Closing mobile’s “gender divide”

At the Networked Society Forum in Hong Kong last November, I sat and listened as Jeffrey Sachs described mobile connectivity as “the single most important instrument for development that we have“. Few people would disagree. A recent study by the GSM Association reported a 10% increase in mobile phone use leads to a 1.2% increase in a country’s GDP. Encouraging as this may be, it’s only half the story.

Women in the developing world are 21% less likely than men to own a mobile, leaving an estimated 300 million excluded from the social and economic opportunities that owning one might bring. If mobile phones do increase opportunity, then right now they’re not increasing it for everyone. Closing this “mobile gender gap” doesn’t just make sense for women – it’s also an opportunity believed to be worth a staggering $13 billion to network operators annually.

Empowering girls and women has long been a focus for the development community, and it’s easy to see why. In Sub Saharan Africa women produce 80% of household food and, when educated women run family farms, they’re able to increase yields by up to 20%. Research also suggests that increasing the earning power of women has additional benefits for the entire family through improvements in health, education and child nutrition. And when educated girls start earning an income, 90% of it is put straight back into their families. The number is nearer 40% for men. Yet, despite all this in many parts of the world women are more likely to go hungry than men, the number of girls out of school almost universally exceeds the number of boys, and – in the case of Sub Saharan Africa – women own only 1% of the land.

Whilst the introduction of the mobile phone alone is unlikely to solve any of these problems directly, targeted interventions can. Defining this opportunity is crucial, according to “Mobile Value Added Services: A Business Growth Opportunity for Women Entrepreneurs,” a new report released today by the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women with support from the ExxonMobil Foundation. This milestone study is a major step for the Foundation – which tasks itself with helping women entrepreneurs across Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East – as it seeks to leverage the power of mobile phones and services for the women entrepreneurs its wider programmes support.

One key objective of the study, which focused mostly on Indonesia, Nigeria and Egypt, was to identify the most useful mobile value-added services which enable women entrepreneurs to advance their businesses. In the study, over 88% of women entrepreneurs said they were willing to use these services to address the core business challenges they face, and more than 82% of women entrepreneurs indicated a willingness to pay for them. Demand for the right service is clearly there. Identifying what those services should be was a key driver for commissioning the report.

Although mobile value added services were abundant in many of the areas covered in the study (over 200 different products were reviewed) surprisingly, none were tailored for the specific needs of women entrepreneurs. The Cherie Blair Foundation is now working with a number of commercial and non-profit partners to fill that gap and to provide a service that an overwhelming majority of women entrepreneurs desperately need.

You can download the full report here (PDF, 6Mb).

This article was also published on the Huffington Post website.

Update: Domestic violence – An SMS SOS

This update is the twelfth in our series of FrontlineSMS guest posts. Here, Anthony Papillion – Founder of OpenEMR HQ – shares the latest news on its use in his Oklahoma home town, where the software is helping provide relief to women suffering domestic violence

Anthony Papillion“In late May of this year, I assisted a local crisis center in deploying a solution we’ve now dubbed “FamilyFIRST“. FamilyFIRST is an SMS based system that allows victims of domestic violence to reach out to police, crisis counselors, and to document abuse incidents all via simple SMS messaging.

When the project first began, neither I nor the agency involved were sure how it would be received or if it would even be used. Educating victims to think pro-actively in crisis situation is a difficult thing. Their first reaction is to simply hide or get out of the situation if possible. This often means running without a purse or mobile phone.

So the agency decided to tackle the deployment in two phases: Technical and marketing. Technical, thanks to FrontlineSMS, was incredibly easy. By integrating the software along with a bit of custom software written by me, I was able to get a working system up and running bug free in less than a week. It includes message routing and archival, and is structured in such a way that the evidence stored inside of it has been deemed acceptable by the court.

Then, came the marketing side. Obviously, the agency didn’t have a lot of money so doing a huge PR blitz was out of the question. So they went about spreading word about the system in local PSA’s, victims groups, in seminars, and through area counselors working with the abused population. Because this was all very grassroots, they were able to accomplish this with a near zero budget and we were all totally shocked by the response it received.

Domestic violence (http://www.helenjaques.co.uk)

In the last two and a half months, FamilyFiRST has processed over 4,000 messages from victims of violence, not only in our local area, but around the state of Oklahoma. Evidence stored in the system has been used to help successfully prosecute 9 offenders and has resulted in combined sentences of over 110 years being handed down in those cases.

