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Agriculture, Family Planning, Health, Health, Maternal & Child Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Women in Development

mHealth for Women: A Diverse Set of Applications

Photo Credit: Anupam Nath / AP

In an ode to International Women’s Day, we wanted to review a few of the mobile health projects and programs directly focused on women’s health issues. mHealth has a great variance in the type of applications used to promote and assist in women’s health. This ranges from sending health information about pregnancy via basic text messaging to more advanced tools that allow community health workers to collect data, diagnosis diseases, and refer patients. As the need and ability to extend health information to women in developing countries increases, here is a diverse set of examples that have been used or are in current use.

MOTECH

Launched in Ghana, the Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTECH) initiative has a duel focus – providing health information to pregnant women and arming community health workers with applications to track the services provide to women and children. This project was funded by the Gates Foundation and has worked in partnership with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Ghana Health Service. The “Mobile Midwife” application provides pregnant women with time-specific information about their pregnancy via text or voice messages. This includes reminders about seeking care, advice on how to deal with specific challenges during pregnancy, and knowledge about best practices and child development. The Nurses’ Application allows community health workers to register and track the care provided to patients in the region. By recording patient data in the MOTECH Java application and sending it to the MOTECH database, the system captures the data and can send automatic reminders to nurses for when and what type of follow up care to provide. For more information about the MOTECH as well as the lessons learned, read the report from March 2011, “Mobile Technology for Community Health in Ghana: What It Is and What Grameen Foundation Has Learned So Far.”

MAMA

Launch in May 2011, MAMA (Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action) is a public-private partnership focused leveraging mobile connectivity to improve information and access to health care for pregnant and new mothers in developing countries. USAID and Johnson & Johnson are the founding partners, and the United Nations Foundation, the mHealth Alliance, and BabyCenter are supporting partners. This initial 3-year, $10 million investment from USAID and J&J is being used to build and expand global capacity of new and current mHelath programs in three countries – Bangladesh, South Africa, and India. The beauty of the MAMA Partnership is the focus on country ownership through these partners. And each country has a separate focus based on the specific needs and problems of the maternal health. In Bangladesh, the focus is to decrease maternal morbidity and mortality through stage-based health messages via mobile phones to low-income and at-risk mothers. The public-private partnership network in Bangladesh has already been established. Lead by D.Net, it includes technology developers (InSTEDD, SSD-Tech), corporate sponsors (BEXIMCO), outreach NGOs (Save the Children, BRAC), mobile operators (Airtel, Grameenphone, Banglalink), content providers (MCC Ltd), media (Unitrend Limited, Brand Forum), researchers (ICDDR, B), and government agencies (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare). In India, MAMA is completing a landscape analysis to understand the complex cultural environment and see in what areas mobile phones can be utilized to improve maternal health throughout the country. Finally, in South Africa, MAMA has partnered with the Praekelt Foundation (lead partner), Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, and Cell-life to provide messages to pregnant and new mothers about receiving earlier antenatal care, prevention mother-to-child HIV transmission, and exclusively breastfeeding.

CycleTel

Developed by the Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) at Georgetown University, CycleTel is an innovative solution, combining a previously used family planning technique with mobile phones. In 2001, IRH created the Standard Days Method (SDM) as a low-cost alternative to family planning based on a women’s menstrual cycle. By avoiding intercourse on a woman’s most fertile days during her menstrual cycle, days 8 to 19, there is only a 5% chance of becoming pregnant. Having developed the system, IRH saw a natural fit with mobile phones. In the original set up, women would use Cyclebeads (multiple colored beads used to represent specific days of a menstrual cycle) to keep track of when they are more likely to become pregnant. Using the same idea, the CycleTel replaced the beads with a mobile phone. Each month on the first day of menses, a women text messages the system. Utilizing FrontlineSMS, it then responds by sending a message showing which days she could get pregnant. In 2009, IRH conducted a research study in the region of Uttar Pradesh, India. The pilot showed the need to tweak the system to fit the region context including the local languages and women’s past experience using mobile phones. But it also showed the willingness of women and men to pay for the service in order to avoid unwanted pregnancies. This program is being operated under to the Fertility Awareness-Based Methods (FAM) Project which is funded by USAID.

Dunia Wanita

Dunia Wanita, which means World of Women, was launched in February 2010 by Telkomsel, a MNO in Indonesia. It is a part of the MNO’s value-added services applications and is specifically for women to receive information on a number of different topics, including health. The subscription costs $0.12 per day. By dialing *468#, women have access to a “one stop info service.” By selecting “Cantik Sehat” (Health and Beautiful), women can receive health information and advice from famous Indonesian doctors. The voice messages include information about sexual health, pregnancy, and healthy living.

