This page contains a selection of kiwanja.net conference talks, news items and radio interviews. A wider selection of kiwanja and non-kiwanja videos – covering technology, anthropology, innovation, entrepreneurship and development – can be found in the Video category of the “Build it Kenny, and they will come…” blog.
Award
Ashoka Fellowship
2:13 · April 2011
This video is a two-minute profile of Ken Banks as an Ashoka Fellow, made by Ashoka UK in April 2011. He explains how FrontlineSMS turns a laptop, a mobile phone and a cable into a two-way text messaging system that works with or without the internet, and how the platform has spread through “sister organizations” applying it to specific fields.
Read the transcript
My name’s Ken Banks. I’m the founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS turns a laptop computer, a mobile phone and a cable into a two-way text messaging system which can be used anywhere, with or without the internet.
In terms of growth, and how we get the platform into more places where it can be useful, over the last couple of years we’ve seen an expansion into what we call sister organizations. These are people who have identified the software that I created back in 2005 and have started to apply it to specific fields. The first person to do that was a guy called Josh Nesbit at Stanford University, who created FrontlineSMS:Medic, a module which applies it specifically to a medical setting in developing countries. Since then we’ve had FrontlineSMS:Credit, which is applying it to microfinance and micropayments; FrontlineSMS:Learn, which is building an education module that sits on top of the software; FrontlineSMS:Legal, which is using it to extend the reach of legal services to underserved communities; and FrontlineSMS:Radio, a collaboration with Cambridge University which is looking to build modules that are relevant and useful to radio stations in developing countries.
So with all this going on, and all these very, very targeted users in these sectors, we’re planning how that software can grow, remain useful and relevant, and continue to scale.
I recently wrote about the work I’ve done innovating around FrontlineSMS and called myself a reluctant innovator, and I think that gets to the heart of how Ashoka can be useful to us as an organization. I’m a technologist; I’m not a business person. There are a lot of things that I don’t know. I don’t know how to grow and scale an organization as instinctively as I know how to build a technology. So I think access to the Ashoka network is going to be hugely important, to allow us, and me, to connect with other people who have previously and successfully grown an organization, other people who are having the same challenges that we do, but also access to business skills, and accountants, and the whole range of sectors that you need, I think, to be able to tap into to successfully build an organization like FrontlineSMS.
Transcript edited from YouTube’s auto-generated captions for accuracy.