Zimbabweans speak out through SMS

International press interest may be on the wane following the heady heights of recent months, but the daily struggle continues for millions of people living in Zimbabwe. An inflation rate of over two million percent - usually a leading headline in itself - merely serves as a backdrop to the political manoeuvring taking place following the recent flawed presidential 'elections'.

It would be all too easy for people to lose hope, particularly in such a disempowering and disenfranchising environment dominated by fear, government harassment and a largely state controlled media which pushes out its own unique version of the truth. Freedom of speech is only freedom of speech when it comes with freedom from fear, something that many people don't yet have.

But hope, it turns out, is one of the few things many people still do have, and freedom of speech has found an ally in the humble mobile phone. I recently blogged about the use of mobile phones during the ongoing troubles, and highlighted the work of Kubatana.net, a grassroots organisation who have been pioneering the use of mobile technology in civil society work. Since 2005, Kubatana have been using a combination of kiwanja's FrontlineSMS platform, and a couple of other custom applications developed around the technology. Kubatana continue to use it, and continue to reach out to everyday Zimbabweans through the mobile channel - one of only a few available to them.

Back in April, at the height of the troubles, Kubatana asked everyday Zimbabweans: "What would you like a free Zimbabwe to look like?". Zimbabweans answered the call through their mobile phones, texting in their hopes for the future. Many people said that the question gave them hope in uncertain times.

Last week, while doubts lingered over the newly signed MDC/Zanu-PF deal, Kubatana reached out again to their SMS subscribers, asking them: "Kubatana! ZPF and both MDCs agree to talk to resolve crisis. Send yr thoughts on this & give us yr postal or email addr if u want a copy of their agreement". Zimbabweans responded with a range of comments and opinions, including:

The talks is good but MDC must be very clever - Zanu PF wants to swallow the MDC Yes it’s a brilliant idea which shall help end crisis, poverty and all tribulations in Zimbabwe united we stand divided we fall Tsvangirai showed qualities of being a leader by agreeing to talk Free and fair elections tomorrow with international observers! It is long over due but we want justice May be worth the effort but MDC must keep their eyes open. You can’t trust these guys. I agree with Tsvangirai that people have suffered enough I believe it’s a good idea if they can reason together in order to solve this crisis. But they must recognise the results of the election done on 29 March We don’t need masters, colonial or nationalist. We want public servants. So respect our votes of March 29. You asked for them That’s better because we are suffering. We are stuck and something must be done to save the lives of Zimbabweans The talks are okay but Mugabe must not lead the government & must step down For as long as it is something that will result in the fulfilment of our wishes and solve our problems no hard feelings I think it is a very bad idea for ZPF and MDCs to talk coz they are like water and oil as far as policies are concerned. What happened to ZAPU when it merged with ZPF? I dnt approve of the talks unless they start on the March 29 election which means MDC T would be the winner No problem as long as the talks result in the formation of transitional authority & fresh, free & fair run-off being conducted thereafter The talks are very important but MDC must not at all accept a gvt of national unity. They must go 4 a transitional gvt and pave way 4 fresh elections. Zanu PF plans 2 destroy MDC just as they did to ZAPU

In addition to direct comments and opinions, over 300 requests came in for the document to be posted to people, and over 200 for it to be emailed. This, according to Kubatana, is a small indication of just how starved most Zimbabweans are for news about their own country.

The numbers may not yet be huge, but mobiles are certainly beginning to make their mark.

NEWS: kiwanja's latest PC World column online

kiwanja's latest article has just been posted on the PC World website. "Mobile Phones and the Digital Divide" takes a look at some of the challenges the industry is going to have to work through if mobile phones are truly going to be the devices that close the digital divide. The article can be read here

Three is not the magic number...

It's 1.4.7...

One month ago the new version of FrontlineSMS was released. Well over three hundred NGOs responded and downloaded the software, and over a hundred of them have joined the new online community. Apart from the excitement surrounding the software itself, the new community is already proving its worth. I'd easily have settled for a hundred members after one month - hopefully the other two hundred will also see the value and sign up and engage soon.

I'd also have settled for the level of enthusiasm among the practitioner community. As you'd expect, many of the smaller NGOs won't have had a chance to do much with FrontlineSMS in such a short space of time, other than get familiar with the software and maybe run a few internal tests and trials. Some of the larger or better resourced projects have made some headway, however.

One of the most active users is Josh Nesbit in Malawi, who's using FrontlineSMS to drive field communications between a local hospital and its six hundred roaming community health workers (CHWs). He's also managed to set up a number of innovative services, such as automatic cellphone top-ups and a facility which allows CHWs to text in drug names and automatically receive responses on recommended uses and doses. A lot of people seem to be watching what Josh is doing very closely. What makes it so exciting is the fact that it's so highly replicable, not to mention the immediate impact it's having on the hospital and the community it is seeking to serve.

