May 6, 2009

By Samantha

Mobile is continually being used in dynamic, innovative ways to change communications–and the world. A great new example of this is RapidSMS, a suite of mobile tools that UNICEF employs to see where there are problems, respond quickly, and allocate resources effectively.

Created by UNICEF’s Innovations and Development team and the Millenium Village Project at Columbia University, Rapid SMS is an open source framework for mobile messaging systems. Essentially, it is to mobile what Django or Ruby on Rails are to the web. Using this system, developers can create SMS forms to collect data through texting. It has optional audio capabilities so people can leave voice messages or hear audio clips over the phone. The system also includes a Web interface with spreadsheets and graphs for easy analysis.

While RapidSMS still requires some cost, the advantages to texting is that there’s none of the expense or time associated with sending workers to the region. Instead, locals can easily be trained to do the reporting themselves. This quick collection and availability of data can help aid agencies intervene if the statistics show a crisis is unfolding.

The system is currently undergoing a four-month trial run in Malawi to monitor child malnutrition, and UNICEF has used it to deliver food in Ethiopia after a drought. Theyfound the results to be “dramatic.”

Previously, UNICEF monitored the distribution of food by sending a small set of individuals who traveled to each feeding center. The monitor wrote down the amount of food that was received, was distributed, and if more food was needed. There had been a two week to two month delay between the collection of that data and analysis, prolonging action. In a famine situation each day can mean the difference between recovery, starvation, or even death. The Ethiopian implementation of RapidSMS completely eliminated the delay.

The program is still in alpha, so it’s undergoing heavy development. One drawback is that at the moment it requires strong technical skills to install and configure. However, RapidSMS has great potential, particularly when it comes to aiding the developing world. That’s especially true now that the GSMA has predicted that 90 percent of the world will be covered by a mobile network by 2010.

February 22, 2009

By Marcia Stepanek

In some African villages, bed nets are used as wedding veils—and water strainers and window screens. It’s a big worry for aid workers: in Nigeria every year, malaria accounts for 30 percent of all child deaths; the World Health Organization says that across the world, some 1 million die from the disease annually. The vast majority of those deaths, says WHO, occur in Africa. “The road map to get rid of this disease involves many things,” Bill Gates told TED2009 earlier this month, “…including the work of social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use bed nets, but 90 percent.”

Enter social media, instead. Christopher Fabian and his colleagues at UNICEF’s two-year-old Innovations unit [along with tech-for-change developer Dimagi] have created something called Rapid Android—a new software application for Google’s Android phonethat turns it into a high-speed data collector and analyzer to help relief workers bust through paper-based bureaucracies to distribute health and food aid more quickly. Using Rapid Android, Fabian and crew also can train villagers, themselves, to use inexpensive cell phones to text in their community’s health, food supply, and bed net usage statistics to authorities. How rapid is this new mobile supply chain system? Think minutes versus months: aid workers can collect and process data anywhere there’s a wireless connection. With faster knowledge of what’s working [and what isn't], aid workers can intervene faster and more effectively.

Two weeks ago, the team launched Rapid Android to help the World Bank, USAID, and other partners start monitoring the deployment of tens of millions of bed nets in Nigeria. It’s also launching a five-month pilot project in Malawi that will use simple cellphones and text-messaging to more rapidly and accurately track children’s health and malnourishment data—before it’s too late to intervene. “Right now,” Fabian says, “it takes months to get simple information from many of these villages to a centralized place.” The team created RapidSMS last fall, following a famine in Ethiopia, to speed food supply data from remote areas.

Cause Global caught up with Fabian, his UNICEF colleague Adam McKaig, and Sean Blaschke of Columbia University, at Saturday’sMobileTech4SocialChange bar camp in Manhattan. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

Why this and why now?
FABIAN: In Africa, we are finding there are systemic failures in public health and supply in terms of getting reliable information quickly from the field. Ninety percent of the developing world has access to a cell phone, so we’re experimenting with the use of instant messaging to make a difference. We’re finding that we can train people in villages to be data collectors and help us by using cell phones to text information to central authorities; we and governments can then respond faster to specific needs. In some places, it takes months just to get a piece of paper from the field. Mobile phones and SMS technology can help surmount that hurdle.

