[kictanet] Mobile messaging for the masses – an idea whose time has come

[alice]

  (From Balancing Act)



  MobileActive 08: Mobile messaging for the masses – an idea whose time
  has come

Three hundred and eighty people gathered from all over the world in 
Johannesburg this week to discuss how mobile phones might be used for 
social and political purposes in developing countries. The organisers 
and hosts Sangonet had expected 150 people but the topic clearly touched 
a nerve. The event crackled with the kind of energy that happens when 
people gather on a topic for the first time. Russell Southwood looks at 
the issues raised by the event’s subject.

At the core of all this energy was a very simple notion. The technology 
device of choice for the majority of people in developing continents 
like Africa is the mobile phone. If you want to deliver messages to 
people or get them to respond then SMS or voice is an obvious route to 
go down.

But mobiles are not just a delivery channel but are fast becoming a 
media in their own right. National consumer surveys in Balancing Act’s 
report African Broadcast and Film Markets showed that between 3-9% of 
respondents in a variety of countries named the mobile as one of the 
most used daily sources of information.

But like the old Hollywood saying, there were only really five stories 
at MobileActive 08. These were identified by snappy tags like M-health 
or M-education: indeed, M- almost any development sector you care to 
think of. Well, there were actually eight areas of M-something: health, 
education, rural livelihoods (agriculture), governance (political 
campaigning), disaster warning and women.

Mobiles are now being used to: send out bulk mailings to key target 
groups (nurses); mobilise supporters; poll people and gather data; to 
provide answers to enquiries; to offer information support for 
activities; and raise funds. The majority of this activity is based on 
the 160 characters available in SMS. In other words, it’s an 
instantaneous, wide angle media but you can’t say that much using it. 
But you can send several messages to overcome this limitation. However, 
as one-long time veteran of using technology for development in Africa 
told me:”Everyone knows how to use it and most people have access to it.”

The sheer inventiveness of many of the different services was 
impressive. For example, I attended a presentation by Zimbabwe’s 
Kubatana.net who used the call centre functionality of Asterisk to 
create Freedom Fone. This was designed to counteract the tight control 
of media in that country by allowing users to phone in and listen to 
short radio-style programming. In the example aired musician Thomas 
Mapfumo talked of a campaign of “tough love” towards the Government.

The early pioneers of using mobiles for social purposes go back in 
Africa to the funding of the agricultural pricing service pioneered by 
Senegal’s Manobi in 1998. But like a lot of new development-based 
activity, the use of mobiles seems to operate in a memory-free present 
tense. The early precursors of this activity were those who gathered at 
the beginning of the millennium to try and use the Internet as way to 
break out of seemingly intractable development issues: technology would 
provide a magic pill that opened up new solutions. On the one side you 
had the wild-eyed (often American) tech enthusiasts and on the other 
side, the mumbling choir of African policy makers who seemed to want 
something called the Information Society. And somewhere in between were 
the development professionals who were trying to make sense of it all.

The hopes for technology as a magic solution were dashed upon the rocks 
of a lack of infrastructure, a consequent shortage of users and the 
inability of the mumbling choir to remove the policy blockages to 
achieve the much-mentioned Information Society. The disillusioned and 
pragmatic headed in a number of different directions. Some of them moved 
from focusing on the Internet to thinking about how to use mobile 
phones. People like Peter Armstrong of One World who set up an SMS jobs 
service in Nairobi’s Kibera were part of this group. Others started 
campaigning to change both the fundamentals of price and infrastructure. 
Whilst others, like Geek Corps founder Ethan Zuckerman (who has been a 
moving force behind encouraging blogging through Global Voices) moved 
off in new directions. The absence of those promoting the Internet at 
MobileActive perhaps reflects these changes.

The Internet enthusiasts had to break through the standard development 
response which might be cruelly summarised as: how can you spend money 
on technology when poor people need _________ ?(insert the word 
reflecting your own particular work area). For whatever else, this 
interest in technology did, it began at the edges to challenge 
long-established funding patterns and the thinking around it.

But it also initiated a debate about the efficacy of different types of 
media. The Internet was compared unfavourably with radio and in time 
also with mobile phones: something always had to be the answer to 
everything. But in reality, no-one thing is ever the answer to 
everything. People make use of a range of media and any process of 
communicating with them will be “hybrid”: in other words, it will be 
sent and received using a range of methods.

