. Apart from a hunch and a small grant from a couple of early converts, there was little proof that anyone would be interested in the software, let alone make the effort to use it. I remember to this day talking about it during an interview with Charity Times in the early summer of 2005. I was still in Finland at the time, writing the code, when it dawned on me that it might be a good idea to put together a website if I was going to start talking to major industry magazines. (Incidentally, the Charity Times interview was already lined up - I just managed to convince them that it would be good to put out a "call for trialists" in the article). So programming was put on hold for a day while I very quickly put together a website. (In case you were wondering, the top banner on the FrontlineSMS website is actually the view from the lounge window where FrontlineSMS was written. It seemed kind-of relevant, in the absence of anything better to put there).

So, FrontlineSMS was let loose on the world during the last couple of months of 2005, and it was then a case of sitting back and waiting to see what happened. There never was a big plan, no big intention, no big vision. Not only did I not have the budget or capacity to do much else, I didn't know what else I could do. But herein lay the beauty of the project, for me at least. If it was going to be a success then the very people it was meant to empower would need to play a big part. I never wanted to force anything onto anyone, never wanted to have to "sell" the idea, so it was down to grassroots NGOs to somehow find out about FrontlineSMS and then find a use for it. If that didn't happen then there probably wasn't a need in the first place. If that was the case, I thought to myself, I'll let my hunch go and move on to something else.

Well, as it turned out the hunch wasn't a bad one, and FrontlineSMS has come on a long way since that heady Finnish summer two years ago. In addition to there being funding (thanks to the MacArthur Foundation), there now is a plan, and a vision. But despite there being more structure to the project, the software continues to surprise me - and that's why it's such a great project to work on. Okay, the Nigerian election monitoring was great, as was its use in the Philippine elections shortly after (this wasn't so widely reported) and the overall response from the community. But despite feeling more in control in recent months, it turns out that FrontlineSMS is doing some pretty exciting stuff out there that I'm only beginning to hear about. (Keeping in contact with grassroots NGOs working in pretty remote areas presents its own challenges, so I do have an excuse). So my learning continues...

So, what have I learnt recently? Well, two things in particular. Over the past few months it seems that FrontlineSMS has not only been merrily sending out security alerts to field workers in Afghanistan (a conflict zone if ever there was one), but it's also been providing market prices to several thousand farmers in Indonesia. None of this should surprise me - FrontlineSMS is a tool, after all, and it can be used for many different things. I've always maintained that the software would end up being used for things I'd never dream of, and on that note at least I have been proved right.

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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2007

Cat out of the bag?

After a hectic but interesting and rewarding summer, October sees me back at Stanford University continuing work on my MacArthur Foundation-funded next generation FrontlineSMS system. The past few months have also seen interest in the work of kiwanja hit new heights. Requests for interviews came from web-based, radio-based and print-based media (see the News page for details). All that's missing is television, although after two recent emails that doesn't look too far off. (I did record a video keynote for the first ShareIdeas.org Webinar, in case that counts).

One growing trend has been the number of emails hitting my inbox from for-profit organisations. Up until recently most contact came from the non-profit sector, either NGOs enquiring about mobile, or requests to use FrontlineSMS, or bloggers and ICT4D news sites asking questions and interviewing me about my work. Breaking into the more mainstream media - and the for-profit sector - is an exciting new development, and it presents a great new opportunity.

A nice example of how these non-profit and for-profit communities can be brought together is nGOmobile, launched three weeks ago. This competition, aimed squarely at grassroots NGOs, is supported by a total of seven companies of various shapes and sizes, each providing in-kind support in some shape or form - Hewlett Packard, Nokia, Wieden+Kennedy, mBlox, ActiveXperts, Perkins Coie and KnowHowe (the project took just 5 weeks and cost just $10, but that's another story). Harnessing the products, services and support of companies such as these can create powerful allies for organisations such as kiwanja and, in turn, the non-profit community it seeks to serve. Global SMS providers, mobile software development companies, handset manufacturers, government agencies and industry bodies are now regularly in contact, not only to ask but also to offer. This is a refreshing change. And I sense that change is in the air.

Last night I met up with a good friend from SAP here in the Valley. She is also an Advisor to my recently created (but as yet inactive) Foundation. Conversations with Tracy, as with my other two Advisors, often centre around capacity. How I'm going to cope working alone when things really take off. "Not enough people know about kiwanja for it to be an issue, surely?" is my usual answer. I'm still not too concerned right now, but with each passing day - and each new email - I'm slowly beginning to think I should be.

As Tracy put it, the cat may already be out of the bag.

