A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
Reported by Leigh Jaschke and Melissa Loudon.
This spring, UNICEF Malawi and the UNICEF Innovations Team deployed RapidSMS to monitor child growth and nutrition. We wrote about it previously here.
Now there is a detailed report (pdf), evaluating the effort (pdf). The report, released on June 16th, was issued by Columbia University's School of Public Policy and Affairs (SIPA), UNICEF Malawi, UNICEF's Innovations team, and Mobile Development Solutions (MDS).
The report details the findings of the deployment, and outlines recommendations for the future use of SMS in Malawi. Raymond Short of Mobile Development Solutions says that,
“while there have been innumerable ICT development applications introduced recently, there have not been many independent studies of their efficiency”.
In the growing network of people in the MobileActive.org staffers and contributors, I am very pleased to welcome yet another amazing woman in mobile. Leigh Jaschke is our new MobileActive.org Fellow for the next few months. She'll be focusing on building out our database of projects and increqase resources and information specifically on formal and informal ways in with mobile phones are used for learning, public education, education, and training.
Here is a bit more about her: Leigh is an educator and trainer with 6 years of international experience. She has worked in international development, and in program and event management. She is currently researching the role of mobile technology in education sector capacity building. Leigh holds a degree in International Development and Economics and will complete her Master of International Education in May 2010. She is fluent in French, and has also worked in German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Bambara (Mali).
Welcome, Leigh!
More Mobile Tech 4 Social Change goodness coming up! There will be two events in June:
We would love to have you! Please feel free to forward and spread the word. More on Mobile Tech 4 Social Change events on the wiki (and yes, you can roll your own!)
Sharek961 is another effort in Lebanon to monitor the election there today on June 7. Unlike LADE which uses more than 2,000 trained volunteer election monitors to systematically report from polling stations throughout the day, Sharek961 aims to get ordinary Lebanese citizen to text, call, and email in incidences from polling stations, crowdsourcing the conduct of the critically important election there.
According to Sharek961's press release,
"Sharek961.org [is[... empowering citizens to report in Arabic and in English, through four means; SMS, email, Twitter and web reports. Reports can address anything election-related happening around the country, from political rallies and polling queues to vote-buying and violence. Sharek961 anonymously publishes these reports alongside news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets, on an interactive map, making them publicly available to all citizens, media outlets, and organizations."
Sharek961 notes that it
Lebanon will hold a critically important parliamentary election on June 7, and election observers from around the world have descended on the country. However, as in many other countries now, there are local organizations and citizen efforts on the ground that are using mobile technology for sophisticated election observation efforts. The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) and the Coalition Libanaise pour l’Observation Elections (CLOE), for example, have put in place an extensive SMS reporting system, for example. LADE will deploy a total of 2,500 volunteer citizen observers throughout the country directly at the 5181 polling stations.
So asks the Enough Project, and its new campaign Raise Hope for Congo. The Enough Project is part of the Center for American Progress, a US-based left-leaning think tank and advocacy organization. The Enough Project's campaign aims, according to Eileen White Read from the organization in an article submitted to MobileActive.org to
..end the trade in “conflict minerals” from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, which are sold by rebel groups to purchase arms and serve as a direct cause of widespread sexual violence in that country.
We are proud and happy that six months of hard work have paid off - the Open Mobile Consortium has launched officially today. Conceived at MobileActive08 in South Africa, the OMC is featuring a suite of fully open source mobile applications focused on health and humanitarian work. The OMC is an unprecedented collaboration amongst nine high-profile organizations to develop an interopable set of platforms of high-quality open source mobile tools for humanitarian and civil society work.
Here is our press release:
New York, NY – May 26, 2009 – The Open Mobile Consortium today launched its global development community to help organizations working towards social good to better collaborate and share mobile phone-based technologies. The OMC’s open source software tools help organizations to better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the “bottom billion,” the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of the world.
With the proliferation of interest in Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps around the world, we have now put up a wiki to keep track of and provide resources for this growing movement of M4Change Camps. The wiki includes a detaied FAQ on how you can run your own Mobile Tech 4 Social Change camp (because this small team here is, well, very small!). Spread the love and roll a camp in your town!
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.
Each event includes interactive discussions, hands-on-demos, collaborative scheming about ways to use, develop, and deploy mobile technologies in health, advocacy, economic development, environment, human rights, citizen media, to name a few areas.
There is a new initiative under way to used use old phones to donate money for mobile health initiatives for clinics in Africa. The Hope Phones campaign is a project of kiwanja.net, the UK parent organization of FrontlineSMS, a text messaging platform. The project asks people in the United States to donate their old phones for a small donation, in turn, to FrontlineSMS that then can be used to purchase new phones for community health workers in clinics in Malawi and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
I am a member of the Working Group of the Open Mobile Consortium, a now publicly launching collaboration among organizations around the world focused on developing open source mobile solutions for social impact and change.
There have been many myths surrounding open source software and little conversation in this field why open source software is important and successful, especially in the context of developing countries and in the field of mobiles for development. I'd like to debunk some of these myths and clarify why the Open Mobile Consortium is focused on open source mobile solutions that build on, and talk to one another. I also invite comments for anything that I have missed or differing point of views.
Firstly, No Dogma
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