These are just a few examples of mobile health applications that are available to women in the developing world. The applications vary in information provided, media used, and business models utilized. This is a great illustration of how diverse mobile health can be in order to reach a targeted group within a country, based on infrastructure, location, health knowledge, and mobile usage/connectivity.

March 8, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Food Security, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

ICTs for “Productivity” Component of the Ag. Value Chain

Photo Credit: The African

Smallholder farmers face agricultural productivity challenges in the areas of under-investment in R&D; the actual processes of agricultural research and communication; access and utilization of agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizer, agrochemicals, etc. by farmers; and accurate information on field production practices. On the other hand, success stories of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to minimize each of these challenges are being documented across the globe and the potential for increasing the impact of ICTs on agricultural production is huge.

As the first in the 3-piece series on “Mapping ICT Solutions along the Agricultural Value Chain”, this post explains how ICT solutions are being used or can be used by value chain actors within the productivity segment of the value chain. ICT solutions in this category may support value chain actors who are involved in agricultural research and development, input manufacture and supply, extension, and production for increased access to information and knowledge for agricultural production.

Potential ICT Solutions for Agricultural Research and Development (R&D)

Agricultural R&D is a key component of the value chain and in most developing nations, has great limitation due to poor access to the global knowledge pool by the developing nations researchers. ICT solutions in this sub-category may support the work of agricultural researchers, agricultural science students, extension staffs, and farmers to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, exchange of information between and among them.

Examples of ICT solutions identified include mobile applications such as the i) OakMapper, a mobile application which allows users to submit occurrences of Sudden Oak Death (SOD), search for incidents, and to report them to the geospatial enabled database; ii) Rural Universe Network (RUNetwork), a network of several partners in the Caribbean to help improve the availability of local knowledge and information through the development of a rural communication system; iii) eRails, a free website for partners across Africa working in the area of agriculture and rural development to help them share their new innovations; iv) AGORA and TEEAL by FAO and Cornell University respectively helping to increase access of developing nations researchers and academics to scientific journals to facilitate their research work.

Photo Credit: Thulasy Balasubramaniam and Graham Lettner

Potential ICT Solutions for Access to Agricultural Inputs

Increased access to inputs such as seed, animal feed, fertilizer, machinery, financial support, insurance, and irrigation systems at the right time, the right price, and in the right amounts is key for successful production by farmers. Actors within this segment are mostly private sector and for-profit firms that need to be in constant communication with the smallholder farmers to ensure profitable investment. Communication tools are important for continuous flow of information between these partners to be able to develop the right input that works for the farmers. At the same time, input manufacturers and suppliers are expected to collaborate with researchers who test these inputs for their suitability for farmers to help in commercialization and scaling up promising agricultural technologies that could benefit smallholder farmers.

ICT solutions within this category may support activities of input manufacturers, suppliers, and users for timely, more efficient and effective use of these agricultural inputs. Some of the ICT applications identified include the use of i) E-Voucher system in Zambia to facilitate easy access to inputs by farmers, help involve the private sector, and reduce fraud in the delivery of these inputs; ii) the Agrian Mobile Information Center, a mobile app that allows users to access product information while in the field, search by product name, active ingredients, signal word, etc. and iii) Kilimo Salama, an input insurance system in Kenya for farmers as they purchase inputs for their farms.

Potential ICT Solutions for Agricultural Production

Apart from inputs and other new technologies from research, farmers put in a lot of resources and efforts into the actual production process on the field. Smallholder farmers across the globe are known for their innovative activities in the face of limited access to scientific knowledge and resources for production. Information communication technologies can play significant role in either way – connecting them to scientific resources and information and also link these farmers together to share their indigenous knowledge and experiences acquired over the years. ICT solutions in this sub-category may help in communicating information to support field activities by farmers such as weather, pest and diseases, soil nutrient levels, harvesting practices, gestation cycles, and knowledge sharing among farming communities.

Photo Credit: FAO

Some of the tools identified within this group include i) Crop Calendar, an online resource created by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which provides timely information about seeds to promote local crop production by farmers; ii) iCow, a voice-based mobile application that prompts cattle farmers on vital days of cows gestation period; iii) NEXT2, a geo-social application that is able to connect farmers with similar interest that are geographically co-located through SMS, voice, or mobile web to share local knowledge, expertise and experiences; and iv) a host of traditional radio programs that are assisting farmers’ production activities.