Your team just created Rapid Android. What’s this?
FABIAN: We’re very excited about the Google Android phone. Android is an open source operating system for a mobile phone. Our developers wrote Rapid SMS, an open source version of the instant messaging software, for the Android phone, specifically. This means that at UNICEF, there’s no need any longer to send a server or any complicated (computer) hardware into a country, and there’s no need to send in a person just to set it up. Now, you can simply bring a $200 phone into a country, plug it into power, and start immediately using it to collect data—on that phone, itself. This obviates a lot of overhead for set-up, and it also allows people who wouldn’t otherwise be data collectors to gather information about their communities from any $10 cell phone. In Nigeria, there are 774 local government areas. Each one of them could use hardware like an Android phone to collect bed net data through SMS and have interventions very quickly rather than having to go to central source and wait 6-7 months for a report to come out. This means you can help people faster during emergencies and disasters.

What’s the cost advantage, if any?
FABIAN: We found in Ethiopia, for example, just after a famine had struck about four months ago, that to collect 3,000 data forms over two weeks via RapidSMS cost less than 40 U.S. dollars. That’s incredibly cheap. This is a technology that saves on fuel, there’s no people time and no travel. In Ethiopia, we’ve trained local people to report what’s happening using the technology, and it’s very cool how they’ve been able to take control over their own reporting in this way versus having foreigners come in and do it for them. It’s very empowering.

In Nigeria, how will Rapid Android work in bed net distribution?
FABIAN: The challenge, again, like in Ethiopia and Malawi, is how we can get information from a wide swath of the population very, very quickly back from the field. We’re working with the World Bank, USAIDand a group of other partners in Nigeria to deploy the largest bed net distribution in history —63 million bed nets by 2010, which is something like 36 kilometers of trucks back-to-back. This will start in two regions in Nigeria, north of Abuja. That’s where the first set of bed nets will be distributed. There will be 6 million nets given to these regions by the end of this summer, and then another 57 million will be distributed throughout Nigeria by 2010. We’re sending six developers to Nigeria to work with local programmers, developers and universities to develop reporting capacity so we can start helping authorities make sure these nets are used effectively.

We’re looking at reporting on the mobilization and distribution outputs of nets in Nigeria, and how these systems can help. Later in the process, we’ve discussed sending out questions like: Are people using their nets correctly? Have they been notified of when the distribution will occur in their village? Do they know what to do if they’re not getting their nets? We’re working with the federal health ministry in Nigeria—and also with mobile phone providers there—to get SMS into the hands of the local population so people in the villages can text in the information we need. This way, we also can provide access to information that can help in malaria prevention.

Do villagers need incentives to text in data?
McKAIG: We’ve been looking at the possibility of using a number of incentives, including offering people two free SMS calls for each call they make to us. We think this might help; we’re still testing a number of options.

In Malawi, you’re using cellphones and SMS to help stem malnutrition. How is this working?
BLASCHKE: Health authorities in Malawi are very excited by the potential of using simple, $20 mobile phones to revamp, revitalize and basically improve a system that has been floundering. It had been taking, at best, three months to get data from the field through the regional governments to the central government. We at Columbia asked UNICEF Innovations to work with us to help. If you’re trying to identify early trends in malnutrition, a best-case scenario of three months doesn’t cut it. Three months can be the difference between life and death.

