MobileActive.org

Mobile phones are approaching ubiquity in Pakistan. Allowing low cost access to community members across class, linguistic and geographical boundaries,  the mobile phone can be an effective tool to communicate with ordinary people in Pakistan, as well as to learn from them, and even collaborate with them. This guide provides a research-driven and practical guide for using SMS  to  do  so.  It  is  intended  for  both  Pakistani  and international institutions, whether in government, civil society or the humanitarian sector. It represents the findings of its authors only, and, it is hoped, is the first draft of a collaborative document, to which many of its readers might contribute.

This document is intended to provide an understanding both of the range of technical options available for SMS-based communications, and of the ways  in  which  campaigns should be conceived and executed in light of the scope and character of both SMS use and phone use in Pakistan.

It also makes the argument that SMS provides an opportunity to do more with mobilebased communications than simple announcements and polling, useful activities though they are. It argues that the conversational nature of SMS, in Pakistan and elsewhere, allows 

Elections in developing countries commonly fail to deliver accountability because of manipulation, often involving collusion between corrupt election officials and political candidates. We report the results of an experimental evaluation of Quick Count Photo Capture|a monitoring technology designed to detect the illegal sale of votes by corrupt election officials to candidates carried out in 471 polling centers across Afghanistan during the 2010 parliamentary elections. The intervention reduced vote counts by 25% for the candidate most likely to be buying votes and reduced the stealing of election materials by about 60%.

Additionally, we investigate the role of corrupt institutions in facilitating election fraud by combining: (i) separate fraud measurements at three important stages of the election; (ii) rich data on the political connections of key parliamentary candidates; (iii) precise geographic coordinates of polling centers; and (iv) experimental variation from our evaluation. Interestingly, strong political candidates react to the intervention by substituting fraud spatially and weak candidates react by substituting temporally. We explain these results in the context of a theory of corrupt vote transactions in which the capacity of candidates to protect corrupt offcials from prosecution determines equilibrium levels of spatial and temporal substitution

As internet and mobile phone use increases, technology is transforming the field of transparency and accountability making it an increasingly dynamic space across the globe. Technology is helping to improve citizen participation in decision-making and producing new ways of identifying public service challenges through processes such as ‘data mashing’.

This paper documents current trends in the way technology is being used to promote transparency in different parts of the world. It reviews over 100 projects from across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, examining how new technologies are re-energising traditional methods. In particular, it focuses on how these new technologies are helping to engage different actors from citizens, media, authorities and the private sector.

Our research finds promising success stories alongside less accomplished examples. The authors argue that a key element of successful technology use in transparency and accountability efforts is their speed – both in execution and in stimulating change. Well-designed efforts produced relevant and usable information that can be used to demand accountability quickly. Technology for transparency and accountability tools need not be sophisticated, but it does need intelligent design that is relevant to the local context. Projects also have a better chance of effectively producing change when they take a collaborative approach, sometimes involving government.

Globally, huge investments are made in ICT as an undisputed and essential component of almost all activities – state and corporate. It is also an integral part of international development cooperation. The rapid spread of ICT – particularly the internet and mobile telephony – is making information available instantly and at low cost to a degree unprecedented in history. It can be used to seek, receive, create and impart information by anyone, at any time and for any purpose. The innovative use of the media has created new forms of citizen journalism which give space to a diversity of voices. In this way, ICT enhances freedom of expression and the right to information, and increases the possibilities for citizen´s participation in decision making processes.

This report examines the potential of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for advancing democracy and empowerment, with a special focus on Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Access to and the strategic use of ICTs have been shown to have the potential to help bring about economic development, poverty reduction, and democratisation – including freedom of speech, the free flow of information and the promotion of human rights. Based on signs of current democracy deficits in the case study countries, it is crucial that ICTs be made central to development cooperation and to approaches to advance democracy in the three countries.

Across both urban and rural populations, the predominant tool for communication is the mobile phone, while access to the internet is largely limited to urban areas. The high cost of international internet connectivity – itself a consequence of dependence on satellite connectivity in Uganda and Tanzania especially – means that even within urban areas internet connectivity is the purview of a small well-to-do elite.

This paper presents an empirical assessment of the impact of information and communication  technologies (ICTs) on political development in sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis, based on the  Mo Ibrahim indicators of democracy in Africa for 2008, reveals a close alignment between ICTs in Sub-Saharan Africa and democratization – or political development broadly defined.

Our examination of the data demonstrates that elevated levels of phone, computer, and Internet  diffusion are associated with political development, although only the effect of the phone remains once other variables are specified. The phone is the most robust of all individual factors explaining variations in political development.   This may be explained by the fact that all strata of society can use cell phones, while the Internet is primarily used by the elite.

This report is structured in three sections. The introduction examines the differing aspects between traditional watchdog journalism and online media that rely on raw data sources, often directly from government websites. The introduction also aims to contextualize the benefits of transparency, accountability and civic engagement from a grassroots, networked perspective.

