Mobile technology for development (MT4D)
I admit it: I have a love-hate relationship with my cell phone.
I don’t like phones in general, but I consider my cell phone to be more necessary than other phones. It has helped me out in some sticky situations, like when I had a flat tire or needed advice on a difficult buying decision while at the mall. But I don’t like the thought of other people being able to find me no matter where I am, so I am stingy with giving out my cell phone number. And I am rather passive-agressive toward my cell phone, often leaving it uncharged until it starts that annoying “low battery” beeping, usually at 2 a.m.
Still, I must be alone in disliking my cell phone, because everywhere I look, people are talking on them. Cell phones aren’t just popular here in the U.S. They are becoming ubiquitous all over the world. Worldwide there are over 2.7 billion mobile phone users, far surpassing Internet users, TV watchers or even car drivers. In the developing world, especially, mobile phones are leapfrogging conventional wired technologies like landlines and Internet to become a primary communications and information resource.
Last week I was in a meeting with a co-worker who had just returned from a workshop the Capacity Project was hosting in Africa. He shared an interesting learning — that his African colleagues rarely read email as part of their daily work. (What a shock that is to those of us working in an email-addicted culture!) Rather, they would prefer to be notified via an SMS (text message) on their cell phones when an important email message was waiting for them because they were much more likely to check their cell phone messages than their email. Reading the text message would prompt them to go read their email. (Why not skip the middle man and send the email straight to their phone?)
In fact, the developing world is way ahead of us in finding creative ways to use text messaging and mobile phone applications. Here, we still largely use our cell phones to talk. In the developing world, cell phones are used to look for jobs, check daily prices for crops, and get timely health information and services, among many other applications.
In the U.S., we are so used to our daily routine of email and web surfing that we forget that the rest of the world is different. We put content or services on a website, point people to the URL and expect them to just go. We expect our audience to get updates via “pull” methods like RSS feeds and email lists that they subscribe to themselves. But everything comes back to the Web link.
Our audience and clients in the developing world don’t have reliable access to the Internet, and they aren’t in the habit of checking these resources daily or using them as primary sources of information. What they do have is a cell phone in their pocket. The technology already exists for converting email messages and website updates to text messages and vice versa. But those of us who are providing the content have to remember that it’s a mobile world and make our content available in multiple formats, including SMS.
This raises some questions and challenges, of course. Receiving text messages costs money, so any messages we send have to be timely and critical to have value. Text messages have to be short and to the point, which changes the way we write content as well as how we deliver it. Does that mean we should start delivering messages a la Twitter, but with meaning? How do we promote two-way conversation, and more importantly, interactivity — with web-based applications, like iHRIS, for instance — given the constraints of the cell phone? How do we reach people who may use multiple phones or change phones frequently?
MobileActive.org may be a resource that can help. Their mission is to help nonprofits use mobile technology more effectively in their development efforts. Their website provides useful news about mobile technology used in various initiatives, as well as international mobile usage statistics, including number of subscribers, cell phone costs and providers for each country. Another good resource is the Mobile Applications Database, a database of projects using mobile technology to make a difference.
Here we’re also planning to take our iHRIS software mobile and to build a mobile telecommunications-based community health information system as part of the Last Mile Initiative. Stay tuned for developments!
Looks like I’m going to have to learn how to love my cell phone…
