MobileActive.org

As part of the connected MobileActive.org community of practice, we feature relevant mobile research. If you've been following our Mobile Research At Your Desk Series, you already have a sense of wide range of articles that we've gathered in the mDirectory. (For a full list, see below!)

This slidecast outlines findings from a large-scale study carried out by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.  Sanjay Gandhi, Gaurav Tripathi, and Dr. Surabhi Mittal interviewed 200 small scale farmers to highlight the best uses of mobiles to support agricultural productivity. 

The authors organized 17 focus groups over four months across India, and conducted 46 individual interviews with subsistence farmers. In total, they spoke to 200 people, living in villages where both mobile services and agricultural information sources are available. Farmers grew a wide of crops and average household incomes varied. The researchers partnered with organizations that provided agricultural information services linked to mobile phones.

For a quick overview of the results watch our slidecast below (5.04) or read the complete article in the mDirectory.

We have gathered over 230 journal articles, evaluations and reports on mobiles for development in the mDirectory - a one-stop literature bank on mobiles in social change useful for practitioners and NGOs.

In our "Mobile Research At Your Desk" series, we've featured the work of researchers in the ICT4D field, covering a range of applications.  Here's a list of our slidecasts to date:

• mGames and mobile Internet (featuring work of Jonathan Donner and Matthew Kam) 
• Effectiveness of PDA-based vs. paper based data collection (a study from Fiji)
• Predicting mobile affordability in Latin America (report by Hernán Galperin)
•  Supply chain management using mobile phone cameras (insights from an m-agriculture project)
• Dr. Math using MxIt, a mobile social network, in South Africa (math skills via mobile, well evaluated)