The same righteous position-taking about what approach was morally 
superior was also present at the conference, best exemplified by a 
person who seemed to pop up at almost every session I attended and make 
the point that voice messages were more effective in communicating with 
the poor than text SMSs. Whilst the position has a useful grain of 
truth, it rather ignores the many millions of messages sent by the 
functionally and completely illiterate every month. And as I learned, 
the presence of SMS writers (who have sprung up alongside letter 
writers) in places like Pakistan, who charge the illiterate to send 
messages they compose for them.

Unlike the initial world-changing promises for the Internet, those 
working with mobiles make more modest claims. Cell-Life which works in 
HIV-AIDS information says that missed appointments at Themba Lethu 
clinic in Johannesburg among the 9,000 patients using TxtAlert has 
dropped from 10% to 3%. SocialTxt which uses the 120 unused characters 
on the “please call me” message to insert calls to action about HIV-AIDS 
has driven an increase in people calling national helplines. One call 
centre reported that over two weeks 41% of users had accessed services 
following a campaign of this sort.

These claims are merely illustrative of the various ways in which 
mobiles can change social circumstances favourably. Others included: 
using MIXIT to teach basic maths; mobilising protest by using SMS; 
“dating” agricultural growers with produce buyers using text alerts 
(TradeNet in Ghana); getting people to speak out against domestic 
violence (WOUGNET in Uganda); gathering data using Java-apps to create 
simple menus; weekly farming tips to farmers (CELAC project in Uganda); 
using a mobile phone on a table for conference calls with farmers; and 
many, many others.

So whilst NGO professionals now make far greater use of PCs and the 
Internet in their work (according to the Worldwide Worx survey for 2007, 
99% of South African NGOs use e-mail), there is a growing 
acknowledgement that mobile phones can be used effectively for wider 
communication. As Peter Benjamin of CellLife told me:”There’s a huge 
demand for information. Very good information already exists (in the 
HIV-AIDS field) and there are high levels of cell-phone usage. (For most 
of the people we want to talk to) e-mails and the Internet are from 
another planet. The mobile is the device in the hands of the majority 
and it can do interactions.”

So if it’s such an obviously good idea, why can’t I name more 
successful, long-standing projects that have begun to change the 
fundamentals of communication or the lives of people? On the fingers of 
one hand, you have the aforementioned jobs service from One World and 
Safaricom’s M-Pesa service (which was initially funded by DFID through 
Vodafone) and errrr…that’s it? Readers may wish to write and tell me 
what a fool I am for forgetting to mention other long-standing projects 
but I doubt that I will find myself using the fingers of more than two 
hands.

The immediate and seemingly reasonable response is that many of these 
projects are in their early stages. There did not seem to be a single 
project I spoke to at the conference that was not a pilot: in other 
words it will be funded for a year to three years and then may 
disappear. However, the early pioneers stretch back further and few have 
found their financial feet or scaled up in such a way that they have 
made a significant major impact. Indeed one might ask: with so many 
pilots around, when are we going to see some flying?

An uncomfortable circle of circumstances involving what the service is, 
who might use and how it is funded chases its own tail to no little or 
no effect. You need scale to demonstrate effect. Scale takes time and 
money to establish. SMS itself in Africa did not spring out suddenly 
newly-formed with millions of users, it took time to develop. With 
certain notable exceptions, donors and foundations are keen to seed but 
do not take a long view.

Impact only comes with scale. A few hundred users is hopeless, a few 
thousand users is promising, a few hundred thousand users is suggestive 
and over a million means you’re actually getting somewhere. For complex 
systems, like agriculture, you need to have “critical mass” across 
several countries. Faced with the daunting cliff of “scaling-up” or 
“rolling-out”, some in the development community go squishy and start 
saying things like cultures are different and things work differently in 
different places. But whilst this is undoubtedly true, these are what we 
know technically speaking as “excuses”.

Mobile phones and the practice of using them differs from country to 
country but that hasn’t stopped them rolling out in every country in the 
world. The same will be true for services on mobile phones and their use 
as media: ways will be differ but certain things will be the same and 
the challenge is to make it so useful that people can’t fail to want it.