McKAIG: In Malawi, one of the biggest things we’re finding is not a problem with communicating nutrition measurements, but that those measurements are very inaccurate to begin with. People have been touching the hair of children to “feel” if they are malnourished rather than using government formulas for measuring height and weight to determine it. And in some places, we’ve found people measuring children’s height by having them stand up against a wall with a board balanced on their heads. These children are being told to stand as still as they can so as not to drop the board while people read measurements from the edges of it. Measurements can vary for each child by as much as 5-10 centimeters, just due to changes in the angle of the boards from any one month to the next. So we have programmed our RapidSMS system there to help detect wild fluctuations in children’s height. Our system also lets health authorities send back questions if they see data that seems suspect. We think this new feedback mechanism is very important. We’re also now asking workers to simply text in the height and the weight of each child; our system will do the rest to determine the math behind what those numbers mean. This will improve the quality of the data from the field and make it easier for local health care workers to perform their jobs better.

For more on the use of mobile in nonprofit work, click here for a recent overview on MobileActive.org. For more on UNICEF’s RapidSMS and Rapid Android projects, click here.

(Photo, Mama Berta in Tanzania, courtesy of John Rae)
(Illustration by Evgeniy Ivanov for istock.com)

Johannesburg

January 13, 2009

For the first time in years, John Phiri*, a health extension worker in Malawi’s central Salima district, does not have to fill in a stack of forms during his monthly round of collecting data to monitor nutrition levels in the community.

Now he whips out his mobile phone and texts the data, including the height and weight of the children in the area, while covering his beat. The information is immediately captured by a computer that stores the national nutritional and food-security statistics in Lilongwe, the capital.

In previous years the data might have taken two months to be registered in the country’s Integrated Nutritional and Food Security Surveillance System. The quick collection and availability of data can help government and other aid agencies intervene if the statistics show a crisis is unfolding.

Malawi has one of the world’s worst under-five mortality rates: up to 120 infants in every 1,000 may die before they turn five, and 46 percent of children younger than five years are stunted – an indicator of the malnutrition level.

The RapidSMS system, as it is called, is on a four-month trial run that began in January 2009 in three districts of Malawi’s Central Province. The SMS (short message service) text message and web-based tool was developed by the Innovations and Development team of UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, and allows text messages to be captured via the internet.
Besides the obvious advantage of speed and quality of data, the system also creates spreadsheets and graphs, allowing for easy interpretation of the data.

Yet doing away with the old system of completing questionnaires and sending them to the capital using the postal system has its drawbacks.

The new system is expensive. In Malawi it costs about 10 US cents to send a text message, “But we are in talks with the mobile phone service provider to make the service toll-free,” said Stanley Chitekwe, UNICEF’s nutrition manager.

Christopher Fabian, who co-heads UNICEF’s Innovations and Development team, maintains that the service is still cheaper than the manual collection of data. “The first week of the trial run only cost about $40.”

Replacing the questionnaire with only the numbers also means anecdotal information on household security, obtained via the questionnaire, is also lost. “We are aware of that – we are trying to develop a system which will help us get a sense of household food security levels and coping strategies, and we hope to get the system running after four months,” Chitekwe said.

Even before it kicked off, the Malawi project, designed by UNICEF and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, in the US, won first prize in the Development 2.0 Challenge, run by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), for its innovative design for adapting a commonly accessible technology to monitor the health and nutritional status of children.

Tested in Ethiopia

The Malawian programme was developed after UNICEF’s success with the RapidSMS system in monitoring and delivering the protein-rich read-to-use therapeutic food, Plumpy’nut, in drought-hit Ethiopia in October 2008.

“It used to take the agency three to four months to respond [depending on when the information reached the head office] to shortages [of Plumpy’nut] in the 1,800 feeding centres in Ethiopia – now the alerts get through within seconds,” said Fabian.

Before implementing the RapidSMS system in Ethiopia, initial field testing was done in northern Uganda by Sean Blaschke, a student at Columbia University who worked as a UNICEF intern during May 2008 in Uganda’s Kitgum district. The area is prone to Hepatitis E outbreaks, a disease caused mainly by drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated food.

UNICEF is also considering developing the system to monitor school attendance rates. “It can have any number of uses,” said Fabian. “We hope to make the system available, free of cost, to organisations and other implementing partners soon.”

