FailFaire – where it's okay to admit the mistakes. MobileActive hosted another round of FailFaire, bringing together practitioners, developers, donors, and students involved in the use of technology for social change development to discuss what's usually swept under the rug – project failure. The event is an open space to discuss those projects that went wrong in our field fostering a sense of learning from mistakes and knowledge sharing. The latest FailFaire in New York brought together eight practitioners to present their failed projects and what they learned along the way. Take a look at this FastCompany article about the NYC FailFaire for some background.
Harvests of Development in Rural Africa: The Millenium Villages After Three Years data sheet 233 Views
Author:
The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Publication Date:
May 2011
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and address pressing challenges of hunger, gender inequality, illiteracy, and disease. The year 2015 has been affirmed as the deadline for reaching these Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets.
The goal is to show how an integrated approach to community-level development can translate the international MDG agreements into ground-level breakthroughs throughout rural sub-Saharan Africa. Villages are located in deeply impoverished rural areas that were considered hunger hotspots—with at least 20% of children malnourished. Sites were selected to reflect a diversity of agro-ecological zones, representing a range of challenges to income, food production, disease ecology, infrastructure, and health system development.
The Millennium Villages Project is a ten-year initiative spanning two five-year phases. The first phase focuses on achieving quick wins, especially in staple crop production and disease control, and on establishing basic systems for integrated rural development that help communities escape the poverty trap and achieve the MDGs. The Project involves the coordinated community-led delivery of a locally tailored package of scientifically proven interventions for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. Over the first five-year phase, interventions are delivered at a modest cost, totaling approximately $120 per capita per year, of which MVP brings about half to complement funds from the host government, the local community, and other partners. The second five-year phase will focus more intensively on commercializing the gains in agriculture and continuing to improve local service delivery systems in a manner that best supports local scale-up.
"The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Our mission is to fight poverty with passion and professionalism for lasting results and to help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors. We are not a bank in the common sense; we are made up of two unique development institutions owned by 187 member countries: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA).
Each institution plays a different but collaborative role in advancing the vision of inclusive and sustainable globalization. The IBRD aims to reduce poverty in middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries, while IDA focuses on the world's poorest countries.
When it comes to water, every drop counts. When a local waterpoint malfunctions or dries up, it’s important to get the problem resolved as quickly as possible. That’s where Maji Matone, a water monitoring and civic participation project in Tanzania, comes in.
Run by Daraja, a Tanzania-based NGO, Maji Matone asks villagers to report outages in their water systems via SMS. Daraja employees read through the SMSs, then pass along the information to the local district engineer. The project is currently being piloted in three different districts. Each district has a local engineer responsible for the water infrastructure. If reports continue to come in and no action has been taken, Maji Matone turns to its media partners in order to publicize the lack of action.
Animation without Borders: Mobile Cartoons as a Teaching Tool data sheet 4716 Views
A team of scientists, animators, and educators are working together to create animated videos that can be sent and downloaded to mobile phones around the world. The animations can be done in any language, are targeted toward low-level literate learners, and convey methods to obtain safe water in Haiti or techniques to farm effectively in Africa, and concepts such as value in a marketplace exchange.
This University of Illinois project is called "Scientific Animation Without Borders", or SAWBO, for short. The project started about a year ago. As the team delivers the animations via mobile phone and other mechanisms, they also hope to deliver a more collaborative and bottom-up approach toward effective educational materials.
MobileActive.org spoke with university faculty and graduate students to hear more about animation, education, and mobile technology.
Water is becoming one of the most contested resources in the world as populations increase and the availability of fresh water decreases. MobileActive spoke to the team behind NextDrop, an organization that uses mobile technology to monitor water flow in urban India.
Designed by a team of Berkeley and Stanford graduate students, the idea for NextDrop came out of a class at Berkeley's School of Information on how to use information technology for sustainable development. A group of students wanted to track intermittent water supplies in India. NextDrop was born. Ari Olmos, one of the team members running NextDrop, explains, “There was an opportunity to use information technology to improve the situation and create a schedule and feedback loop.”
NextDrop provides accurate and timely information about local piped water delivery in cities with unreliable water supplies. This information comes from water utility employees who call our interactive voice response system when they open valves to distribute water. These reports are used to generate real-time water availability updates and notifications 30 to 60 minutes in advance of water delivery. NextDrop uses crowd-sourcing to verify the accuracy of utility reports and helps utility engineers manage information flows.
Roughly 13 percent of the world’s population still lacks access to a regular supply of clean drinking water, and monitoring current water pumps and sanitation points is an important part of making sure that areas that have gained access to clean water don’t lose it. Water for People is a non-profit organization that monitors water and sanitation points in the developing world; last February, the organization began to investigate how mobile technology could help their work and from this, FLOW was born.
FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch) is an open-source, Android application that allows field workers to use mobile phones to document how well water pumps and sanitation points in the developing world are functioning, then transmit that data to create an online tagged map of target regions.
The Mobile Minute has info on social networking via mobiles, interactive mobile lesson plans in South Africa, a new ITU study that estimates more than 90% of the world's population has access to mobile networks, the Red Cross' work to battle a cholera outbreak in Haiti with SMS health updates, and the launch of a mobile money transfer pilot in the Philippines.
KickStart’s mission is to help millions of people out of poverty. The organization promotes sustainable economic growth and employment creation in Kenya and other countries. It develops and promotes technologies that can be used by dynamic entrepreneurs to establish and run profitable small scale enterprises.