In concluding this piece, it is clear that the huge potential of the new digital network for agricultural productivity is yet to be fully exploited for smallholder farmers. The technologies are affecting the work of agricultural researchers, extension workers, input manufacturers and distributors, private sector organizations interested in partnering with governments to improve agriculture, and some farmers at the remotest communities. But stakeholders need to devise better strategies for fully integrating these solutions into their projects.

This is the first in a 3-part series that explains the role of ICTs within the three major stages of the agricultural value chain – Productivity, Marketing, & Monitoring and Evaluation. We’ll soon be launching a dynamic and interactive version of “Apps4Ag Database” project on March 9^th during GBI’s TechTalk:Mapping ICTs Along the Ag Value Chain.

March 6, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

From Classrooms to Economies, INTEL White Paper Says eLearning is Making a Postive Impact

Photo credit: Kitguru.com

Intel’s recently released white paper entitled “The Positive Impacts of Learning”, provides new research data that concludes that eLearning is improving the quality and effectiveness of education. An updated version of the 2009 paper, it offers a comprehensive glimpse at some key research findings aimed at helping educational leaders identify relevant eLearning benefits to make well-informed decisions for developing eLearning strategies.

Intel realizes, along with much of the ICT sector, that with an endless array of both failed and successful examples of implementation strategies for eLearning — and few published results of strictly controlled experimental studies — it is difficult for researchers to produce valid data that can actually prove the efficacy of improving the quality of education through the use of ICT. By comparing data from a spectrum of different studies conducted in the US and various countries, the paper draws several important conclusions supporting the theory that eLearning is in fact positively impacting not only students and teachers, but also their families, communities, societies, and economies.

Students:

Research has shown that there are three major areas of student learning affected by eLearning: engagement, motivation and attendance. Teachers that were surveyed or consulted in many of the studies reported that student motivation was improved the most out these three areas, as much as 76% of low achieving students involved in 1:1 computing programs in one teacher survey.

Access:

Access to technology is a large factor in student performance levels. Studies have found that 1:1 computing programs are much more beneficial than computer labs. Through analyzing 13 different countries, researchers have found that students with easy access to ICT in the classrooms or involved in 1:1 programs are significantly more likely to use ICT than students who only had access to computer labs. Not only do these students use the devices more, but another study showed that academic scores and attendance improved significantly.

Quality of Learning:

When deciding how deeply the technology should be integrated into the learning process, Intel concludes that the more opportunities and easier accessibility that students have to the technology, the greater the effects. Intel has found that student-centered teaching methodologies coupled with blended learning, a strategy that mixes different educational environments, is the most effective way of ensuring that students fully value and explore all learning possibilities available through the technology. With similar advantages found in differentiated instruction methods, students are then able to learn at their own pace and adopt strategies to develop skills needed for self-regulated learning.

Performance:

Photo credit: anonymous from blogspot.net

The white paper suggests that various aspects of student performance, particularly 21st century skills needed to compete in a developing global economy, are significantly improved through the use of ICT. For example, “in one two-year study of upper elementary classrooms with 1:1 computing access, students outperformed non-laptop students on English Language Arts (ELA) literary response and analysis and writing strategies, (Suhr et al., U.S.).”

Teachers:

Access:

Research shows that giving teachers computers or helping them to purchase them is incredibly valuable to these programs. Through boosting teacher confidence in the validity of the information that they are teaching and offering various ways to plan lessons efficiently, teachers can become empowered through technology. Intel suggests that by creating learning management systems, software applications for managing online learning, and training teachers how to use them, educators can share and contribute to a growing body of open educational resources (OER).

Performance:

Besides visible improvements in the quality of student learning, teachers management skills improve as well. Better organizational skills and levels of productivity were reported in most of the studies referenced in the report. In one study, “68 percent of teachers with 1 to 3 years of experience say that technology has increased their effectiveness by making them more productive, (Project Tomorrow, U.S.),”

Society and Community:

A number of studies suggest that eLearning is creating benefits for students across all social classes but that disadvantaged, at-risk, and disabled groups of students benefit more. For example, “the Texas Technology Immersion Pilot showed that economically disadvantaged students reached proficiency levels matching the skills of advantaged control students, (Texas Center for Educational Research, U.S.).” At the broader social level, Intel suggests that by improving basic education, eLearning can indirectly reduce levels of criminal activity and increase students’ involvement in improving their communities.