In one of the first microfinance-related applications of the new version, FrontlineSMS is being used by Grameen in Uganda to open up text-based communications with their Village Phone Operator (VPO) network. According to the project:

... We have been using FrontlineSMS to survey VPOs on their experiences at our training sessions and events, distributing information to them ranging from airtime to announcements to outages, and inviting feedback on other selected items through SMS. It really makes our lives easier by giving us a clear record of what’s been sent and responded to that can be reproduced and re-used elsewhere. It also helps us promote a culture of SMS use for communications

FrontlineSMS is also being lined up by the Cambodia Crop Production and Marketing Project (CCPMP). Funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, their aim is to improve agricultural value chains as a key to sustainable growth and poverty reduction in Western Cambodia. CCPMP plan to begin workshops and trials of FrontlineSMS in August and September. Further details are available on their project wiki. (FrontlineSMS is already being used to provide coffee prices to smallholder farmers in Aceh, something I blogged about a while ago).

Another project considering FrontlineSMS implementation is a text-based SOS/distress facility for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). The programme attempts to maximize the widespread ownership and use of mobile phones by Filipinos at home and abroad, and provide a 24/7 service in case of emergency. Incoming SOS text messages will be forwarded to numerous organisations and agencies capable of responding to various emergency situations. The project has just completed a round of comprehensive testing on the latest version - 1.4.7 - and posted the results on the FrontlineSMS community web pages.

Finally, Ushahidi have just completed their own period of FrontlineSMS evaluation, and are now putting together plans to integrate the platform into their web-based "crisis alert system". Ushahidi was recently listed as one of "Ten Web Startups to Watch" by MIT's Technology Review.

Behind the scenes there's also considerable activity, and we're working with a number of large donor organisations and academic researchers to help them understand the FrontlineSMS user base. Expect some interesting field-based research in the coming months. And in a couple of weeks or so we're releasing the software source code, with a number of developers looking to build on the work we've already started.

I've always believed in the immense value of building an NGO community around a single powerful, shared, open, flexible mobile-messaging solution. After a couple of years it finally looks like it might actually be happening.

Anthropologists! Anthropologists!

Found this today on Facebook - by the "Far Side" creator, Gary Larson - a day after posting my latest PC World column on the application of anthropology in ICT. Very funny - and no doubt just how it is... =)

NEWS: kiwanja's latest PC World column posted online

kiwanja's latest article has just been posted on the PC World website. "Anthropology's Technology-driven Renaissance" looks at some of the mystery surrounding the discipline, and examines the role anthropologists continue to play in the ICT4D and wider development fields. The article can be read here

Resting on our laurels?

Three weeks have passed since we took the new FrontlineSMS out of an extended period of beta testing and made it widely available to the NGO community. Three weeks ago we also launched the new website, and a new community section, and today we stand just one registration short of hitting a hundred members.

It's been exciting, interesting, informative and hectic since the launch, and we've learnt a lot. Releasing a mobile application to the world is no easy task, particularly when there are so many parameters out of your control. Just talk to anyone in the industry.

On the positive side the lessons learnt are going to come in real handy when I talk about mobile applications development at a number of conferences later this year, including the intriguing "A Better World By Design" event in November (where good friend Erik Hersman is also speaking). Our experiences will also be useful as we move forward with the exciting and equally challenging mobility project, announced last week.

FrontlineSMS is an interesting 'mobile' application in that, being PC-based its interface with the wider world is via an attached GSM device and not a much simpler internet connection. The core FrontlineSMS functionality has been thoroughly tested and, although not many of the new users have had much time to do anything with it yet, we know it holds up well. It's already doing great work in Malawi, and is even being used there to automatically and remotely top-up health workers' phones with airtime credit.The new HTTP POST functionality, and the ability to run external programs triggered by text messages, have gone down particularly well among the few developers who have had time to play with it. Ushahidi and InSTEDD are two of a number of high-profile organisations starting to think about how they might integrate FrontlineSMS into their wider projects.


Of course, it doesn't matter how much functionality you build in if FrontlineSMS isn't able to connect to the outside world. The first release, back in 2005, only supported a very limited range of phones, and this was always going to be an issue. We've expanded the list considerably by making FrontlineSMS fully AT-compatible, which means that any phone which communicates via standard AT (Hayes) commands will work. This covers a much wider range of phones on the market, but not all - Symbian phones, Windows Mobiles, Blackberry's and iPhones are not supported at the moment, but being largely higher-end devices we're not too worried about that. I've not seen too many iPhones floating around rural Uganda.