All in all, the system is a success and it couldn’t have happened without FrontlineSMS. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I wouldn’t have had the time or knowledge to build such a robust system from scratch and FrontlineSMS reduced ‘building the system’ to writing a few pieces of tie-in software and setting up a database.

Our future goal for the system is to work with other agencies in deploying in in health care (our core competency), domestic violence, and education. Thanks to this experience with FrontlineSMS, I’m confident that a robust system can be built quickly, easily, and very affordably (under $700 USD).

Thank you Ken and all the developers of FrontlineSMS. You’re helping to change the world, one download at a time”.

Anthony Papillion
Founder
OpenEMR HQ
www.openemrhq.com

(This post is also available on the FrontlineSMS community pages. Anthony’s original FrontlineSMS guest post, which describes the thinking behind the project, is available here. Congratulations to everyone at “FamilyFIRST” for such a great, inspiring and hugely valuable initiative)

Tackling domestic violence: An SMS SOS

This is the seventh in our series of FrontlineSMS guest posts. Here, Anthony Papillion – Founder of OpenEMR HQ – discusses his initial thoughts on being introduced to the software, and outlines his plans for its use in his Oklahoma home town to help women suffering domestic violence

“I only recently became involved with the FrontlineSMS project as an addition to a national project my company, OpenEMR HQ, is doing with a small African country. But, since discovering the software, I’ve been busily thinking of good ways it could be put to use by organizations in my own community and I’ve come up with a few I believe are viable. Today, I want to share one of those ideas and how we’re going to use FrontlineSMS as a tool to help combat violence against women in the United States, specifically, in the small community of Miami, Oklahoma.

Cause for concern

Every year, millions of American women face domestic violence at the hands of those that are supposed to love and protect them. These women often feel powerless and suffer continued abuse without ever reaching out because they either don’t know the resources are out there or because they’re scared nothing will be done to their abusers if they do come forward thereby encouraging even more abuse. Community crisis centers serve as a front line of defense in these situations often shuttling abused women out of dangerous situations and into safe houses, interfacing with police to make sure victims get the services and protection they need, and providing the much needed emotional support those who’ve escaped violent situations are so desperately in need of.

Domestic violence (http://www.helenjaques.co.uk)

Unfortunately, none of those things can be offered until the victim reaches out and getting abused women to take the first step can be a large part of the battle. Many women don’t think or have a safe way to catalog the abuse, don’t know how to report it, and don’t want calls to crisis numbers showing up on the mobile phone bill. The end result is the complete isolation of these women from any help at all.

Seeking solutions

As I’ve been playing around with FrontlineSMS, I’ve been thinking about ways it could be used to address these situations and I’m slowly starting to piece together a system called CPR that I hope to soon have deployed locally as a test bed for a larger, maybe statewide system.

The basic idea is to give women a quick, easy, and safe way to report and catalog abuse, and reach out for either police or crisis worker help, all without ever making a traceable phone call. Piecing together a system that consists of a laptop running FrontlineSMS, a mobile phone, and a few PHP scripts sitting on an Internet connection, I’m creating a system where women can send messages to various help authorities or just record instances of abuse for later use in court. For example:

C <A message that she wants to send to a crisis counselor>
P <A message she wants to send to a police officer>
R <A message she wants to be recorded for later use in court detailing an abusive incident>

FrontlineSMS keywordsUsing the CPR system, women in dangerous situations can quietly and safely reach out for help when a phone call simply isn’t possible. Using FrontlineSMS will allow both police and crisis agencies to have two way communication with the victim thereby ensuring the communication loop is never broken.

Building the vision

Since I’m still developing the system, I’ve not deployed an installation of it yet but I’ve been getting great feedback from various agencies I’ve spoken to. Eventually, I’d like to implement a way for victims to send pictures, video, and audio, and have it automatically attached to their case file within the CPR system for later use in court. That will come later and probably with some community help.

None of this would be possible without FrontlineSMS. While I am a professional software developer, I probably would never have developed a system like FrontlineSMS and the fact that it’s available as open source makes it incredibly accessible.

I’ll be sure to keep everyone up to date on how this project is coming along as it progresses. I’ll also be sure to blog about how we’re using FrontlineSMS in our Vision Africa project being launched very soon. Until then, feel free to send your feedback or make comments to this post. Thank you”.

Anthony Papillion
Founder
OpenEMR HQ
www.openemrhq.com

(This post originally appeared on Anthony’s “CajonTechie’s Mindstream” blog, and is republished with permission)