Photo credit: impactlab.net

As policy makers use eLeaning to improve basic education, they are focusing on the larger effects on the economy. Emphasizing this fact, the report highlights the creation of more job opportunities and developing a workforce better able to fill these jobs. For example, “The OECD estimates the demand for employees with technology skills is growing at a pace that most labor markets struggle to satisfy, stating that approximately 16 million people are employed by the ICT sector, and representing approximately 6 percent of the OECD business sector employment. Furthermore, the estimate is that this sector is growing faster than most other business sectors.”

The full report and bibliography for the studies referenced above can be accessed here.

March 1, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Education, Education Partnerships, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Attention ICT Innovators: Have you Considered Peace Corps?

No, I don’t actually mean you should commit to 2 years of service in the Peace Corps (though if you have the time, “life is calling” as the PC recruiters say), but what about joining forces with them? With over 9,000 volunteers, 40% of which focus on education and another 12% in business and ICT, and spanning the globe in about 76 developing countries, isn’t that a resource worth exploring?

I’ve been thinking about this lately since there seems to be a growing amount of speculation about how new innovations in information communication technologies (ICT) are being introduced into classrooms throughout the developing world without enough, or any, teacher training to ensure sustainability. Take for example the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. It drew a lot of criticism after it first released the XO 1.0 laptop for lack of teacher-focused training programs on how to use the devices and it is soon to become even more controversial with the release of the much talked-about XO 3.0 tablet.

Amidst reading the numerous critical blogs and some rather heated debates, I’ve started to wonder: What on-the-ground research is being done to assess the need for some of these new innovations in a specific country in the first place? What resources, particularly people, are already available to help introduce and support the teacher training needed for local teachers to deem the technology useful and relevant within the unique cultural context?

In Cambodia, where I recently served as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the Prey Veng Regional Teacher Training Center (RTTC), the Khmer have a saying: “Don’t take the straight or winding path. Take the path your ancestors have taken.” And new innovations in ICT can be seen as just that — a long winding path of new and confusing devices, unfamiliar to an aging population of school officials and teachers that think they have fared well enough as educators without the help of new gadgets.

Last month, leading experts and stakeholders in the field of mobile learning discussed how people’s perceptions of mobile phones are impeding progress in mobile learning in the recently released UNESCO Mobile Learning Week report:

Perhaps due to the intellectually-light and entertainment-heavy content that has been optimized for mobile devices over the past decade, the primary social challenge is convincing people that phones are NOT a barrier to learning.

Even in American classrooms, mobile phones can often be thought of as a distraction, most commonly used for texting and watching YouTube videos, rarely ever thought of as a valuable teaching aide that teachers could already be using if they had the training or interest to explore its potential on their own.

And mobile devices are just the tip of this growing iceberg of ICT, OER, FOSS, and a plethora of other acronyms used in this field. So once the need and appropriateness of a technology is determined useful for a particular country and educational environment, who might be able to help train teachers how to use and develop it? Who has three months of intensive language training and culture-sensitivity seminars, works and lives with the locals, has a wide range of connections within the school system, and strives to understand the complexities of the education system? That’s right — the tech-savvy Peace Corps Volunteers.

Now that’s an assumption and generalization that all PCVs know and care about what’s going on in the ICT4D field and have any interest of being involved in such endeavors — dealing with stray dogs and gastrointestinal diseases is a challenge enough. But why not reach out to the volunteers in your ICT-destined country and give them a chance to use some of those international relationship building skills that they spent hours cultivating during training.

And Peace Corps is just one of several organizations that send volunteers into the developing world. VSO UK and VSO International, Volunteer Service Overseas organizations, are quite similar to Peace Corps volunteers in regards to their culture and language immersion and 26% work in the education sector. The interactive map below shows where Peace Corps and VSO volunteers are currently serving and the program sectors that they work in. Almost every country has volunteers working in the education sector and some have already launched information technology-related projects:

View Volunteer Programs in Education and ICT in a larger map

February 23, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Mobile, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Western Cape taxis to use smart cards

The Peninsula Taxi Association (PTA) in the Western Cape will become the first taxi organisation using electronic payments in South Africa.

The Peninsula Taxi Association (PTA) will become the first taxi organisation to use a smart cards system for payment (image: Gateway)

The end of January saw the launch of the Tap-I-Fare card payment system. Five thousand cards were distributed to passengers. These cards are compatible with the MyCiTi bus service and Johannesburg’s Reya Vaya bus service too.