In just three weeks we've already come across a number of connectivity challenges caused by a range of driver problems (or no-driver-problems), faulty cables, fake cables, software locking communications ports and incompatible handsets, none of which technically have anything to do with FrontlineSMS. Most users have reached out to the online community to get their problem solved, and most have been resolved quickly thanks to help from a combination of other community members and the great team we have at Masabi. Once FrontlineSMS connects with the outside world most users have been quick to excitedly respond to its potential.

Developing something like FrontlineSMS was always going to be a challenge but, as my recent BBC article noted, if we're to really advance the use of mobiles for positive social change we need to stop talking and start building (something more and more people are beginning to do). Thankfully the software has a strong following in the ICT4D space, a dedicated and growing user base and an engaged blogger community. It has also received incredible support from the MacArthur Foundation and, more recently, the Open Society Institute.

The next step is to engage the wider open source community.

Time to rest on our laurels? Never.

NEWS: kiwanja.net guest article published on BBC News website

BBC News have just published a guest article by kiwanja.net on the "Technology" and "Science/Nature" pages of its website. Ken Banks was approached to write the article after the recent launch of the latest FrontlineSMS, and increasing exposure of kiwanja's work. The article looks at the broader use of mobile technology in conservation and development work, and highlights the current use of FrontlineSMS in Malawi. The full article - entitled "Mobile development rings true" - can be read here

NEWS: New "mobility" project unveiled

How do we unlock the full potential of mobile applications development for users in the developing world? What would a mobile-based programming environment look like? "mobility", a collaborative project announced by kiwanja.net, hopes to find out. Check out the website for details

More on the kiwanja.net News page

NEWS: kiwanja.net lined up to appear at Rhode Island conference

Ken Banks has been invited as one of only 25 speakers to present at a conference at Brown University in Rhode Island this November. The conference, A Better World By Design, "asks the question today’s designers, engineers, and economists should be asking. How can we use technology to improve the world? Hear answers from world-class professionals and academics in this milestone conference that will change the way you think about global crises and push the limits of user-centric, affordable design"

Erik Hersman, a friend and supporter of kiwanja's work and the man behind the highly regarded White African and AfriGadget websites, is also lined up to speak

More on the kiwanja.net News page

NEWS: kiwanja guest chapter in new digital learning publication

kiwanja.net was recently invited to contribute a chapter on mobile learning for a new book, "Education for a Digital World". Described as a guide, resource, textbook and manual for policymakers and practitioners in developing and developed countries, the book has been published as a collaborative effort by fifty contributors from around the world representing the research, administration and business communities. Publication is by BCcampus and the Commonwealth of Learning

kiwanja's chapter - "Mobile Learning in Developing Countries: Present Realities and Future Possibilities" - looks at the emerging use of mobile phones as an educational tool, discusses a number of case studies and examines some of the technical challenges faced by organisations looking to develop or use mobile technology in support of education initiatives in the developing world. The book can be downloaded in full (PDF, 13Mb) or as a single kiwanja chapter (PDF, 350Kb)

More on the kiwanja.net News page

NEWS: Silverback mobile game featured on National Geographic Channel

National Geographic are profiling kiwanja's "Silverback" mobile phone game as part of their promotion of "Gorilla Murders", a new programme about the plight of the mountain gorillas in Central Africa (showing in July on their cable channel in the US). The website has also republished kiwanja's earlier Blog post on the thinking behind the game.

More on the kiwanja.net News page

The Social Mobile Long Tail 2.0

A few months ago I finally got round to diagramming what I thought mobile applications development in the not-for-profit space looked like. I came up with this, and called it "Social Mobile's Long Tail". It was based on the original Long Tail concept, first talked about by Chris Anderson in a Wired Magazine article, when he used it to describe consumer demographics in business (something quite different).

(A larger image is available via the kiwanja.net site here)

My thinking was this. Looking at the mobile applications space today we have a number of high-cost, well-publicised, large-scale mobile-related projects which tend to cover national (and sometimes international) needs. These "large" systems play a crucial role in helping larger bodies, sometimes as big as government departments, provide mobile services to their target audiences. They are generally aimed at the higher-end of the market, where only the larger or resource-rich NGOs reside. Way out there on price, complex to develop (assuming you wanted to) and near-on impossible to replicate, they're almost completely out-of-reach of your average grassroots NGO. These applications and platforms sit in the red part of the Tail.

In the orange section we move into the more mid-range systems - solutions developed by individual NGOs for a specific need, campaign or project. These are generally less complex, which makes their chances of replicability slighter better, but still difficult for many grassroots non-profits with few technical resources or hardware at their disposal.

