The FrontlineSMS:Credit Story

By Sharon Langevin, FrontlineSMS:Credit Project Manager

Mobile money is spreading quickly across the globe. The ability to transfer funds from a mobile handset has been hailed as the key to extending financial services to the base of the pyramid. While a mobile money account is valuable to an individual for securing savings and easy money transfer, there are many ways that the use of mobile money can create efficiency in the operations of organizations. Through the FrontlineSMS:Credit project, the FrontlineSMS team has been thinking about how to provide a tool that makes it easy for our users to get started using mobile money in their organizations.

FrontlineSMS:Credit is currently preparing for the beta launch of our very first software product, PaymentView, which will be available for public download from early March. PaymentView is an extension to FrontlineSMS that allows the user to send, receive, and manage mobile payments. The software is currently configured for use with M-PESA in Kenya. We are now testing the software with a variety of different organizations, from agribusinesses, to microinsurance providers, to financial services associations. The road from the beginning of FrontlineSMS:Credit to today has been a long one, and not without some setbacks, but we are proud of how far we have come since the project began.

FrontlineSMS:Credit originally started as CreditSMS. The project was instigated by Ben Lyon in 2009, and inspired by the growing potential of mobile technology in Africa, especially mobile money and M-PESA. Ben had the original idea for using FrontlineSMS’s interface as a mobile money management tool, and was able to connect with Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS:Medic (now Medic Mobile). When they met, Ben pitched the idea of FrontlineSMS + M-PESA, and Josh said to go for it. Josh provided valuable encouragement for the idea, and Ben started building out the concept under the name CreditSMS. Eventually CreditSMS became a project of FrontlineSMS, called FrontlineSMS:Credit.

In January 2010, Ben met Nathan Wyeth, who would later become the second director of FrontlineSMS:Credit. Nathan was investigating the mobile money sector around the world, and interviewed Ben for a blog post about FrontlineSMS:Credit for NextBillion.net. Soon after, he volunteered to help Ben work on the project. Around the same time, Ben began to develop the very first version of PaymentView with a global network of volunteers. He then applied for, and won, Vodafone’s Wireless Innovation Project competition, which provided the initial funding for PaymentView.

The first pilot of PaymentView took place in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in May 2010 and proved to be a real learning experience. The team quickly gathered that the solution they were offering did not fit the organization they were partnering with. PaymentView allowed the user to both send and receive payments, even though the partner MFI had only asked for the ability to accept loan repayments. In addition, PaymentView linked to a different MIS than the one the partner MFI was using, and the difference between the two was not trivial. The challenges of the pilot helped to inform the further development of our software, our approach to selecting and working with partner organizations, and most importantly, our ability to design appropriate projects.

After the pilot ended, Ben headed to Boulder, CO to attend the very first Unreasonable Institute, an accelerator for social entrepreneurs. He met other talented and driven social innovators and connected with advisors and investors. He worked on FrontlineSMS:Credit all summer, further developing the idea and making plans for future expansion, which led to his Pop!Tech Fellowship in the fall of 2010 and significant press attention for the project.

Through his experience at Unreasonable Institute, Ben made the decision to hand over FrontlineSMS:Credit to Nathan and move on to a new position, as founder of a company called Kopo Kopo, where he is now the Vice President of Business Development. He says he is grateful for his time at FrontlineSMS because it helped to shape his career path and taught him how to lead a successful project.

Nathan took over fully by late fall 2011, and moved the project to Nairobi, Kenya, one of the epicenters of mobile money, where he planned to build a user community before expanding the project internationally. (Side note: Funny enough, Nathan and Ben lived together and worked in the same co-working space, the iHub, for several months during 2011).

Nathan hired new developers and began building the version of PaymentView we’ll soon be releasing. Nathan re-thought the role that PaymentView could play in the Kenyan context and began building the software based on some of the lessons of the original pilot, but strongly tailoring the software for the growing community of potential users in Kenya. By June, the staff began to expand with three summer fellows and me, the new FrontlineSMS:Credit Operations Manager.

Over the next few months, the summer fellows delved into a variety of sectors to learn more about how mobile money could be used, and I worked on securing beta users for the PaymentView software we have been building. We interviewed potential users in agriculture, financial services, and health to find out how mobile payments could increase efficiency and cut costs. We found that the possibilities were endless; from enabling loan repayments to be made remotely, to distributing payments for farmers’ crops without the farmers having to meet at a central point, to paying community health workers’ salaries with mobile money. Mobile money allows organizations to provide better services to their clients and save on operating costs. Some of the savings groups we are working with have reduced travel time for repayments from a full day to under an hour, and cut the cost of the transaction in half.