With a fleet of 250 vehicles, the PTA is testing the system on a number of taxis for now. “As a pilot project at the moment, the card system was being implemented in 42 vehicles which ran the city to Victoria & Alfred Waterfront route but would be rolled out to other routes in future. The 42 vehicles had wireless hand-held devices upon which the cards were swiped,” the New Age wrote.

“As the most progressive taxi association in the country, it was always the vision of the PTA to look ahead and pre-empt the ever changing needs of the commuter. This meant that changes had to be made to keep up with the times, and this card payment system was but one option that was explored,” said Ghaalid Behardien, association spokesperson .

The first 1000 passengers to buy a new card will get it at 50% discount, while card holders’ fares from Cape Town central to the V&A Waterfront are reduced by 50c.

Charlie Fripp – Online editor

February 8, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Environment, Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Cheat Sheet: ICTs for Climate Change

How can ICTs be used to combat climate change? Stan Karanasios’s paper entitled “New & Emergent ICTs and Climate Change in Developing Countries” outlines emerging ICTs in 3 steps:

monitoring of climate change and the environment
disaster management
climate change adaptation

Excerpts from the paper outline uses of ICTs for climate change:

Monitoring of climate change and the environment

For developing countries to better understand their local climate and be able to anticipate climate change impacts, they must have adequate local and national observation networks, and access to the data captured from other global and regional networks.

Types of technology include:

satellite systems
wireless broadband technologies
wireless sensor networks (WSN)
mobile phones
hand-held devices

Examples of environmental monitors:

Rainfall and Landslide- In hilly regions of western India, SenSlide, a distributed sensor system, predicts rather than just detects landslides. Landslides occur frequently, often during the monsoon when rain causes significant damage. SenSlide makes use of WSN and strain gauges, providing data to a network.
Fire- In South Africa, FireHawk, a forest fire system of cameras with zoom lenses and microwave transmitters and receivers was implemented in mountainous and extreme temperate locations. The system automatically detects fires, even at night, limiting the impact of damage.
Flood- In Honduras, a WSN for flood monitoring was developed that was able to withstand river flooding and the severe stromes causing the floods, communicate over a 10,000 km river basin, predict flooding autonomously, and limit cost, allowing feasible implementation of the system.
Impacts of Agriculture- In India a WSN-based agriculture management system named COMMON-Sense Net, was deployed to support rain-fed agriculture and provide farmers with environmental data. Wireless sensors were deployed in geographical clusters, each with one base-station that was connected to a local server via a Wi-Fi link and organized in groups, each corresponding to a particular application, such as crop modeling, water conservation measures, or deficit irrigation management.

Disaster management

Responding to natural disasters in a timely and effective manner has emerged as an important climate change theme particularly in developing countries; where in addition to the immediate crisis vulnerable communities suffer excessively from the secondary post-disaster effects that compound the tragedy. In many cases, the existing telecommunication infrastructure will be significantly or completely destroyed by an extreme weather event, and hence rapidly deployable networks and other communication services need to be employed for disaster relief operations.

Communication Methods:

Emergency Communication Systems- In Bangladesh an Integrated Information and Communication System is underway which will use satellite, wireless broadband, mobile phones and community radio services strengthening communication links between rescue and relief units and Emergency Operation Centers (EOC).
Rapidly Deployable Communications
Social Networking- During Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines in 2009, local volunteers organized and disseminated information online through websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Organizations and affected people used these sites for timely reports concerning the extent of damage, to provide information on the resources required tand to allocate relief resources.
GIS & Other Information Systems- Visualize high risk zones; evacuation routes, shelters and the catalogue of available resource and their proximity
Early Warning Systems- satellite radio, mobile phones, cell broadcasting system, the web, WSNs, and CAP (common alerting protocol) can be coupled with climate data for immediate and short/medium/long-term warnings to minimize harm to vulnerable communities.