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MONDAY, OCTOBER 01, 2007

In search of The Searchers

In my search for a holiday read last week, I picked up a copy of The White Man's Burden by William Easterly, a book about "why the West's efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good". Reading this feels like a throw-back to my days at Sussex University where, during the Development Studies portion of my degree, I seemed to spend half my time reading books about how woefully inefficient international development-spending was. On the whole, most of the evidence then seemed to fit that view. So here I am, a decade later, reading much of the same in the form of an updated condemnation, reinforced by a further ten years of (generally-speaking) failure. The White Man's Burden does a good job of unpicking much of what I - and many people - believe is wrong with the development industry (and yes, it is an industry, employing - it seems - as many people here as we're trying to help there). And I find it particularly refreshing because, for once, small-scale efforts are appreciated for what they are, and not condemned as 'irrelevant' or 'unscalable'. The problem, as William Easterly puts it, is that donors and governments like big impact, and this leads many people to only think in terms of "Big Plans". Few Big Plans work. Many more smaller ones do.

Much may be wrong with international development, but the industry is still blessed with talented people who deeply care, and are truly passionate, about their cause. Many work for the Big Planners, while others choose an alternative path. The two approaches could not be more different, and there are many reasons why people choose one over the other - job security, money, opportunity, 'big is beautiful' and status are perhaps just a few. After all, how could billions of dollars funnelled through massive aid projects not make a difference? One problem with the Big Plan approach is that no-one ever seems to be accountable. Wait for the next set of global health targets to be missed - better still, the Millennium Development Goals - and see who gets fired. Go it alone, however, and the situation is very different.

Planners prefer big budget big scope big impact plans designed to fix big problems, while Searchers look more closely at specific (smaller) problems and tailor a more appropriate response based on cost, local issues and understanding, need, relevance and opportunity. Microcredit began life this way. It was never meant to fix everything, although going by the number of Microfinance Institutions (MFI's) around today you'd have thought it was. As William Easterly puts it:

Microcredit is not a panacea for poverty reduction that some made it out to be after Yunus's discovery. Some disillusionment with microcredit has already come in response to these blown-up expectations. Microcredit didn't solve everything - it just solved one particular problem under one particular set of circumstances - the poor's lack of access to credit except at usorious rates from moneylenders

Although William Easterley's book only occasionally touches on technology, ICT projects are far from exempt from the Planner/Searcher scenario. Mobile phones are regularly touted as "the device to close the digital divide", a magic tool to help lift people out of poverty or a quick-fix solution for activists. As with microfinance, this is also only true in some instances, not all. Mohammad Yunus took a commodity as 'available' as money and improved people's access to it. Mobile phones are now the new currency, and there are myriad examples of how this handy little device is empowering people the world over. But we need to be careful that the mobile doesn't fall foul of the same trap. We need to realise, too, that many of the mobile-based solutions prevalent in the developing world are the result of local initiatives, local people identifying local needs and acting on them. These people had no Big Plan - they simply searched, found and did. As William Easterly puts it, "poor people have accomplished far more for themselves than the Planners have accomplished for them".

So often we find that the answers lie with the people themselves, but all-too-often solutions are imposed from the outside - the West - or from above through a distant, centralised government. William Easterly continues: "The best chance for the poor is for them to be their own Searchers, borrowing ideas and technology from the West when it suits them to do so".

A few months ago I gave an interview about my work, and FrontlineSMS, to the Corporate Council of Africa for their forthcoming Africa Journal. This interview more than any captures kiwanja's work ethic, and ends with a quote which could have easily come from William Easterly's book:

... But what excites Banks most about FrontlineSMS is the role he doesn’t play. “FrontlineSMS provides the tools necessary for people to create their own projects that make a difference. It empowers innovators and organizers in the developing world to achieve their full potential through their own ingenuity”

Whether it's measured in the uptake of FrontlineSMS, or interest in my latest nGOmobile initiative, it will be The Searchers in developing countries who ultimately determine whether my efforts succeed or fail. We all need to be accountable to someone. I'm happy to be accountable to them.

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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2007

Hat-trick on the BBC World Service

My latest initiative - nGOmobile - was featured this week on the BBC World Service "Digital Planet" series which reports on technology stories from around the world. This is the third time kiwanja has been featured on the program. Nokia's Head of Social Investment for Africa and the Middle East, Micheline Ntiru - who is on the competition judging panel - joined me in discussing the project with Bill Thompson (another judge!) and Gareth Mitchell. A Podcast of the program is available via the "Digital Planet" website or the shorter interview segment is available here (8Mb, MP3).

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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2007

Let's not write it off quite yet

A couple of months ago a member of the Social Mobile Group on Facebook asked an interesting, and pertinent, question. Commenting on a picture of a payphone attached to a bicycle from the kiwanja Mobile Gallery (this bike is taken around the streets of Kampala for members of the public to use to make calls), they wondered what was going to happen to these kinds of entrepreneurs as more and more people began owning their own phones.

