MobileActive.org

The most widespread information and communication technology (ICT) in developing countries today is the mobile phone. The majority of people in the least developed countries still live in rural areas and their livelihood depends on the primary industries. This study investigates the use of mobile phones among farmers in rural Tanzania in order to supply empirical data on the developmental role of this technology. The results show that the improved access to communication and information that mobile phones represent affects the entire cyclic farming life during the year and has resulted in considerable changes in the entire livelihood constructs, increased opportunities and reduced risks for rural farmer.

This case study analyses the ways in which the Cell-Life initiative, a collaboration between UCT‘s (University of Cape Town) departments of Civil and Electrical Engineering and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), utilises technology-based solutions (in particular, cellphone technology) for the life management of patients living with HIV/AIDS.
 

Cell-Life is a model example of a socially responsive endeavor which utilizes technology to overcome limitations and constraints. The use of cellphones to save lives by aiding adherence to the ARV medication regime and gather data is a remarkable contribution to the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic and signifies an intersection between the academic endeavour, innovation and the lives of ordinary people on the ground. The open approach taken by the organisation in sharing its work also illustrates how research is able to contribute to the 'undead count' (i.e. the number of lives saved) of academic research, which must surely be considered the greatest achievement of any endeavor.

This report focuses on the opportunity to improve agricultural productivity using mobile services, highlighting the opportunity to bring new investment to a key group: smallholder farmers. Mobile telephony could have significant potential to help the poorest farmers towards greater food and income security.

Only in recent years that mobile communications technology has been widely accepted as an enabler of sustainable growth. In developing markets, where the deployment of mobile telecommunications networks has surpassed traditional fixed-line technology, the mobile telecoms industry is well-placed as an enabler of higher performance in the value chain. There is a distinct need for market-led opportunities, and the opportunity for mobile operators to deliver these is significant.

The mobile services studied here enable companies to access and interact directly with different participants in the value chain, helping to build visibility of issues, capacity and quality. They will support company sustainability objectives, and in particular, progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals by helping to reduce poverty, improve health and increase funding for education.

This report aims to stimulate the necessary engagement between mobile operators, governments, NGOs and businesses to realize these opportunities and explore others.

This report takes a journalistic rather than an academic approach. It aims to pique interest, provoke debate, and explore the ideas that emerged from a groundbreaking relationship. It also hopes both to accentuate the Technology Partnership’s many positive results while providing a sense of self-reflection that might benefit other potential partnerships.
Over half a decade of experimentation, the Technology Partnership encountered many challenges and saw a variety of outcomes – some successful, others less so. Some of those outcomes might have been improved by different design, but many were also an unavoidable consequence of a complex world of many players and the fast rate of
technological change.

What emerges clearly, however, is a moment of extraordinary and continued opportunity in which both the humanism of the UN and the action-oriented culture of the private sector will be essential. The potential of this cross-sector collaboration is demonstrated by the work of the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation. Public-private alliances of this kind require sacrifice and hard work but promise a significant boost to global efforts to improve human wellbeing.

In November 2009, the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT office in Zambia, with technical assistance from the home office, conducted the End-Use Verification activity to assess the performance of the logistics management and supply chain systems for selected essential drugs, malaria and family planning commodities.

The survey was used in conjunction with the ongoing Essential Drugs Logistics System Pilot in Zambia, and overall objective was to assess how the logistics systems managed selected commodities at public health institutions, as well as provide a snapshot of how malaria was being diagnosed and treated at lower level facilities. This report presents the findings of the assessment as well as the short- and long-term recommendations to successfully implement the End-Use process, as well as the use of EpiSurveyor for regular data collection purposes.

We examine the growth of mobile phone technology over the past decade and consider its potential impacts upon quality of life in low-income countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. We first provide an overview of the patterns and determinants of mobile phone coverage in sub-Saharan Africa before describing the characteristics of primary and secondary mobile phone adopters on the continent.

We then discuss the channels through which mobile phone technology can impact development outcomes, both as a positive externality of the communication sector and as part of mobile phone-based development projects, and analyze existing evidence.

While current research suggests that mobile phone coverage and adoption have had positive impacts on agricultural and labor market efficiency and welfare in certain countries, empirical evidence is still somewhat limited. In addition, mobile phone technology cannot serve as the “silver bullet” for development in sub-Saharan Africa. Careful impact evaluations of mobile phone development projects are required to better understand their impacts upon economic and social outcomes, and mobile phone technology must work in partnership with other public good provision and investment.