* Not his real name

December 3, 2009

By Aparna Ray

New York

December 4, 2009

By Shushan Mebrahtu

‘Design for UNICEF’ is an interdisciplinary design programme where graduate students examine some of the challenges UNICEF faces and work in groups to research and prototype solutions. The graduate class is taught by Professor Clay Shirky and is a collaboration between UNICEF and the Interactive Telecommunication Programme at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City.

As the end of the second semester approaches, 16 New York University students presented their projects at UNICEF Headquarters yesterday.

UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman thanked the students for their hard work and underlined the importance of working with interdisciplinary groups in academia to extend the reach and effectiveness of UNICEF’s work by bringing in new ways and thinking to the organization’s programmes.

“This fits into a larger context of UNICEF engaging the next generation of thinkers around issues that pertain to children,” Veneman said.

Real solutions in the field

The students presented the following four projects to UNICEF staff and attendees:

1. Rapid – Family Tracing and Reunion (Rapid – FTR) A project designed to improve field collection of information necessary to aid in family tracing and reunification programs. The group is approaching the data collection piece of FTR, on the assumption that improvements in the breadth and accuracy of the data, in the ability to keep photos and other data sets together, and in the ability to transmit collected data in minutes or hours instead of days, will benefit all subsequent users of that data.
2. Personal Power explores various ways of generating power in the field, using a minimum of delivered parts and a maximum of locally available scrap and kinetic energy. The group is looking at various ways to cross the ‘science fair gap’, where the generation of trickle voltage using alternators assembled from scrap wire and cheap magnets is adequate to demonstrate principles of power generation, but not to perform useful tasks, while the cost of generators to perform useful tasks is too high to make significant distribution feasible.
3. Inphone is a front-end to RapidSMS application. RapidSMS is UNICEF’s open-source platform for data collection, logistics coordination and communication, allowing any mobile phone to interact with the web. Inphone is designed to collect valuable but dispersed information from target populations via SMS and phone calls. InPhone links basic interface design for the creation and maintenance of participating users (e.g. truck drivers who could be queried about the passibility of roads; citizens in low-lying areas who could be queried about the presence or absence of standing water), with an incentive program (each participant gets an SMS credit for participating) to make these “human sensor networks” viable.
4. ElectriSeed is an attempt to improve the educational background for simple engineering projects, concentrating on power generation, whether by the creation of heat-generating parabolic reflectors, or batteries and other forms of power generation. The output of ElectriSeed is not the projects, but rather their documentation. An ElectriSeed project culminates in the creation of the graphic instructions necessary to recreate the project using locally recovered parts (everything from sticks and string to soda cans and bottles to scratched but still reflective CDs.)

A continuous learning platform

The collaboration provided UNICEF staff with useful insights on how to pursue effective engagement with the academia.

“Our experience with ‘Design for UNICEF’ class this semester, showed us that we cannot engage academia with a specific solution in mind – but that it has to be a learning platform for all involved,” said UNICEF’s Division of Communication Innovation team leader Erica Kochi.

UNICEF will look into ways to further engage with the students by arranging field trips to country offices to work on specific projects and connect the students with other partners and private sector thinkers.

Hindustan Times

Press Trust Of India

December 21, 2008

By Katrin Verclas

Ethopia again this year has experienced crippling droughts.  Faced with the possibility of famine, UNICEF Ethiopia launched a massive food distribution program to supply the high-protein food Plumpy’nut to under-nourished children using mobile phones for monitoring and delivering supplies its more than 1,8000 feeding centers in the country.

To coordinate the distribution and maintain appropriate stocks, field monitors reported on supplies and number of children fed through an SMS reporting system using a UNICEF-built mobile data collection and monitoring software, RapidSMS.  We have previously reviewed RapidSMS here, comparing it with a less scaleable lower-end tool, Frontline SMS.

The emergency food supply chain before RapidSMS

Before the use of texting to record and monitor, the roving 30 field monitors traveled around the country, visiting feeding sites, recording data, and then faxing data sheets to Addis Ababa once a week.  This low frequency of reporting did not allow UNICEF to quickly respond to increased need or low supplies of food supplements in remote areas. The inefficiency of this system was also error prone, and resulted in reporting on only about 20% of the Plumpy’nut distribution centers – a small percentage of the 1852 distribution centers in the country.