A recent article in Fast Company
magazine has set out to answer just
that. Looking specifically at
decreasing income levels among
Grameen's Village Phone Operators,
it points the finger of blame squarely
at the proliferation of mobile phones
(the same finger can be pointed by the
fixed payphone network, another
victim). On the surface, blaming mobile
proliferation seems like a safe bet.
After all, if you have your own phone
then why pay to use someone elses?

The increase in mobile ownership has
certainly had an impact, but any time
you mix economics, technology and
human behaviour together, some
pretty surprising things can happen.
And this is where my love for
anthropology comes in handy.

I was fortunate to have spent four
weeks in Uganda last month, working with Grameen on their Village Phone Program at the same time that Business Week researched their own article on mobiles and economic development in Africa. Nothing beats being on the ground, and I'm very lucky to regularly get the chance to spend time in developing countries where I'm able to get a really good sense of what does and doesn't work.

Many of the blog entries circulating the web in the last week or so - citing the Fast Company magazine and touting the 'end of the Village Phone' - fail to appreciate some of the subtler issues at play. The assumption that people will stop using a Village Phone the minute they own their own is not the open and shut case you might think. During my month in Uganda, I would regularly see people walking up to a Village Phone Operator, mobile in hand, look up a number and read it out to the phone lady to key into her own handset. From my own observations, this seems to happen for a number of reasons.

Firstly, for many owners, mobiles double-up as glorified contact managers, clocks, alarms, torches and, finally, a device which enables them to be contacted any time of day or night for work, or to stay connected with family or friends. Few maintain enough credit to make calls. Many taxi drivers, for example, hold just enough credit to enable them to 'flash' a phone (ring and hang up) to indicate that they are outside and waiting.

The reason for the lack of credit leads onto the second point. Few mobile owners want to spend a dollar or more topping up their phone - the amount needed to get enough credit for about 5 minutes of calling - when all they want to do is quickly touch base with a business contact or family member. Instead, a couple of hundred shillings gets them a 40-second call with a Village Phone operator, a smaller amount of money for a small amount of time which is utilised to the full with amazing skill.

And thirdly, call rates are actually cheaper through the Village Phones. Whether the caller has a mobile or not, and whether that phone has credit or not, many people still seek out a Village Phone to make their call because it saves them money. That's the bottom line.

Try telling these people that the Village Phone is dead.

Mobile ownership may be increasing at a phenomenal rate in the developing world, but more people still don't own phones than do, and most people earning a dollar-a-day are still a long way off affording one. The Village Phone has been a huge success - there is little dispute about that - but, as with any business, market changes force a period of re-evaluation and adjustment, and the mobile market has moved quicker than most.

Village Phone might well be a victim of its own success, but let's not be too hasty in condemning it to the history books quite yet...

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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2007

The Digital Divider

People tend to get pretty excited around mobile technology. In developing countries most of this excitement has centred around their proliferation into poorer rural, communication- starved areas, and their new-found potential in helping close the digital divide. Handset giants such as Nokia and Motorola believe that mobile devices will "close the digital divide in a way the PC never could", industry bodies such as the GSM Association run their own “Bridging the Digital Divide” initiative, and international development agencies such as USAID pump hundreds of millions dollars into economic, health and educational initiatives based around mobiles and mobile technology.

But what do we really mean when we talk about the mobile helping close the digital divide? Clearly, mobiles are a relatively cheap device - when compared to personal or laptop computers, anyway. They are small and portable, have good battery life, provide instant voice communications, have SMS functionality and they have the potential to provide access to the internet.

Even the poorest members of society find ways to own one. But Houston, we have a problem.

I've been lucky over the past few years to have spoken at numerous conferences, workshops and companies about the uses of mobile technology in international conservation and development, and it's something I truly enjoy doing. However, I've slowly noticed a knowledge gap, or should we say an awareness gap. In the West, when we talk of mobiles helping close the digital divide, many people make a huge assumption about the technologies available to users in developing countries. We look at the mobile through rose-tinted glasses, from the top of our ivory towers, through a Western prism. Call it what you like. Think about it. Most of us have fancy phones and are gifted with pretty good network coverage to drive them. Not only can we make calls, we can take good quality photos, we can make and edit little movies and upload them to the web, we can surf the web, we can play neat games, and we can download neat bits of software. Our overall experience is generally a pleasant one. Why else would we want a phone? So, with mobiles able to do all of this, their potential in developing countries is clear, right? Well, maybe...