The second section of the report consists of regional overviews authored by each of our eight researchers. These overviews document the history of the good governance movement in each region, the role of technology in promoting transparency and accountability, and summaries of the case studies they documented. The concluding section groups case studies thematically in order draw out trends, conclusions and recommendations that apply across a number of projects.

Cell phones are assumed to enhance communication among insurgents, thus making it possible for them to coordinate more effectively. On the other hand, mobile communications can also hamper insurgent activity, by allowing the population to share information with counterinsurgents.

This paper makes a first attempt to provide a systematic test of the effect of cell phone communication on conflict. Using data on Iraq’s cell phone network as well as event data on violence, we assess this effect at two levels. First, we analyze how violence at the district level changes as a result of the introduction of new cell phone towers. Second, using a novel identification strategy, we examine how insurgent operation in the tower’s vicinity is affected by the introduction of coverage.

Taken together, our results show that mobile communication seems to increase the information flow from the population to the military, thus reducing insurgent effectiveness and ultimately, violence.

The purpose of this research is to empirically examine the ways in which Indonesian civil society organisations and groups engage in civic activism by means of the use of Mobile phones, Internet and social media; and how this civic engagement impacts upon the shaping of civil society in Indonesia.

With technology and its use continuously shifting and being shaped, the appropriation of the Internet and social media in Indonesian civil society is more about process than outcome. The technologies are continuously modified and adapted to bring them into alignment with the organisations’ routines. ‘Citizens in action’ are therefore never fixed in format, but rather ‘constituted and reconstituted’ through the everyday practices of the civil society groups and communities involving citizens and activists alike in ongoing actions – where technology serves as a convivial means.

Mobile Phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman is still 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 23% if she lives in Africa, and 37% if she lives in South Asia. Closing this gender gap would bring the benefit of mobile phones to an additional 300 million women. By extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to women, a host of social and economic goals can be advanced.

Mobile phone ownership provides distinct benefits to women, including improved access to educational, health, business and employment opportunities. Women surveyed across low and middle-incoome countries on three continents believe that a mobile phone helps them lead a more secure, connected and productive life.

This paper offers an overview of the emerging domain of mobile governance as an offspring of the broader landscape of e-governance. Mobile governance initiatives have been deployed everywhere in parallel to the development of crowdsourced, open source software applications that facilitate the collection, aggregation, and dissemination of both information and data coming from different sources: citizens, organizations, public bodies, etc. Ultimately, mobile governance can be seen as a tool to promote the rule of law from a decentralized, distributed, and bottom-up perspective.

The purpose of the Sudan Vote Monitor (SVM) project was to utilize simple information and communication technology (ICT) tools in the independent monitoring and reporting of the Sudan national elections held in April 2010. This initiative built on the successful recent experience of civil society organizations (CSOs) and volunteers in several countries (e.g., Ghana, India, Sierra Leone, Montenegro) in harnessing ICT to support the conduct of fair and credible elections. The project’s primary focus is the process of observing and reporting rather than the election results or their implications as significant as these are. Accordingly, SVM, and this report, is only concerned with the reporting activity with no regard to the political climate or political orientation of reporters, CSOs,or candidates. The main objective is to cooperate with and facilitate technological knowhow for civil society organizations in the Sudan (grassroots and other NGOs, media organizations, journalists, and interested private citizens and individuals in general).

The project was led by SIRP in collaboration with Asmaa Society for Development and several other Sudanese NGOs, with technical support from eMoksha.org, Ushahidi.com, and Khotawat Consultancy. During the April national elections, the Sudan Monitor website enabled reporting of the election process by many different organizations and individuals. Through the use of open source software civilians in Sudan were able to report general observations or irregularities via e-mail, short code text message (SMS), or by logging on to the Internet and visiting the sudanvotemonitor.com website. Using the Ushahidi platform reports could be aggregated along with direct feeds from news sites, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map. Users had up-to-date information including streaming video from election centers or polling stations around the Sudan, and were able to comment and rate the credibility of the submitted reports in collaborative manner. The site was accessible to all individuals and organizations regardless of their political affiliations or views. The reporting facility was available for public reporting from April 10 to April 30, 2010.

During the past ten years, we have witnessed how mobile phones and the simple functions of voice and text messaging (SMS) can empower citizens and affect the way citizens interact with each other and with the society as whole. Mobile phones are also thought to open up for a deepened democracy through citizen participation and insight into state affairs, through influencing the political decision making process, and helping in holding governments accountable. Is this the case?

So far, few East African government institutions have adopted the idea of using mobile phones as a tool for service delivery and a way to communicate with the citizens. This paper describes a few interesting cases and pilots, focusing on East Africa (mainly Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), where mobile phones and mobile applications have been used for improving governance, either independently or as a compliment to other methods and strategies. The paper will critically examine some of the challenges as well as the main opportunities for improving good governance through mobile phones and present ideas on how these projects could effectively be scaled-up.

The World Wide Web and the movement for transparency and accountability in government have grown up together over the past two decades, though often in parallel, and with little research evaluating the role and potential of online technologies to bring about greater transparency, accountability and civic engagement. This report is the culmination of four months of research examining the objectives, challenges, successes and effects of online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China and Central & Eastern Europe.

