mobile phones

The Myanmar military continued to suppress demonstrations in Burma/Myanmar today with harrowing pictures of tear gas, guns, and beatings directed at the monks and many more civilian protesters, estimated at 70,000 people. We wrote earlier about the use of mobile phones in transmitting information. The BBC today has an update on the use of the Internet in getting information out of Burma, as the country is called by democracy supporters and dissidents. The article notes that mobiles were used to get information out of the country, but also as a tool by the military junta to disseminate rumors and false information.

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Reposted from humanitarian.info.

Do mobile phones answer all our prayers? I’ve written about the role that mobile telephony can play in humanitarian assistance quite a few times now, without really talking about it directly. The one line I have consistently taken is that cellphone coverage is not reliable or secure enough to be used as the primary means of communication in an insecure environment.

Putting that to one side for a moment, however, it’s clear that mobile telephony really is the key communications technology for the poor - and that means it should be the key communications technology for the humanitarian community.

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In Sierra Leone's national election today, 500 election observers at polling stations around the country are reporting on any irregularities via SMS with their mobile phones. Independent monitoring of elections via cell phone is growing aqround the world, spearheaded by a few innovative NGOs.

The story starts in Montenegro, a small country in the former Yugoslavia. On May 21, 2006 the country saw the first instance of volunteer monitors using SMS, also known as text messaging, as their main election reporting tool. A Montenegrin NGO, the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), with technical assistance from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in the United States, was the first organization in the world to use text messaging to meet all election day reporting requirements.

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Amnesty International announced yesterday that it will accept payments on the UK via mobile phone that will get more money to the charity.  Billed as a "digital wallet", LUUP, the mobile payment vendor that Amnesty uses,  will " make it easier for people to make donations. Says Amnesty: "It will also enable the human rights organisation to receive up to 15 per cent more of the money than via PSMS methods such as regular text."

The UK arm of Amnesty ruled out premium rate text messages for donors as too costly. In Europe and in the US, network operators take a significant percentage of the revenue of premium texting -- up to 50% in some cases, and donations are limited to what are essentially micro contributions.  Using LUUP, however, means that donors can give up to £800 in the UK to Amnesty International, for example.

To encourage donations, LUUP wil add to the money received by donors an additional 20 per cent. Once signed up to a LUUP account, users can also use the service for sending money via SMS to friends via their mobiles and other mobile payment. If the recipient isn't a LUUP member, they'll be sent a text, inviting them to sign up. Users can they keep the money as part of their LUUP account or transfer it to their traditional bank account.

LUUP is currently available only in a few countries in Europe, but mobile payment systems are springing up all over the world, such as India and part of Africa where Safari and other mobile carriers and vendors see huge potential for offering banking services to the currently "unbanked," as the parlance goes.

Meanwhile, In the United States, Planned Parenthood is rolling out a new service with Working Assets, a progressive telecommunications provider.  According to the press release,  Planned Parenthood Wireless will provide 10% of revenues generated directly to PPFA. Planned Parenthood Wireless features competitively priced calling plans, and popular cell phones (I have seen some and they look fine). Working Assets uses the Sprint® network that reaches more than 250 million people in the United States but it limited to this country.

“Planned Parenthood members care passionately about women’s reproductive health and rights,” said Cecile Richards, PPFA president (and the daughter of the late American politician Ann Richards). “Now they have a smart, simple way to support our work and express that passion with every phone call they make, through a wireless service provider that cares.”

Not to be outdone, the other side is already offering similar services.  The Missouri-based Pro Life Communications offers long-distance, local telephone, nationwide cellular, Internet, and soon satellite television services. The company donates about 15% of the monthly bill customers pay to anti-abortion causes.  Another company, Amerivision Communications and it's Affinity 4 brand offers similar services, including pre-paid mobile, credit cards, and DirecTV service.  The company gives 10% of the monthly usage bill back to the pro-life organization of the customer's choice and has contributed more than $75 million to Christian and pro-life groups, according to a recent article.

Charities clearly have discovered telecommunications services as a way to garner financial and political support, and with the mobile market booming it was just a matter of time before our wallets and ears are hit hard.  What will be next?

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Mobile banking is taking off, with the potential to change entire economies where the majority of people currently are currently "unbanked," as the term goes. There have been been several very interesting reports and articles recently on the topic.  On the Foreign Policy blog, World bank consultant Christine Bowers writes about the enormous  economic implications that mobile banking has for the world's poorest:

"The World Bank estimates that in many countries, over half the population—"the unbanked"—has never had a bank account. The poor tend to be terrified of banks, since they're often humiliated or ignored when they try to enter them. That means they can't leave their savings anywhere safe, pay a bill without walking the cash to the office, or prove that they're credit-worthy. Meanwhile, mobile phone penetration is through the roof, especially in Africa. In 2000, fewer than 8 million Africans had a mobile phone - now over 100 million do. That's one in nine. Now, anyone with access to a cell phone has a place to keep his or her savings without needing a traditional bank account. We won't see millionaires suddenly emerging from the shantytowns just because they're "banked," but even a small nest egg needs a safe resting place.

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Following on the heels of the BBC feature on the revolutionary growth and availablity of mobile phones in Kenya, OmyNews features a new project-to-be in South Africa's KwaZulu Natal province.  The UmNyango Project of Fahamu, a MobileActive participant, equips rural women in the Province with free text messaging to report on violence against them and their children, and report other abuses.  The project coordinator, Anil Naidoo, says: ""This is the first time in KwaZulu Natal that we know of, where SMS technology has been used to directly empower women in this way. What makes the project unique is that women will be able to assert their constitutional rights using accessible and sustainable technology." The project will train women how to send and receive messages in their local language.   According to Naidoo, the sms platform "will complement the network of rural legal advice centers that form part of the UmNyango Project. Very importantly though, the SMS platform allows women to anonymously report on gender-based violence without fear of reprisal. We hope that women will be able to assert their constitutional rights through this project."

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An amazing article yet again on mobiles in Africa by the BBC.  Paul Mason in his two-part series writes about the economic impact of mobile phones, but more importantly, about how mobiles are transforming local politics.

"With one in three adults carrying a cellphone in Kenya, mobile telephony is having an economic and social impact whose is hard to grasp if you are used to living in a country with good roads, democracy and the internet. In five years the number of mobiles in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million - while the number of landlines remains at about 300,000, mostly in government offices. I decided to make a journey through Kenya to gauge the impact on the ground: the plan was to go from Mombasa via Nairobi to Lake Victoria following the mobile network map - contrasting life on the network to life off it."

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