Finally, in the green section - the truly long part of the long tail - we have the low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. From my own experiences the number of NGOs present in this space is by far the greatest, making it the area to focus on if we want to create the highest amount of mobile-enabled social change. Add up all the value here, and it easily outweighs the rest along the higher (more lucrative) parts of the tail.

I use this diagram in many of my conference talks and presentations, and it seems to go down very well. It was interesting to see some of the staff at Nokia Research, where I spoke last month while I was in Palo Alto, grabbing their camera phones to snap a picture of it. I'm always thinking about ways I can refine it though, and Jim Witkin - a colleague - suggested adding an extra axis. This is now the one on the right, representing the number of NGOs in each of the Long Tail segments.

There are probably better ways of depicting this, but for now I'm happy with this. Suggestions, however, are always welcome.

Three years on, but still some way to go...

I'm writing this from seat 7D at exactly 38,000 feet somewhere between Forssa and Cambridge. Normally seat 7D would be in first- or business-class, but unfortunately for me I'm on a Ryanair (low cost airline) flight. Nothing fancy here. I'm returning from a short combined work and pleasure trip to Finland, where exactly three years ago I was knee-deep writing the first version of FrontlineSMS.

It was seat-of-the-pants stuff back then. I remember giving a very early interview about the software to Charity Times, even though it was only a third complete and it wasn't totally clear what it was or wasn't going to do. If that wasn't enough, I was also asked for a URL so people could go online for more information. "Of course", I said. With no website yet in place, programming was quickly put on hold for an afternoon while one was hastily deployed. In the absence of an obvious graphic to use for the main banner, and no logo to speak of, I took the liberty of taking a photo of the forest outside (the same forest I used to stare into while trying to decipher numerous unfriendly VB.NET error messages). My forest banner - which did resemble something of a 'frontline', I guess - held firm for two-and-a-half years until it was finally replaced when the new website - properly planned and commissioned, I hasten to add - went live in May.

A lot has changed in three years, and we're not just talking website banners. The initial launch, back in late 2005, went largely unnoticed. I remember spending my evenings trying to identify people who might be interested in writing about it, but it was new, was written by somebody nobody had heard of, had no users, nobody knew if it worked (not even me, to be honest) and nobody knew if anyone would want it. Talk about an uphill struggle. Mike Grenville at 160Characters was the first to see some potential in it, and his post got the ball rolling. A few other sites followed suit, most liking the thinking behind the program more than the program itself. Things slowly began to move, and a few enquiries came in from here and there. One was from Kubatana, who have the great honour of being the first organisation to take a punt on FrontlineSMS (they still use it to this day). Significantly, another email was from the MacArthur Foundation. The huge significance of that mid-November telephone conversation with Jerry wasn't to become apparent for another year-and-a-half or so.

Today, news of the latest version is effortlessly working its way around the web and my Inbox is regularly hit with NGO and press enquiries, people wanting to know if they can help in any way, and a stream of messages of support (there are one or two negative individuals, but luckily they remain well in the minority). There are some great, hugely supportive Blog posts out there, including those by Erik Hersman, Mike Grenville, Sanjana Hattotuwa and Clark Boyd, but also some insightful, short and unusual ones. FrontlineSMS is work in progress, and people seem interested enough to want to come along for the ride.

Cellphone 9 described FrontlineSMS as "The NGO Twitter", while Unthinkingly thought it was "a thoroughly wonderful idea in many ways … If you’re into international rural research with mobile phones. A tool worth watching very closely, it’s what I think is the leading platform of the mobile research 'industry' if there is such a thing". Chromosome LK won the Dramatic Headline competition with their "FrontlineSMS and Sri Lankan Gays" (referring to its use in Sri Lanka by a gay rights group), while Aydin Design decided that one of the really exciting things about FrontlineSMS was "the speed of development - with low resources, putting it in the hands of people now - so they can do things to improve their lives - now", which is exactly what it is trying to do. Isis-Inc - who's strap line is "Technically, it's about sex" (?) - concluded their coverage with "Yay FrontlineSMS!! Access meets elegance!!".

It was Clark Boyd, however, who hit the nail right on the head when he wrote:

"Today, FrontlineSMS announced version 2.0. To get a handle on what goes into this, think about it. This platform has to work on hundreds of different handsets and modems, and in languages ranging from Swahili to Cantonese. And it needs to work with Windows, Mac and Linux. Not child's play, and not something that's been done with millions of dollars of backing from major funders"

Not one to sit on my laurels, I'm already working on ideas for the next version of FrontlineSMS, and a number of exciting related initiatives, with the support of another major US foundation. FrontlineSMS is a major step forward in kiwanja's efforts to build affordable, appropriate technology solutions for the grassroots NGO community.

But we're by no means there yet...