A team of eight regional researchers documented a total of 37 case studies of relevant technology projects. Though this report contains only executive summaries of each case study, full interviews including audio podcasts and related documents, are available on our website.1 In addition to the in-depth case studies, we have also documented over 30 project listings, which provide basic descriptive information and context about related projects. This report is structured in three sections.

The introduction examines the differing aspects between traditional watchdog journalism and online media that rely on raw data sources, often directly from government websites. The introduction also aims to contextualize the benefits of transparency, accountability and civic engagement from a grassroots, networked perspective.

The second section of the report consists of regional overviews authored by each of our eight researchers. These overviews document the history of the good governance movement in each region, the role of technology in promoting transparency and accountability, and summaries of the case studies they documented. The concluding section groups case studies thematically in order draw out trends, conclusions and recommendations that apply across a number of projects.

This paper examines the use of mobile phones, particularly the short messaging system or SMS, in promoting democratic governance - organizing institutional frameworks to achieve democratic ideals. The objective of this paper is to document how mobile phones is being used to promote popular participation in Philippine politics.

The paper looks into the various SMS-based services that enhance citizen participation. Specifically, SMS services that provides the following were examined: 1) Provision of Public Information; 2) Delivery of Public Service; 3) Amplifying Voice; 4) Vigilantism. 5) Elections and 6) Mass Action and 7) Developing Political Accounts.

Previous studies of SMS in government show that over half of Philippine government agencies use SMS-based services. Most of these national government agencies use SMS as a mechanism for providing information and receiving feedback. In a few instances SMS is used to enhance the delivery of public services.

The notable examples of SMS-based services that provide information are the Department of Agriculture’s Presyo and Panahon Text and the Department of Trade and Industry’s TextDTI. The PAYBIR is an SMS-based service that allows citizens to pay taxes through their cell phones. The Office of the President’s TXTGMA and the office of Marikina Mayor’s TXTMCF elicit complaints, comments and suggestions from constituents. These two are examples of SMS-based services that amplify the citizens’ voice. On the other hand, the DILG’s Patrol 117 is an example of a government service that promotes citizen participation in crime prevention.

The role of SMS in elections as well as its role in mobilizing political action is also discussed. Examples of how text messaging was used as the medium for organizing rallies, spreading information, and stating political positions were given. The discussion on how SMS help develop political account or interpretation of current events was considered through an analysis of political jokes spread through SMS.

While the focus of the paper was on how SMS is being deployed to promote citizen participation, it was noted that SMS is also used in anti or counter-democratic projects.

In sum, this paper documents the role played by SMS in the overall effort at creating an effective set of rules for managing voluntary political exchanges in the Philippines.

Written largely through the lens of rich nations, scholars have developed theories about how digital technology affects democracy. However, primarily due to a paucity of evidence, these theories have excluded the experience of Sub-Saharan Africa, where meaningful access to digital tools is only beginning to emerge, but where the struggles between failed state and functioning democracy are profound. Using the lens of the 2007–2008 Kenyan presidential election crisis, this case study illustrates how digitally networked technologies, specifically mobile phones and the Internet, were a catalyst to both predatory behavior such as ethnic-based mob violence and to civic behavior such as citizen journalism and human rights campaigns.

The paper concludes with the notion that while digital tools can help promote transparency and keep perpetrators from facing impunity, they can also increase the ease of promoting hate speech and ethnic divisions.

Based on two experiences using mobile phones in Africa to address women’s rights and social development, the author tries to understand whether mobile technology will bring social progress to the economically poor of Africa.

The author first examines mobile phone use in the campaign for the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted by the African Union (AU)in 2003 and in need of ratification by 15 countries. The technical barriers to message transmission in the campaign and the message spamming that it attracted inhibited the success of this particular application of mobile technology but did not reduce the campaign effectiveness because the uniqueness of the cell phone campaign strategy drew a large amount of publicity for ratification.

In the second example, the UmNyango Project intended to promote and protect the rights of rural women in the province of KwaZulu Natal (KZN), South Africa, from domestic violence against women and landlessness amongst women. The project created "an SMS gateway through which messages could be distributed to all those enrolled in the project, and it enabled every individual to send messages to the organisers and to the local paralegal officers where they needed assistance with regard to any incidence of violence or threat to their access to land....In practice, the project found SMS to be prohibitively expensive, despite the fact that some level of subsidy was provided by the project towards the cost of SMS." The author states that, "Mobile phones, after all the hype, are like pencils, tools for communication.... Like all technologies, tools do not themselves do anything." He uses the example of SMS hate mail messages to support the position that effects of technology result from the underlying values and morals of its developers, not from the tools themselves, and concludes: "In capitalist societies, all technologies have the potential for magnifying and amplifying social differentiation. It is only through the imposition of the democratic will of citizens can this inherent tendency of technologies be overcome."

In this how-to, we test out two systems for SMS incident mapping: Ushahidi and Managing News. Incident mapping is a simple but powerful concept that does what it says - using SMS to report a given incidence and mapping the data geographically. This article compares the two platforms, their pros and cons, and outlines when to use either.