A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
This guest post was submitted by Amanda McClelland, Emergency Nutrition and Food Security Manager, Concern Worldwide, Niger.
I arrived in Niger three months ago to help the Concern Worldwide country team scale up and roll out an emergency program to respond to the emerging food crisis. It’s hard to say when exactly this shifted from an “impending crisis” to a real humanitarian emergency, but we are there now. And we are putting every bit of the planning this team has done since December to the test. The official Food Security survey of April 2010 states that there are 7.1 million people facing hunger: 3.3 million of those are considered to be facing extremely food shortages and unable to feed their families’ without help. Concern’s program is in Tahoua, the second worst affected part of the country.
Every day, we are working at maximum capacity on initiatives to prevent rates of malnutrition from reaching emergency thresholds. We are distributing seed packs and fertilizer to help families plant crops in time for the next harvest; providing nutrition support to children under five, pregnant women and mothers; and are launching an innovative use of mobile phone technology (and manual transfers) to distribute emergency cash to the most vulnerable women. We have high hopes for this program—and we are starting to see its great potential. (Note of the editor: Concern conducted a similar mobile cash program in Kenya in 2008 that we wrote up on MobileActive.org here. Concern also published an extensive evaluation of the Kenya programme (PDF)
What we are doing sounds easy when I write it, but delivering aid in Niger is anything but easy.
This guest-post is by Arturo Morosoff who completed recently a project with D-Tree International and BRAC Tanzania to provide videos on mobile phones to assist Community Health Workers (CHWs) for health education. It is posted here with permission.
I recently completed a five week volunteer project working with Irene Joseph and Gayo Mhila of D-Tree International to provide videos on mobile phones to Community Health Volunteers with BRAC Tanzania in the Mbagala district of Dar Es Salaam.
A bit about me: I have no formal training in ICT or public health. My background is in technology and business and I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. I was on a two month trip in Tanzania and volunteered to help D-Tree with this project. As such, the project needed to be completed in a short time and we began with modest goals.
Among BRAC’s programs to help alleviate poverty is its health program, which relies on an all-female team of Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) to conduct monthly home visits to provide health education and support. Each CHV visits 150 – 200 homes each month, asking health related questions and providing healthcare information. In Tanzania, D-Tree has been collaborating with BRAC to provide the CHVs with a mobile phone-based tool called Commcare, to help improve the effectiveness of their home-based programs. About a year ago there was discussion with the CHVs of providing them with health education videos suitable for use on phones to provide additional support for their home visits.
This article was written by Bright Simons, Director at IMANI-Ghana and President of the mPedigree Network. It is re-posted here with permission.
Let’s face it: Africa is on the downward slope to perdition as far as technology is concerned.
Many people who are not directly confronted with this reality on the continent are usually lured into a false sense that things are looking up because of the fountain of good news that is the telecom sector.
The truth though is that the seeming proliferation of ICT success stories across the continent masks the real picture, which is one of a splattering of embers in a desolate patch of darkness.
For a casual browse through the latest International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ICT Development Index for instance should force you to conclude that ICT offers Africa no relief from its chronic state of technological pathology.
As we are completing an inventory of mobile date collection projects around the world that are focused on vulnerable populations and early warning, we've come across a few efforts that are worth highlighting. One is the SMS and PDA-based surveying of the World Food Programme (WFP). WFP's food security monitoring systems are set up in many countries. While some countries are still submitting paper records, there is a push to incorporate PDAs or SMS data transmission for faster and more reliable monitoring of food security.
The data collected includes both food security baseline data and food insecurity indicators. The bulk of WFP's data collected focuses on nutritional indicators, market prices, import, cross border trades, socioeconomic indicators, and health indicators. The UN agency is trialing both FrontlineSMS and RapidSMS, two mobile data collection software tools, in its current projects, as well as PDAs but is likely going to standardize its operations using one of the two with some custom gateway software.
In the process of collecting data, WFP always collaborates with governments and other UN partners. WFP staff are involved with the supervision, training and coordination but but the people who conduct interviews and collect the data are usually government staff, university students, or NGO workers As one WFP staffer noted, "We have huge armies of data collectors."
The scope of the work is accordingly large. Some of the efforts cover an entire country. In Senegal, for example, WFP has 250 numerators covering the country – 22 teams of 11 people each who are collecting data for six weeks, visiting 2,000 villages.
The video below features George Muammar of the WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping Unit. He describes rapid data collection in an Emergency Food Security Assessment in Goma, N. Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Is the growing skepticism on SMS warranted? The following post was written by one of App Africa's recent International Fellow Oliver Christopher Kaigwa Haas (aka Ollie) who now works at Frog Design.
It appeared first as a guest post for Appfrica.net and is reposted here with permission.
Mapping incidences via SMS has been in the news lately. From the swine flu to requests for assistance to election data, visualization of data submitted and collected with mobile phones and via other channels is a hot topic. We asked our special contributor, Melissa Loudon to compare two platforms: Ushahidi and Managing News. While different, both offer powerful capabilities for mapping reports, news of incidences, and SMS-submitted data.
In this "How-To," we describe the installation process, SMS integration, and the mapping functionality of both platforms. If you have deployed either one of the platforms or have others to add for future reviews, please leave a comment! The full "How-To" article can be found here.
We are pleased and delighted to congratulate Matt Berg, Tech Lead for the Millennium Villages Project. Matt was chosen by Time Magazine to be one of the 100 most influential people this year.
Matt is a director at the Earth Institute at Columbia University responsible for the design and implementation of technology for the Millennium Villages Project, a project working with communities in 10 sub-Saharan Africa countries to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development goals.
During the last FailFaire (well, actually the first one to date) we were reminded by a guest rather sternly that NGOs often forget who their users are and, more importantly, what the needs of these users are. When we, collectively as a field, implement mobile deployments with constituents or groups, do we tend to forget user needs and capabilities, getting too enchanted with the tech (and ourselves) and then fail when, not surprisingly, there isn't any uptake? We have seen many a project fail for precisely this reason. Our grouchy attendee had a point even if he did not deliver it very gracefully.
To this end, we are reposting here a recent report from Zambia. Project Mwana is UNICEF Innovation project that is "working with the Zambian Ministry of Health, UNICEF Zambia, the Malawi Ministry of Health, UNICEF Malawi and many implementing and technical partners to find appropriate, scalable and impactful ways that mobile technologies can strengthen health services for mothers and infants in rural health clinics."
Two mobile tools that we have been watching with interest have new versions out and available for public beta and testing.
Freedom Fone, developed by Kubatana in Zimbabwe, is an interactive voice response system that allows callers to access audio information on their mobile phones. It is aimed at organizations who want to set interactive up audio news services for their audiences. Freedom Fone is now out in version 1.5 and available for public testing and use.
While there are many such interactive voice systems (Asterisk is the most well-known open source VOIP platform, with many commercial, open source versions such as Trixbox using Asterisk), Freedom Fone is focused on an NGO audience with easy install and setup that minimizes the need for technical expertise.
We have been very keen on exposing the security issues related to mobile communications for activists in insecure environments. To that end we have, to date, produced a number of how-to guides that evaluate some of the tools available.
We just added a matrix of available tools that compares existing applications for secure communications more systematically. So, here is the line-up of mobile security resources on MobileActive for easy reference:
We will continue to pay close attention to this space as there are not enough tools and resources yet for activists and journalists to communicate securely via mobile. If you are aware of other projects or resources, please add a comment!
Photo courtesy: rafeblandford via flickr
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