The Health Impact Fund (HIF) is a proposal designed to incentivize pharmaceutical innovation by rewarding the development of new medicines in proportion to their health impact. The health care sector is plagued by wastage and poor governance, especially in developing countries. The MHIF system is a mobile payment and data collection system designed to enhance transparency and accountability, whilst improving the quality of data available for impact assessment. It also provides a platform for reporting misuse and abuse. The system is designed to mitigate some of the deployment challenges of the HIF and to act as a springboard for further expansion into broader mobile health (MHealth) solutions.

This paper presents a case study of the efficiency gains resulting from the introduction of electronic technologies to monitor and support adherence to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in Guguletu, South Africa. It suggests that the rollout of HAART to such resource-poor communities can be assisted significantly by the introduction of modified cellphones (to provide home based support to people on HAART and improve the management of adherence data) and simple barcoding and scanning equipment (to manage drug supplies). The cellphones have improved the management of information, and simplified the working lives of therapeutic counsellors, thereby enabling them to spend less time on administration and to devote a constant amount of time per
patient even though their case loads have risen threefold. It has helped integrate the local-level
primary health service provision of HAART with the kind of centralised data capture and analysis
that could potentially support a national HAART rollout.

Poor farmers often lack credit to purchase agricultural inputs, and rely on their buyers to provide it. This paper considers the effects of mobile phones on traders of perishable foodstuffs operating between Tanzania’s Southern Highlands and Dar es Salaam’s wholesale market, with a particular focus on the importance of credit in the relationship between potato and tomato farmers and their wholesale buyers.

It argues that the ability to communicate using these new information and communication technologies (ICTs) does not significantly alter the trust relationship between the two groups. It also suggests that farmers, in effect, often have to accept the price they are told their crops are sold for – irrespective of the method of communication used to convey this message – because their buyers are also their creditors. In this situation, many farmers are unable to exploit new mobile phone-based services to seek information on market prices, and potential buyers in other markets. Doing so runs the risk of breaking a long-term relationship with a buyer who is willing to supply credit because of their established business interaction.

It is suggested that, under a more open system than currently exists in Tanzania, mobile-payment (‘m-payment’) applications should target these creditor-buyers as key agents in connecting farmers to the credit they so often require.

The overall goal of the PDAs for Malaria Monitoring in Maputo and Gaza Provinces, Centre was to improve the management of public health dat using handheld computers in order to provide the malaria program the Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative (LSDI) with appropriate assessment tools and the ability to make informed decisions.

The specific objectives of the project that would contribute to the achievement of the overall goal were

1. to enable personnel from District level of the health service to collect data and provide it to the Provincial level in a timely fashion;
2. to develop training courses and appropriate collection tools designed for use with handheld computers; and
3. to evaluate the utility of handheld computers for the malaria control program to provide data rapidly and accurately to allow better targeting of interventions and resources.

AED-SATELLIFE developed and successfully deployed electronic data collection tools which catalog drug and rapid diagnostic test stocks; spray operators daily work performance; weekly health facility data; localization of individual households with GPS, including demographic data on household members, house structure and divisions; and health facility surveys linked to GPS positioning. Training materials were developed inPortuguese.

Independent evaluation confirmed that the electronic data collection/transmission tools proved to be a useful, adoptable, and result in higher user satisfaction compared to paper based approaches. Some challenges need to be addressed before there can be widespread adoption of the technology, such as limited infrastructure, especially cellular coverage.

Presented here is an overview of the operational needs of NGOs and CBOs and the role information systems can play to increase their accountability and efficiency. Information systems need to fit the diverse operational needs of NGOs and CBOs, which include coordinating activities, training and monitoring staff, documenting results, accounting, reporting, decision making and learning, acquiring external information and encouraging community participation.

Unfortunately, there are gaps in information systems that impede the ability of NGOs to embrace ICT. To name a few, the lack of open, accessible, cross-platform mobile development tools, limited opportunities and resources provided to local small software companies to engage with NGOs, and the lack of long distance networking technologies to reach remote locations.

Two examples of technologies that were applied successfully are shared: Self Help MIS, an application to monitor activities of small microfinance organizations and credit groups and DigitalICS, an application for data collection used by agricultural cooperatives.  The author stresses that ICTs should be viewed as a tool to allow local change agents to be more effective and accountable and shows how computing is able to support local organizations by inspiring innovation, implementation and dissemination of projects, and measuring impact.