Disaster Management Project Example: Project DUMBO

Mesh Networks and Disaster Response in Thailand DUMBO, a project initiated by the Asian Institute of Technology Internet Education and Research Laboratory, developed and tested asystem for response to emergency scenarios in Thailand . Making use of the concept of wireless mesh networks, DUMBO uses lightweight portable mobile nodes to broaden coverage and penetrate deep into areas not accessible by roads or where the telecommunication infrastructure has been destroyed. During the trials in Thailand, laptops were carried on elephants to extend thewireless mesh network coverage. On the networking side, the solution utilised hybrid WiFi and satellite connectivity. The second application component involved sensors, which allowed for readings of environmental data such as temperature, humidity, pressure, windspeed, wind direction, rainfall and CO2. The third application component involved facial recognition software that allowed rescuers to compare facial images captured from the site to the collection of known faces. This is one of a few systems in developing countries that make use of emergent technologies and combine communications with integrated disaster applications

Climate change adaptation

To cope with current and future climate stress, communities – particularly those most vulnerable to developing countries – must build their resilience, including adopting appropriate technologies, while making the most of traditional knowledge, and diversifying their livelihoods. For instance, monitoring networks can inform habitat location (provide information to house communities away from a flood or landslide in prone areas), better agriculture (based on informed climate information or water allocation) and provide early warnings, amongst other applications. Mobile technology should be scaled-up for adaptation.

There is a lot of room for growth in developing ICTs for adapting to climate change through collecting, analyzing and disseminating information particularly in space-based systems, GIS, WSNs, wireless broadband technology, mobile technology, and soft technologies such as Web-based tools. By doing so, bottom-up local coping strategies will be encouraged.

February 7, 2012/by actualize

Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

How ICTs Can Empower Blind Students: Souktel’s New Audio Service in Palestine

Lately there has been a lot of talk about how mobile phones can improve the access to and quality of education in the classroom. But how has the technology affected students with special needs?

Souktel, an organization that designs and delivers mobile phone services for finding jobs and connecting aid agencies with communities in need, announced Tuesday that it has developed a new mobile audio service that is empowering blind and low-literacy communities. The voice messaging system allows users to record messages online and send them to multiple phones easily and efficiently. The messages can then be retrieved by the recipients through using a voice-activated service or touch-tone audio menu, allowing easy access to information for the visually impaired and illiterate.

As part of Souktel’s mission to give low-income communities the information they need to improve their lives, Nureddin Amro, founder of the Siraj al-Quds School in East Jerusalem for both blind and sighted students, is now able to use this innovation to record messages online and send them to the mobile phones of students, staff, and parents. “It saves a lot of time and money,” says Amro, “I love using it. We sent a message just yesterday [to several hundred people] announcing the launch of a new program and the services and activities that will start February 1st … And I’ll send another one out tomorrow to advertise the beginning of second semester.”

Nureddin, visually handicapped and an innovator himself, has pioneered a new integrated-education approach to teaching visually impaired students, allowing them equal opportunities in school and providing them with the necessary skills to becoming accepted and integrated into their communities. Recognized for his advocacy for disabled students’ rights and groundbreaking work at the school, Nurredin was named an Arab World Social Innovator by the Synergos Institue in New York, the organization which funded the Souktel project.

Using mobile phones in education is certainly not a new idea but mobile learning, commonly referred to as mLearning, is such a new opportunity for many schools within developing countries that searching for documented examples of it’s application to aid blind students yields few results. Computer-based technology, or eLearning, has already provided tools that are helping visually impaired students. In fact, Nureddin’s Siraj al-Quds School is already using ‘talking computer’ technology which uses an assistive learning computer program designed for blind students.

But through identifying more cases where Souktel’s services can be used, as well as exploring new creative ways in how mlearning can be introduced to help, not only blind students, but all students with special needs, these new technologies promise to aid education and informing low-literacy populations. “In almost every developing country, illiteracy and disability are massive challenges,” says Souktel president Jacob Korenblum. “When a large percentage of the community can’t read, they can’t get the basic information they need for daily life: Where to find a doctor, where to find emergency food supplies.” For Souktel, mobile audio services have become a growing part of its work and will be a major focus for 2012.

February 2, 2012/by actualize

Connectivity, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

What exactly is 3.75G?

Recently, the term ’3.75G’ has been appearing all across Africa. Airtel is most keen on 3.75G branding and plans to soon offer the platform in more nations where the company operates 3G (presumably all eight). Nations currently with 3.75G service include:

South Africa (Cell C)
Congo-Brazzaville (Airtel)
Sierra Leone (Airtel)
Zambia (Airtel)
Ghana (Airtel)
Nigeria (Etisalat)
Egypt (Etisalat)

But, what exactly is 3.75G and how does it compare to 3G or 3.5G?