It’s not about technology, it’s about what makes people’s lives easier. 
The big abstract concept areas of development (like health) may sound 
important and “do you good” but they have to fit into how people lead 
their lives and their sense of priorities. For as Mark Davies of 
TradeNet (who wrestles with the complicated issues affecting farmers) 
said:”It’s all about understanding the agents of change and that’s 
anthropology not technology.” People in development all too often think 
they know what’s good for people and for all the rhetoric about 
“bottom-up approaches” simply fail to observe what people are saying or 
doing.

To be fair, that listening process is not as simple as it sounds. Gary 
Marsden of University of Cape Town ran a session that looked at the 
important relationship between potential users and developers. The 
design community’s version of “bottom-up” is “user-centred design”: the 
user becomes part of the design team in a warm, humane Scandinavian 
version of co-creation after you show them a prototype.

The real difficulty faced by developers, according to Marsden, was that 
the potential users had no familiarity or conceptual framework to make a 
useful input. To use an analogy, it would be a bit like showing a 
pre-automobile, horse-rider a car and asking for design input. Why are 
there no stirrups? One Mexican group simply watched closely the intended 
users making use of the tools provided and used paper to sketch out what 
might happen with them.

But this observation probably applies better to more complex apps for 
computers or menu-driven apps for mobiles, not SMS. But even with SMS 
simple design flaws can upset the process. One application for data 
collection using SMS involved using the hash key as separators but the 
hash key was different when the phone was in SMS mode for some users. 
 From my own experience, African users want to be helpful and will often 
consciously or unconsciously simply mirror back what the project’s 
initiators want to hear.
The conference had a session on “sustainability” which is one version of 
development-speak for: how will it pay for itself? I was unable to 
attend this session as I was speaking in another session but having 
closely grilled two or three people who attended, there didn’t seem to 
be a whole lot of answers that were aired.

In truth, there are only three broad, long-term answers and none make 
very comfortable listening for those who want these projects to succeed. 
The user pays, the Government pays or as with other media, a sponsor or 
advertiser pays. There is an interesting sub-set of the user pays which 
is political issues and the campaigning that goes with them: Greenpeace 
Argentina can use phone calls to find supporters and ask some of them 
for funds to pay for this work. If it’s important to you and you want it 
enough, you’ll find a way of paying for it.

The development sector usually assumes that if people are poor, then a 
service will need to be “free-at-the-point-of-delivery”: it costs money 
to have the service but it comes out of general taxation. But at one 
level poor people are not so different from the more well-off. The 
Orange Foundation ran a scheme in a poor part of Mali’s capital Bamako. 
Mothers would bring their babies to be weighed and the weights of the 
babies would be mailed to a paediatrician. He or she checked their 
progress and if and when weight progress fell below a certain level, 
advice or medication would be provided.

There were 300 subscribers paying US$1.05 a month and by any description 
this is a health insurance scheme. As with using mobile phones, the poor 
will pay for what they really value. Therefore one challenge is to 
produce a service that they really value and large number can afford to 
pay a small amount for: Safaricom’s M-Pesa has 2.5 million users because 
it is a service that is really valued by its users. No capacity building 
workshops were run to help users, they taught themselves based on the 
service’s marketing information.

There will be some services that cannot be commercialised because they 
are simply a public service: these will either need to be fundraised for 
or ultimately become part of the budget of Government. For the latter, 
the justification for spending will be two-fold. It communicates more 
effectively with a group of people and/or it is more cost effective. So 
for example, collecting data electronically is challenging but almost 
certainly quicker and cheaper than its paper and physical collection 
equivalent. But for African Governments, it implies overhauling a 
sclerotic and often inert civil service by moving money out of existing 
ways of doing things into new more effective ways of doing them.

In terms of advertising and sponsors, the level of activity needs to be 
at a critical mass to attract interest. Praekelt Foundation’s use of 
advertising slogans on Call Me messages can reach 13 million people 
daily in South Africa. But for only 120 characters, the few thousand 
dollars they charge per million users seems reasonable. Nevertheless nw 
advertising media take time to establish themselves.

But whatever the challenges and limitations of using mobiles as a media, 
this one will run and run as all those involved wrestle with different 
ways to make it work.