sms

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 the West African nation of Mali, back street vendors power the mobile phone market. The major players -- Ikatel, a division of France Telecom, along with the homegrown Malitel -- have official stores, but most of their sales come from the street. In West Africa, subscription service is rare. Instead, mobile phone users purchase plastic-wrapped cards of varying denominations, scratch off a silvery bar much like those found on an instant lottery ticket, and recharge their phones with the code hidden underneath. These cards can be purchased from tin-roofed convenience shacks, egg sandwich vendors, or random men walking down the street, stacks of soccer jerseys slung over their shoulders.

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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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Gerry Jackson reports on Media Helping Media about the radio station SW Radio Africa outsisde of London that is sending sms headlines about news in Zimbabwe to it's subscriber base of about 2,000 mobile users. Jackson writes:

"We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway - so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective for any additional donor because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers. Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect.

We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly. What becomes interesting is what business model to use?

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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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The Jessica Lal case in India- people texting messages in real time in to a TV station which displays hundreds of thousands of messages protesting against the corrupt justice system.

Ever since our experimentation with the sms blog (text to a phone number or short code via a gateway and see your text message displayed on a blog or screen) I have been fascinated by the potential of real-time texting or sending photos to public sites or billboards to document, to protest, to proclaim.

Here are a number of creative examples I have come across: CronicasMoviles in Buenos Aires - un weblog artistico y documental donde se registraban fotos tomadas con celular, con una mirada distinta the Buenos Aires. It now has more than 3,000 entries and is an interesting snapshot of culture and life in Buenos Aires.

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