Airtel, along with other mobile operators, touts HSPA+ service as being 3.75G. Other sources (including 3GPP), consider HSPA+ to be 3.9G. Airtel’s country pages all include a brief description of how they define 3.75G. Sierra Leone’s page states:

3G has evolved through several updates, leading to the very latest release, HSPA+, which is referred to as 3.75G, now available on airtel. 3.75G technology operates at dazzling speeds of up to 14.4 MB/s downlink and 5.7MB/s uplink.”

However, the 3.75G page for Zambia lists a 3.75G top download speed of 21Mbps, thus making Airtel’s cited 3.75G technology speeds incongruous. We deduce that either Airtel is offering 3.75G (HSPA) at a maximum of 14Mbps, they are offering 3.9G (HSPA+) at a maximum of 21Mbps, or they are simply changing out download speed since the handsets sold in Sierra Leone might not have the same chipset as those sold in Zambia.

Either way, the HSPA+/3.75G terms are used solely for marketing purposes. The same goes for the 4G versus LTE versus WiMAX debate. Mobile operators endure fierce competition to attract customers (who drive profits).

Although 3.9G is better than 3.75G and 3.75G is by all means technically superior than 3.5G, there will not be a noticeable transfer speed difference for most customers. Factors like signal strength and coverage mitigate any advertised speeds. African 3G users aren’t about to experience anything higher than even 10Mbps. But, since 21 Mbps speeds are technically possible, they are allowed to be used for advertising purposes.

Often, 3.75G is the first form of 3G service available in a country. Accordingly, the mobile operator skips mention of just “3G” and goes straight to using “3.75G” due to the potential marketing benefits.

In Nigeria, Etisalat was quick to describe the move to 3.75G as a major innovation. They also claimed it was the fastest 3G network in Nigeria. However, reading on, it becomes apparent that the move was mainly impressive since it replaced a 2.5G network with true 3G. It just so happened that the 3G platform was of the 3.75G release.

However, when 3.75G arrived in Congo-Brazzaville in October 2011, Airtel used plain 3G terminology in their news release announcing the arrival of 3G service in the country. There was no mention of 3.75G. Similarly, there is no mention of 3.75G in Airtel’s video spot promoting 3G service beginning in January 2012 (although Airtel’s social media never fails to mention 3.75G).

Mobile competition has increased remarkably in Africa since that time, and 3G operators (mostly Airtel) have begun to increase their efforts to secure customers.

However, customers should be focused on how the latest mobile technologies can ease the strains of life rather than exact technical specs. Bragging rights can be enjoyable, but what matters is not the benchmarks “3.75G” and “14Mbps” or whether 3.75G is really considered HSPA+. Important instead are that 3G is available and that costs are becoming more reasonable. What matters is that 3.75G (or 3.9G) enhances mobile health efforts and provides new educational opportunities.

A rough comparison of recent 3GPP releases and basic features. {Sayy 365}

February 1, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

UNESCO Mobile Learning Week Report: 3 Projects for Policy Development

UNESCO released a report last week introducing three exciting new projects that promise to shape how policies are developed for mobile learning programs. Within the year, UNESCO will develop and release a set of policy guidelines, commission and publish ten working papers, and introduce four pilot projects in teacher development in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal.

The report was a summary of project goals as well as an overview of discussions and ideas organized by participants at UNESCO’s first Mobile Learning Week (MLW). The event which was held at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris last month drew approximately 30 experts in mobile learning and 100 participants from the fields of mobile technology and education to discuss the use of mobile technologies in the classroom.

Policy Guidelines:

The most challenging but promising of the three UNESCO initiatives is the development of a set of policy guidelines due to be released by the end of 2012. There are currently many examples of the use of mobile technologies in the classroom but few are supported by – or the result of – effective and sustainable policy-making initiatives. Through discussions between UNESCO, MLW participants, and a growing global community of mobile learning educators and leaders, these new guidelines will be broad enough to encompass different cultural contexts, stakeholders, and technologies so that they can be used by national governments and educators and evolve with new developments in mobile technologies.

Discussions surrounding this topic generated general considerations and challenges including:

Consideration must be given to the perspectives of the stakeholders (mobile network operators, teachers, students, etc.) and their interaction with each other
Guidelines should be flexible and be able to adapt to new technologies and their applications
Costs of internet access and personal-ownership of devices remains a challenge
Efforts should be made to dispel negative views of mobile technologies within the classroom
Lessons should be learned from past examples of successful and unsuccessful projects
Mobile technology should support a well developed curriculum and pedagogy and not become the focus of the content

10 Mobile Learning Working Papers:

To provide research information for the policy guidelines and teacher development projects, UNESCO has commissioned ten working papers: five that will investigate mobile learning policies in the five major world regions (Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and North America) and five that will investigate mobile technologies for teacher development and support. Drafts of the papers were presented and discussed at the MLW.