Let's start by looking at the worlds best selling phone - the Nokia 1100 (pictured). Anyone who's spent any time in a developing country recently would not have failed to notice the number of these around. The reason? They're Nokia (and people just seem to love Nokia), they're sturdy, have good battery life, the user interface is easy and they're cheap (selling for around $40 new in Uganda, for example). They do everything the user wants - they can make and receive calls, they can send and receive SMS and the built-in alarm is very popular (only last month in Kampala my taxi driver was telling me with great excitement how his alarm still sounds, even when his phone is switched off). These are the kinds of phones in the hands of many people in the very rural areas where we see the mobile as the tool to help close the digital divide.

The problem here is that the Nokia 1100 - as with many of the low-end handsets found in the markets and shops in developing countries - has no browser of any kind, and doesn't support GPRS (or any other form of data transmission). Accessing the internet? Dream on. But this is not the only problem. Network coverage in many rural areas lacks data support even if the phones did have it, although this is admittedly changing. There are also issues of language and content, but more importantly cost. Someone with little spare income doesn't want to spend a large chunk of it scratching around the web to find what he or she is looking for. In many countries GPRS pricing models are at best confusing. While an SMS carries a fixed cost, calculating how many kilobytes of data make up a WAP page is anybody's guess.

The opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid is huge, and handset manufacturers and network providers alike are working hard to fill it with phones. For them, the most important issue is cost because that's what's most important to their customer. And if this means providing trimmed-down handsets at the lowest possible prices then so be it. This current reality sees many of these phones with no GPRS, no browser, no Java, no camera, no colour screen - the very technologies which form the lynchpin of our plans to promote the mobile phone as the tool to help close the digital divide.

So, if we're serious about using mobile to help close the digital divide, how about diverting international development funding towards providing a subsidised, fully-internet ready handset for developing markets? Aid donors are already providing funds to the network operators, after all. In the DRC, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Uganda for example, the IFC (an arm of the World Bank) recently provided US$320 to five operations of Celtel to help expand and upgrade its mobile networks (you can read more about that here). Network coverage, important as it is, is only part of the equation. From the perspective of the digital divide, who's addressing the handset issue?

During a recent interview with the BBC I commented that "Voice is still the killer app in many developing countries. Data is going to be playing catch-up for a long time to come". I've received many comments of support - and a few in disagreement - since this was published. This is a very important debate, and I hope it is one which finally starts to get some serious discussion.

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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2007

China crisis?

Over the past couple of years there has been increasing debate in the West on the role of "China in Africa". There are even several books out on the subject. I haven't heard too much from Africans themselves, except for the odd comment by the man on the street that Chinese goods are swamping their markets, something not considered a good thing. So when I saw this headline in the East Africa Times last month, it made me laugh...
 

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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 04, 2007

Politicians fail, technologies prevail

There's been plenty of talk in recent years about a 'United States of Africa'. Fantasy or reality, politically such an entity looks as far off as it ever was. But visions of a continent borderless economically and politically are gradually being replaced by another borderless phenomenon - the mobile phone network. While Europe argues about roaming tariffs and a lack of integration, East Africa silently blazes a trail.

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. "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 in developing countries - continues unabated. I'd bet on Africa being the first continent to create a true 'single network'. After all, it's already happening.

Ironically, in the mobile industry at least, it's Europe, and not Africa, looking more like a developing country...

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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 02, 2007

Saving Africa from us

There are often times when things I feel particularly strong about are better put in words by other people. This article, by Uzodinma Iweala (author of Beasts of No Nation, a novel about child soldiers), is no exception. Originally published in The Washington Post a few weeks ago, it's particularly poignant coming at a time when more and more celebrity attention and more and more glossy magazine centre-spreads are focussing on the 'dark continent'. I regularly struggle with my own involvement on the continent, particularly when I'm out in the field (as I am now, helping with a Grameen project in Uganda).

Uzodinma believes that most Africans don't want saving. Instead they'd rather just be given a fair chance. Since my first visit - to northern Zambia way back in 1993 - I've been intrigued by how you create an environment where ordinary, everyday Africans are able to make the most of that chance, assuming one ever comes their way. The more work I do, the more countries I visit and the more people I meet, the more I believe that creating this environment is morally and practically the right thing to do. It would be hard, if not impossible, to argue otherwise. Yet the Western model of development prevails, built on the view of Africa as a hopeless and impoverished place in desperate need of 'our' help. Help is delivered in the form of money and sympathy. Forty years of handouts has failed to change that view, just like it has largely failed to make a significant positive impact on the root cause of the problem.

Whatever we say or do, whatever message we choose to convey through the glossy innards of top-notch magazines or the clever visuals of a website, it will be Africans who will 'save Africa'. Let's stop pretending it will be anybody else.

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