To increase turnaround, increase accuracy, and to improve speed and efficiency of supplying food to the centers, UNICEF devised a mobile phone-based reporting system so data could be analyzed and responded to as soon as it is known in the field.

The RapidSMS Solution

UNICEF Ethopia, with the organization’s New York-based Innovation Center, evaulated how the open-source RapidSMS platform could be customized to provide a solution that would take advantage of the widespread availability of mobile phones In Ethopia to improve the monitoring and delivery of supplies.  The result of these customizations is RapidSMS – a flexible distribution monitoring package – which can be reconfigured to any supply or situation (eg, drug supply, bed-net distribution, etc), and deployed at short notice. A GSM modem attached to a webserver receives the incoming SMS messages, replies with a confirmation message, and automatically saves the entry into a database.

RapidSMS can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet (with proper login credentials) to monitor reporting activity, send custom messages to field monitors, generate reports, and export data to Excel. Field monitors are able to send any additional information in the form of ‘alerts’ which are forwarded by email or SMS to UNICEF staff, so action is taken immediately. Reported data can be automatically plotted on a map to show a visual summary of field conditions.

How RapidSMS Was Used

The field monitoring staff interacted with the system exclusively using SMS from their mobile phones. Monitors received a 2-hour training and printed documentation containing instructions and examples of how to submit SMS reports.  The documentation also contained instructions on how to summon additional “help” by sending “alerts”, which are relayed immediately by email or SMS to UNICEF staff. All incoming and outgoing messages are logged and counted, so field monitors can easily be reimbursed for their expenses.

The UNICEF staff used the web-based interface of RapidSMS to monitor the field reporting activiies, to view and analyze incoming supply reports immediately, send custom messages to field monitors, broadcast announcements and updates to all field monitors, generate reports and visualize data (delivery status, number of new beneficiaries, stock levels, etc) on a map, and generate graphical summaries of activities.

Results

The RapidSMS Ethiopia project went live on 27 October, 2008. As of 4th December, 2008, the organization had received 939 unique reports — which amounts to about 10-50 reports every day.  The total number is similar to reporting with the traditional pre-SMS system, however, reports were received every day instead of fortnightly and information was automatically entered into database.  Each of the reports contained information about the number of new admissions to the fedinc center, and the quantity of Plumpynuts received and consumed, as well as information on the stock balance, location of the distribution center, and information about the field monitor.

As the pilot continued, field monitors became more familiar with RapidSMS and explored its advanced functionality voluntarily.  Based on their interaction, UNICEF continued to improve  the usability of the system to reduce reporting errors.  The urgent alert system proved particularlyimportant.  In the two months since the pilot started, UNICEF received dozens of alerts above and beyond the standard data collected, such as “The supply room was left unlocked” to “There is NO STOCK remaining at this OTP!”

Frield monitors used the system well. Despite travelling in pairs, 21 of the 33 field monitors  successfully submitted reports: a 64% participation rate, even though only 50% is required for full coverage. The initial target by the UNICEF Ethiopia field office was a “limited snapshot” of the conditions at 20% of distribution centers, similar to what the old faxing reporting method yielded. Of the 1852 distribution centers initially imported into RapidSMS, reports have been received for 939: a 44% coverage in five weeks.

UNICEF Ethiopia supply and logistics staff are currently (as of 4th Decemeber, 2008) reviewing the results of the RapidSMS pilot, the data collected, and comparing it to the traditional phone/fax method of reporting that was conducted in parallel during this period.

Implementation requirements

Every country has a different telecommunication infrastructure which determines the inputs needed for RapidSMS to work.  This makes it hard to determine  the precise cost of deployment. However, an estimation of a deployment includes discussion with staff, customization of RapidSMS as needed, installation in the country, user training,  a webserver (a low-end PC is sufficient), an Internet connection, a GSM modem (around $120 USD), 2 prepaid and 1 contract SIM card (and two mobile phones for testing).