Photo credit: http://www.redorbit.com

The five papers on mobile learning policies won’t provide an in-depth analysis of each region but should give a general overview and provide examples of policy development. The papers will explore the pervasive lack of mobile learning policies around the world, observing the misconception by some policy makers that mobile technologies are distracting from learning and should be banned in schools. They will also include lessons learned from success stories of initiatives supported by governments and tech-savvy model teachers.

The additional five papers will examine professional development for teachers using mobile technologies in the classroom as well as how professional development can be delivered through mobile technology to teachers across the five regions. These papers will observe how mobile technologies are being used already, how they can be used in the future, and explore the use of mobile technologies with other educational tools and resources.

4 Teacher Development Pilot Projects:

Finally, UNESCO will launch four pilot projects to explore how mobile technologies can be used to provide support and professional development for teachers in Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria and Senegal. Though the projects are still in the planning stages, MLW participants were able to provide input to important questions such as “What guidelines and understandings should steer the projects? What does the organization need to do, address, and keep in mind to best ensure the projects it launches are successful?”

To learn more about the MLW participant’s comments and ideas about these new projects and mobile learning policy development, see the full report here.

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Financial services demonstrate the most proven sustainable business models within ICT4D

The following is a guest post we’re pleased to share by Hystra Consulting and Ashoka.

A recent study reveals how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can viably provide access to education, healthcare, agro-services and financial services to the Base of the Pyramid (BoP). The study reviewed more than 280 initiatives set up by various types of actors (corporations, Citizen Sector Organizations, social entrepreneurs…) in Asia, Latin America and Africa which are using ICTs to provide services to the BoP. Hystra, a French consulting firm and its partner Ashoka evaluated the projects based on their ability to solve a problem, their scalability and their financial sustainability. The report presents 15 of the most ground breaking market-based business models, which have reached a significant level of scale and have improved the living standards of the BoP using ICTs.

Financial sustainability varies across sectors, financial services being the most mature of the four areas studied.

3 of the projects featured as financial services case studies in the report serve profitably more than 5 million customers each via different business models: M-PESA in Kenya with mobile money, Bradesco in Brazil with branchless banking via post offices and small retail shops, and FINO in India with a suite of POS-powered financial services available to over 40 million clients via door-to-door agents.[1]

Why are financial services the most developed area in terms of business model sustainability? One of the reasons cited is the willingness of clients to pay upfront for the service, because it offers them immediate savings compared to previous practices (such as cheaper money transfers). Moreover ICT-based financial services often go well beyond previous offerings, creating new practices for unbanked populations such as savings or insurance schemes that lower their vulnerability to adverse events. For example, some MNOs have developed innovative loyalty-based life insurance covers. These types of products help reduce churn and attract new customers for MNOs while providing a new valuable service to customers.

Establishing trust in the service is a key factor of success for ICT-based financial services, as they deal directly with people’s money. These services require robust and secured platforms, in addition to trusted agents who are able to sell the service, manage liquidity and provide a direct interface between the technology platform and end-users. Leveraging existing trusted networks such as Safaricom’s airtime resellers (in the case of M-PESA) or post office agents (in the case of Bradesco) appears as an effective way to create trust in these services.

The business models studied in the report tap into multiple revenue sources, getting commissions from governments for g2p payments, banks and insurance companies for the opening of new accounts, end-users for the transactions they perform, and MNOs which benefit from customer retention and higher end-users fees. Governments can actually play a large role in promoting such services: using them for their G2P payments, they can be a sufficiently large first client of ICT-based financial services to justify the initial investment in the technology that new companies entering this space need to make – one of the first services offered by FINO was G2P payments and state health insurance, for example. Many actors have tried – with mitigated success – to replicate M-PESA. However, the study points out to a wider range of models which can be just as effective in providing financial services using ICT. The key is to find which business model is suitable in each local context.

The study was sponsored by AFD, Ericsson, France Telecom-Orange, ICCO and TNO and conducted by Hystra and Ashoka. The full report is available for download in the MMU library.

[1] The number of FINO clients stood at “only” 28 million when the case study was done in February 2011, but FINO grows by over a million customers each month!

January 25, 2012/by actualize

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