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.
This is a guest post by our colleague Michael Benedict who is currently working in Tanzania and Uganda. It was originally posted on his blog and is published here with permission.
While working with SMS-based applications I’ve noticed an air of mystery around the issue of reliability. I hear colleagues say ambiguous things like “carriers consider SMS to be lower priority than voice”, or “SMS delivery isn’t guaranteed”. My personal experience has been that messages are almost always delivered quickly and correctly, but I’ve heard stories of hours-long delays, corruption of data, and occasionally messages that never arrive. Since I am working on two projects that depend on reliable SMS service — one involves field-based data collection and another employs SMS as a transport layer between computers — I am interested in learning about how factors such as network, location, and time of day impact message transmission. I found myself in Mwanza, Tanzania last week with two GPRS modems and a local partner who was distinctly unenthusiastic about the work I was there to do, so I decided to try an experiment. I bought SIM cards and airtime for three of the major TZ networks, put two at a time in the models, and wrote a simple python script using Adam Mckaig’s excellent pygsm
SIMbaLink: Towards a Sustainable and Feasible Solar Rural Electrification System data sheet 1172 Views
Author:
Schelling, Nahana, Meredith J. Hasson, Sara Leeun Huong, Ariel Nevarez, Paul Wei-Chih Lu, Matt Tierney, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Harald Schutzeichel
Publication Date:
Dec 2010
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
Rural areas lack sustainable electrification solutions. Although solar solutions hold promise, they are fundamentally constrained by high maintenance costs (due to low user densities,equipment failure, poor handling) and a complete lack of accountability. In this paper, we describe our experiences deploying more than 5,000 Solar Home Systems in Ethiopia and the sustainability problems we faced.
Towards developing a decentralized and sustainable solar solution, we have designed SIMbaLink,an extremely low-cost real-time solar monitoring system that significantly reduces both the maintenance costs and the time to repair. By explicitly exposing the real-time status of a solar system to all parties concerned, SIMbaLink addresses the lack of accountability and trust concerns. SIMbaLink can be easily integrated with existing solar systems and can reduce equipment failure rates through early detection of system malfunctions. The SIMbaLink module uses the existing mobile network to send Solar Home System health updates to a technician located in an urban or rural center. Remote monitoring reduces the amount of visits that the technician needs to make to a certain household. Also, when the technician does make a visit, he or she will already know what the problem is.
Tanzania MOH and donors introduced reporting requirements for PMTCT (preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS) facilities to submit monthly reports to the district and regional levels for progam monitoring and decision making. Futures Group is responsible for collecting reports from PMTCT facilities across four regions. Sites are remote and there is no Internet, and no computers.
To meet the technical and budgetary challenges we developed IQSMS, an open source, freely available SMS reporting tool monitoring and evaluation data collection, to enable facilites to report on PMTCT indicators. IQSMS is used to track program activities at PMTCT sites in rural Tanzania using basic SMS mobile phone technology.
IQSMS is a freely available, software using SMS data in a predetermined format. Information is sent to a dedicated central laptop connected to Motorola mobile phones. The IQSMS software aggregates incoming SMS reports into an SQL database. Automated data quality checks, business rules and immediate notifications are sent to users ensuring that only validated data is added to the database. Aggregated PMTCT data is instantly available to district, regional and national managers based on role views.
FINALIST AND HONORABLE MENTION IN STOCKHOM CHALLENGE AWARD 2010
International Quality Short Message Services focus on development and implementation of a software technology that uses mobile phone to report data to a dedicated centralized computer. This will help coordinating medical care in various part of Tanzania. It is a project with great impact and potential for transferability particularly as the costs of telecom tend to decline with volume. It is a case of e-health, more clearly mobile e-health. International Quality Short Message Services makes health services available. a service which must be recognized. Congratulations.
Tool Category:
Resides and runs on a computer with tethered modem or mobile phone
Key Features :
The software uses SMS data in a predetermined format, sent to a dedicated central laptop connected to a Motorola mobile phone. The IQSMS software records incoming SMS reports into an SQL database. Automated data quality checks, business rules and immediate notifications are sent to users ensuring that only validated data is added to database. Aggregated PMTCT data is instantly available to district, regional and national managers based on role views.