Next Implementation

The next use of RapidSMS will be in Malawi between January and April 2009 to transmit nutritional data from growth monitoring clinics to government and UNICEF databases, while providing instant feedback to mothers on the changing status of their child’s growth.

The Child Malnutrition Surveillance and Famine Response project is an effort by a team of six students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) to use mobile technology solutions to improve the speed and quality of nutrition surveillance data for children in Malawi. Again, mobile technology will replace the paper/mail data collection process currently in use at Malawi’s child growth monitoring clinics with instantaneous data transmission via mobile devices.

The project will enable the Government of Malawi, UNICEF Malawi, and their partners to geographically map and track child malnutrition trends accurately and in real time. This tool will provide a critical means of intervention into rapidly unfolding food and nutrition crises.

To recognize the innovations of RapidSMS and UNICEF’s work, this project is a finalist in the USAID Development 2.0 Challenge.

MobileActive has been a judge in the Challenge.

Reviews of RapidSMS and Frontline SMS can be found in our [Mobile Active’s] tool reviews.

August 7, 2009

Leigh Jaschke

The number of women in Tostan villages that have abandoned the practice of female genital cutting is powerful testimony of the organization’s impact. The tradition is centuries old. “Since 1997, 3,792 communities in Senegal, 364 in Guinea, and 23 in Burkina Faso, as well as villages from three other African countries, have joined other women [who have participated in Tostan's basic education program] in abandoning this harmful practice,” notes the Tostan website.

Now Tostan, an international development organization, is exploring the use of mobile technology in its work.

Tostan has partnered with UNICEF in a year-long pilot project in which several Senegalese communities are exploring the use of a mobile communications platform built with RapidSMS.  “Jokko“, which means “communication” in Wolof, a regional language in Senegal, aims to become a practical, low-cost system that encourages group decision-making in the villages.  RapidSMS is a free and open-source framework for mobile communications that is leveraging SMS/text messaging.

Tostan has a decidedly community-driven approach to development.  The organization’s signature program is the Community Empowerment Program (CEP) that runs for 30 months. The majority of participants in the CEP are girls and women who have participated in programs in over 2,600 communities and nine countries. The CEP has strong social empowerment, literacy, and economic empowerment components to help give marginalized groups a voice and improved access when it comes to services in health, education, and social inclusion.

Mobiles for Literacy

Tostan has worked in literacy in Senegal for over eighteen years; its model has been identified by many including UNICEF, the WHO, and others as an exemple for rural development. In a recent interview with MobileActive.org, Gannon Gillespie, Director of US operations, explained that the Tostan Literacy Program is the point of entry for the use of mobile phones, helping participants practice reading and writing skills and to reinforce math skills and numeracy.  Participants begin by identifying and typing familiar letters, such as their name, and using the phone calculator for basic addition and subtraction.

Mobile phone penetration in Senegal has grown to over 85%; phones are owned by many adults and children. Members of the communities where Tostan works speak about learning how to use their phones autonomously as a personal means of communication, to compute prices in the market, or send an SMS. These are the everyday social uses of literacy that the mobile literacy component of Tostan’s program teaches.

Jokko

The second way in which Tostan is deploying mobile tech is by building a RapidSMS-powered mobile list-serve that texts everyone in the community. The UNICEF Innovation Team, Dimagi, and The Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA) worked with the Tostan Program staff in the Cassamance region to help launch the pilot.

Jokko makes it possible to communicate with a network of people by sending a text message. This means that a nurse, literacy leader, representative of a women’s association, or the village imam can communicate with community members about events or other important activities in the village (for example, a vaccination campaign or a literacy group meeting). Jokko works by sending a message to a number that then forwards the message to all phone numbers belonging to the network.