The Case for mHealth in Developing Countries data sheet 2537 Views
Author:
Patricia N. Mechael
Publication Date:
Jan 2009
Publication Type:
Journal article
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to encourage reflection and discussion around the potential of mHealth in developing countries and to consider how early experiences can inform the way forward. Toward this aim, I synthesize many reviews and presentations from the eight years I have been studying the evolution of mobile phones and health in developing countries. I include observations and discussions that are now shaping the creation of mHealth as a field, to highlight the ingredients we need to move from a series of pilot projects and isolated business opportunities to a full-scale maximization of health-related benefits.
I begin by reviewing the strategic priorities within global health, where mobile telephony can have the greatest impact, along with organic health-related uses of mobile phones, and examples of formal mHealth interventions. I then demonstrate the potential for mobile phones to become an extension and an integral component of eHealth, describing how information and communication technology (ICT) can be used in health care, as well as mHealth, as a subset of mServices: using mobile devices to deliver services such as banking and health. I also show how trends and interests are converging among key stakeholders within the mHealth ecosystem, thus forming a foundation on which we can scale up and sustain more and better mHealth activities. Finally, I present some tactical guidance for a way forward that will further the objectives of both public health and business, particularly in outreach efforts to emerging markets, the bottom of the pyramid, and the next billion mobile phone subscribers.
Crowdsourcing Critical Success Factor Model data sheet 3048 Views
Author:
Ankit Sharma
Publication Date:
Jan 2010
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
Crowdsourcing, simply referring to the act of outsourcing a task to the crowd, is one of the most important trends revolutionizing the internet and the mobile market at present. This paper is an attempt to understand the dynamic and innovative discipline of crowdsourcing by developing a critical success factor model for it. The critical success factor model is based on the case study analysis of the mobile phone based crowdsourcing initiatives in Africa and the available literature on outsourcing, crowdsourcing and technology adoption. The model is used to analyze and hint at some of the critical attributes of a successful crowdsourcing initiative focused on socio-economic development of societies. The broader aim of the paper is to provide academicians, social entrepreneurs, policy makers and other practitioners with a set of recommended actions and an overview of the important considerations to be kept in mind while implementing a crowdsourcing initiative.
Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a global celebration that raises awareness about the enivronment. To do our part to celebrate this day, we’ve put together a look at some of the mobile tools and organizations we’ve covered recently that are doing their part to help the Earth. If you have any suggestions about tools or organizations that are doing great environmental work with mobiles, please leave a comment and let us know – and have a good Earth Day!
Water Quality
We recently covered the Water Quality Reporter, a program in South Africa that uses mobiles to test the health of water supplies. The program allows field workers to use mobile forms or SMSs to cheaply and effectively transfer data about water quality to a centralized database, while receiving feedback about how to handle local water problems.
Many lament that mobile phones can isolate us from our immediate surroundings as we walk down the street texting friends and not paying attention. These three different projects are encouraging people to actively engage with what's around them - with and on their mobile phones. TXTual Healing, Amphibious Architecture and Pathways to Housing take regular text messages and turn them into an interactive experience.
Txtual Healing
In 2006, Paul Notzold showed the first presentation of TXTual Healing as his MFA thesis project for Parsons School of Design. The project consisted of speech bubbles projected onto the side of a building; viewers texted in messages to fill the speech bubbles. Since then, the project has been shown around the world, including France, Italy, Romania, the USA, the Netherlands and China.
Safe drinking water is a necessity for life. But according to a 2005 report published by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to quality drinking water.
In South Africa, a current project is monitoring water quality with SMS in a push to bring safer water to the area. Run by the University of Bristol and the University of Cape Town, the four year project is two-fold: 1) develop a new means of testing water quality and 2) develop a new means of reporting the results of these water quality tests.
Aquatest, the water quality testing system, is still under development, but the Water Quality Reporter is up and running – on mobile phones with reporting via SMS. The application allows field workers to cheaply and effectively transfer data about water quality to a centralized database, while receiving feedback about how to handle local water problems.
Says Melissa Loundon, a researcher at the University of Cape Town who worked with the development of the Water Quality Reporter,
“The main part of the project is to develop the water test. But the original project team at the University of Bristol realized that if you’ve got a water test that can be used by people who aren’t in the field, or people who aren’t specialists, it doesn’t really help them if they get a result and see that their water is not safe to drink. They may not have a whole lot of resources to do anything about it. So the point of the cell phone application is that once somebody has a result, they can communicate it to a central database and also to somebody in the area who can provide support.”
The Peace Corps traces its roots and mission to 1960, when then-Senator John F. Kennedy challenged students at the University of Michigan to serve their country in the cause of peace by living and working in developing countries. From that inspiration grew an agency of the federal government devoted to world peace and friendship.
Since that time, more than 195,000 Peace Corps Volunteers have served in 139 host countries to work on issues ranging from AIDS education to information technology and environmental preservation.
Here's an exciting project I've been working on recently (sorry about the PR speak, it's some copy I've been using in promotion!).
Glastonbury is a giant music festival, the biggest in the UK and probably in Europe, but it's located on a working dairy farm and we need to leave the farm the way the cows like it. So the only trace of this year's festival we want to leave behind are images, videos and text messages. So Greenpeace, Oxfam and WaterAid are collaborating with Moblog to capture the sights and sounds (but, thankfully, not the smells) on a mobile blogging website or moblog.