IQSMS has reduced the time and costs associate with traveling to 535 facilities for data reporting, eliminated need to aggregate paper reports, reduced the need for expensive equipment, improved compliance in monthly reporting and has inspired confidence by rural healthcare workers that their results were accurately reported.
For the period from Jan –Dec 2009, 9867 total reports were submitted and 9400 reports were successfully validated. As the project takes advantage of mobile phones already owned by health workers, the training requirements are relatively low.
Main Services:
Information Resources/Information Databases
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2009-12
Platforms:
All phones -- SMS
Current Version:
1.3
Program/Code Language:
C/C++
Organizations Using the Tool:
PMTCT facilities providing services to all mothers, fathers and children to infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. The plan is to scale up to include more PMTCT sites supported by AIDSRelief, the NGO we work with. The IQSMs has been demonstrated to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and we are thinking of introducing the system to other regions not supported by AIDSRelief.
SMS As A Tool in Election Observation data sheet 4443 Views
Author:
Ian Schuler
Publication Date:
Apr 2008
Publication Type:
Journal article
Abstract:
In a short time, SMS messaging has demonstrated an impressive ability to help election-monitoring organizations overcome many logistical challenges to effective election oversight and protection of citizens’ rights.
The speed of communication and processing the flexibility and the coverage SMS can provide gives monitoring organizations a powerful tool for organizing volunteers and responding instantly to an evolving election environment. These tools allow groups to quickly collect a rich dataset of election information.
When combined with a reporting methodology that utilizes a representative sample of polling stations, SMS reporting contributes to a deep understanding of how elections are conducted across a country and whether the results reflect the will of the people. When shared with the public, these insights help citizens recognize their right to information about the electoral process. When citizens have more information about the electoral process and understand the degree to which elections represent their will, they are more likely to participate in the process and are better able to demand elections in which they can have confidence.
In contentious and politically tense situations, the ability to comment immediately on the conduct of the election can help to stabilize a potentially volatile postelection environment. Election-monitoring groups using SMS can quickly identify violations of citizens’ rights and alert authorities in time to have problems remedied on election day.
In addition to election observation, SMS has been used in other ways to protect the right to vote, such as voter education and voter registration. SMS text messages have provided a way for citizens to lodge official complaints and informal opinions on an election. However, citizens’ rights to transparency and accountability do not end with elections. It is easy to imagine how SMS could be used between elections to engage citizens and to protect civil rights. Citizen groups with experience collecting and providing information on elections might use similar methods to advocate for citizen interests in other areas. These tools could be used to monitor government service delivery and identify corruption. By systematically deploying to schools and clinics and reporting on resources available, groups would be able to determine whether their government is living up to its promises and identify areas where government managers are diverting resources.
SMS also could be used to report unfair and exploitive practices by police and government officials between elections. These exercises would experience different logistical challenges than election observation. Nonetheless, a cheap, easy, and ubiquitous tool like SMS could play in important role in making governments accountable to their citizens every day.
I have been meaning for a while to respond to a paper Rebekah Heacock, a graduate student at Columbia, wrote last year. Hancock describes in Mobile Activism in African Elections (PDF) three recent elections in Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and how mobile technology was used for both crowd-sourced and systematic election monitoring.
She poses that:
The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa is transforming the political and social landscape of the developing world, empowering people to source and share their own information and to have a greater say in what comes to international attention. This paper compares the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.
Zimbabwe is going to the polls on Saturday and candidates there have made extensive use of mobile phones to get their message out. In what is likely going to be a fraught election with poll irregularities and violence feared, the three main candidates are nonetheless using mobiles to engage their supporters and get them to the polls.
Zimbabweans, faced with a state-controlled media with few independent outlets, are also using text message jokes to express their opinions, as we have reported previously here at MobileActive.org. According to the Voice of America, "One of the most popular messages, at the moment, among Mutare residents is one that reads "President Robert Mugabe should be sent to farm, while Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition movement For Democratic Change should be sent to school... And [former ruling party finance minister] Simba Makoni must be allowed to rule."
The message is believed to the brain child of Makoni's backers."
The joke refers to Mugabi's controversial land reform, and candidate Twvangirai's limited formal education.