The communications system utilizes a functionality dubbed ‘SMSForum.’  SMSForum allows community members to access a server in the Tostan office by sending their text to a “magic number”. This number feeds directly into the server or computer which then forward the SMS to a group of community members phones. The platform supports easy and dynamic creatin of multiple groups of people. For example, one village  has created a discussion group exclusively for youth. The basics of this system work much like a group list for text-messaging, however, the sender is only charged for the cost of one local text message. The cost of text messages sent to the “magic number” are covered by the administrator, in this case Tostan.

Part of the power of this trial is that it is community-driven. Rather than place restrictions on what messages can be sent and received, various groups in the communities are trained on the basic functions of the system and then define their own uses.

According to Guillaume Debar and Sylvan Herskowitz, two members of the project team, the first message on the blog was a shout-out sent by a group of young girls, and the second was a poem. Potential uses include community discussions, events, and mobilization – with each community defining how they will use their network.

By October, Tostan hopes to introduce the community communications platform to 40 villages in Senegal, and to bring the total number of villages using the platform to 200 within a year.

Jeff Wishnie, Director of Social Engagement at ThoughtWorks, played a critical role in developing the platform. He was quick to point out in a chat with MobileActive.org that this is the first time he has seen a RapidSMS application being driven by a community.

Rowena Luk of Dimagi, a software development firm, and part of the UNICEF/RapidSMS development team, told MobileActive:  “Some of the challenges of setting up the platform in Senegal included “extending the web and SMS system to work for Wolof, Pulaar, and Diola, and supporting local language characters such as ‘ŋ’ and ‘å’ on mobile phones. Also, because we are targeting low-literacy users, it was vital for us to design explicitly for that learning process – providing very low barriers to entry, for example, giving clear feedback, and making best-guess recommendations for mistyped commands.”

In the end, the team chose to internationalize the system, allowing translators to build out both the web and SMS interface to support any language in any country that they are working in. At the moment, Tostan is still paying per message. This raises certain questions of sustainability, although there is potential for collaboration with network providers in Senegal, as in other countries.

For now, the project is based on the ambiguous idea of communication groups in a system, grouped by village or community. There is a diversity within users that includes Community Health Workers, teachers, untrained community health agents or ’Mobilizers’, and the women’s literacy group. The initial training varied between each of these groups. More experienced mobile phone users were taught to send messages while newer users received training that focused on how to receive a message.

Access to other services

One of the most important aims of integrating mobile technology into the Literacy program and experimenting with Jokko, the community communications platform, are access to other community services, particularly in health. For example, the ability to receive and read text messages might allow community members to read alerts about vaccination campaigns, or receive follow-up reminders for Malaria or Malnutrition treatment from community health care workers. Considering recent advances in mHealth represented by RapidResponse, FrontlineSMS Medic, and OpenMRS, there is much to be gained by communities that are mobile literate and able to take advantage of strong social networks.

Unexpected outcomes

There are unexpected positive impacts of innovating the way mobiles are integrated into communities in the Cassamance. In Kagama, for example, the Tostan team received news from the local school teacher that attendance has risen since mobile literacy was included in Tostan’s basic education program.

Photo courtesy Tostan

July 7, 2009

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the 2009 Innovation Fair held at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva yesterday. The fair is part of the High-Level Segment of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which is meeting here this week with a focus on global health.

UNSG Ban Ki-moon with UNICEF Communications Specialist Erica Kochi

UNICEF and partners represented at the fair are presenting new technologies and products that have helped revolutionize child and maternal health care.

“Health is the foundation for peace and prosperity,” said Mr. Ban in his address to ECOSOC delegates. “Investments in health are investments in society. They save lives and benefit economies through improved productivity.”

Read the complete article here.

The following poem was received and broadcast (via RapidSMS) to one of our
villages in rural Senegal earlier today. Note that it even rhymes in French.

“Puvoir tuché tt l monde come si l monde été une ronde: simpl ingégn 1guin
d temp TOSTAN ns t some reconéçen”

(Translation: “Being able to reach the world as if the world was just a
round dance: easy, well-thought, a gain of time. Tostan, we are grateful”)