MobileActive's Blog

For 40,000 people a year across the U.S., voicemail is a lifeline. The Community Voice Mail (CVM) program, started in 1991, has helped provide over 40,000 homeless and low-income individuals each year with access to voicemail in 41 U.S. cities. For many CVM clients, their voicemail is their connection to a job, an apartment, and relationships with teachers, doctors, or social service agencies. (MobileActive wrote about CVM and similar programs here).

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I am in South Africa this week as violence against immigrants broke out in townships all over the country. There are several initiatives that have now been launched to combat the violence -- using mobile phones.

In response to the violence against foreigners, the Western Cape Emergency Task Team with the leadership of Peter Benjamin of Cell-Life, has activated a national SMS emergency system for citizens to respond to the violence. The Task Team, a coalition of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and over 20 NGOs, has activated “NO TO XENOPHOBIA” SMS lines across South Africa.

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Roberta Lamptey Nartey, a family health practitioner in Ghana, used to rely on the walkie talkies of the security guards to communicate between hospitals where she worked. Once she wanted a woman who had had a severe asthma attack transferred from the Korle Bu Polyclinic to the surgery unit of another hospital. Nartey left a message with the night nurses to transfer her patient and wrote a note in the patient's chart, but to her chagrin, the asthmatic patient never appeared in the surgery unit. "I told the security man at the Surgical Unit to send a message to the security man at the polyclinic using his walkie talkie," Nartey wrote.

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This entry is cross-posted from Rock the Vote's blog.

Thousands of people download voter registration forms every day from Rock the Vote, but they don't necessarily know the voter registration deadline for their state. We're all busy and it can sometimes take people a few days or weeks before they print and mail the registration form. One of the programs we've been testing at Rock the Vote is the use of text messages to remind young people of their registration deadline. Our early evaluation results from the primaries indicate that these SMS reminders boosted registration rates of our registrant list by about 4% points!

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SANGONeT and MobileActive.org invite you to contribute your expertise to MobileActive08 that will take place from 13-15 October 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

• Do you have expertise in the field of mobile technologies for social development?
• Are you a researcher with research findings to showcase about mobile technology for social impact?
• Are you a mobile service provider with specific products to exhibit that benefit the social market?

If so, we invite you to submit your ideas to be part of MobileActive08!

MobileActive08 is the largest event to date focused on mobile technology for social development. This global gathering brings together practitioners, researchers, technologists, and donors interested in the use and application of mobile technology for social impact. At MobileActive08 participants will explore how mobile phones are effectively used to advance civil society work, assess the current state of knowledge in the use of mobile technology to advance social development, and investigate trends, needs and investment opportunities.

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Danny Quah is Head of Department and Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. I had the pleasure of meeting Danny at the recent release of "Wireless for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use," in London. This report is an exploration of how mobile technology is changing the way NGOs do their work, and includes case studies of how mobiles are used in social development. Danny had an articulate and cogent critique of our findings. We thought it would be interesting to MobileActive readers to hear his thoughts -- with which I could not agree more -- re-published here with permission.

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Guest Blogger Sanjana Hattotuwa from ICT4Peacebuilding is reviewing Frontline SMS, a software that allows you to run an SMS campaign from your computer. It is one of a class of do-it-yourself SMS campaign tools that we have previously reviewed on MobileActive.org. Sanjana took a look at the new release of Frontline SMS and had this to say.

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Two organizations in the MobileActive community were recently awarded Knight News Challenge Grants, given annually to fund "innovative digital projects around the world." There were 16 awards given in all to projects that use digital and open source technology to provide public-interest news.

Bev Clark, the co-founder of Kubatana.net, was awarded the largest grant in the Challenge for Freedom Fone, a way to distribute news and independent media:

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Mobile phones are transforming economic life for consumers in developing countries, says a new report by David Lehr. The report Going Wireless: Dialing for Development, focuses on "base of the pyramid" consumers and the ways that mobile phones have the potential to change economies in the developing world. Lehr writes,

The mobile phone has established itself as the communication and networking platform of choice for billions of the world’s consumers, most of whom are at the base of the global economic pyramid.

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Mobile phones are nothing new for Greenpeace Argentina. The organization has used mobile phones multiple times to mobilize its now 350,000 person-strong mobile list to successfully lobby for important environmental legislation. One of Greenpeace's significant accomplishments was the passage of the Ley de Bosques, or Forest Law.

According to a recently UN/Vodaphone report, Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, before the law was passed forests in Argentina were being quickly destroyed.

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