Fast forward a few months, and we’re ready to release the PaymentView beta into the world for live testing. The FrontlineSMS:Credit team is now moving full steam ahead, building on the foundation that Nathan built over the last year (Nathan has since moved on, and I’ve taken over as Project Manager). We are hard at work expanding our user base and adding USSD support to PaymentView so that a developer anywhere will be able to build an integration into any mobile money system in the world (currently we can only support SMS and STK-based systems).

We are currently seeking testers in Kenya who are willing to use the software and provide feedback to us. If you are interested in helping us to test the software, please contact the FrontlineSMS:Credit team for more information. If you are based outside of Kenya and want to learn more or be notified when we the international version is ready for testing, please visit our website and join our mailing list to stay updated.

At the Forefront of Development: A Look at the Potential of FrontlineSMS in India

FrontlineSMS featured in an Indian newspaper named The Financial Chronicle this week, in an article entitled At the Forefront of Development. You can read the article below, or view the print version of this article here [pdf]. By Brij Kothari, The Financial Chronicle

The hardware is rudimentary. An ordinary mobile phone connected to a laptop with a cable. But who would have thought that this simple set up could actually be turned into a central communication hub, and in the hands of civil society, become a powerful communication tool for people’s empowerment? Ken Banks’ FrontlineSMS, a free and open-source software, is allowing groups at the frontline of development to do some extraordinary things. And yet, all that FrontlineSMS does, is that it “enables users to send and receive text messages with groups of people through mobile phones”. Perhaps, the power of FrontlineSMS can be grasped best by the stories of its use in the hands of others.

A woman in rural India gets an SMS on her mobile Asurakshit din or “Unprotected day”. She is, thus, informed that she is likely to be fertile that day. The information is specifically intended to empower her to make a reproductive choice. Similar reminder SMSs ping through days eight-19 of her reproductive cycle, fertile days as per the Standard Days Method (SDM) of family planning, based on awareness of the menstrual cycle. How does CycleTel, an SMS-based system put in place by Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH), keep track of her cycle? The woman herself keeps CycleTel regularly informed of the onset of her cycle, simply by sending an SMS from her mobile to a dedicated number. FrontlineSMS provided the basic architecture upon which a more customised system is being developed through field trials.

HarassMap is a group in Egypt, started by two women who themselves faced harassment quite routinely on their way to and from work, that uses FrontlineSMS to capture the location and gravity of incidents of sexual harassment. The key idea is to get women to report harassment episodes in real time by sending an SMS to a dedicated number. Place and time information is then mapped with another amazing software, Ushahidi, to draw patterns from what would otherwise have been left as isolated data points. Hot spots are then targeted with community activism, awareness campaigns and tools to empower and support women individually and collectively.

In Nigeria, voters who also registered themselves as volunteers for the Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM), took it upon themselves to SMS instantaneously into a FrontlineSMS central hub, any untoward incident of tampering or rigging they might observe. Human Em­ancipation Lead Project (H­ELP), a Nigerian NGO helped set up this citizen monitoring system, independent of the official monitoring groups and European Union observers. Observations by two or more volunteers in an area were verified, and if necessary, shared with the official monitoring agencies. Banks ter­med the Nigerian case a “breakthrough deployment” of FrontlineSMS.

FrontlineSMS was made available online as recently as 2005, and made open source two years later. In 2009, Banks hired his first employee. The spread of FrontlineSMS to more than 80 countries is, thus, nothing if not astonishing. A variety of uses by country popup on a world map at www.frontlinesms.com/frontlinesms-in-action/user-map/. With a strong presence in Africa, the top countries of deployment are Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Banks offered three reasons, the last using a popular acronym of the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) community: “This is likely down to: a) Me having historically focused my blog and attention on Africa; b) FrontlineSMS being closely associated with the continent (the concept came out of field work in South Africa); and finally, c) There being a growing developer and ICT4D community on the continent (through innovation hubs, among others) keen to build on top of tools like ours.”

India, it would seem, is an ideal adoption ground for solutions like FrontlineSMS. Of the 1.2 billion population, only around 100 million have access to the internet, although, this is projected to grow to 300 million over the next three years. The mobile growth story is far ahead. The total subscriber base at the beginning of 2012 was 894 million, with an active subscriber base of 647 million. Wireless teledensity, the number of subscriptions per 100 people, was 161 in urban and 37 in rural areas. Several estimates put the number of smartphones in India at no more than 30 million, and one could safely assume, mostly in urban areas. The majority of active mobile handsets are, therefore, very basic but well-suited for voice and SMS. For civil society organisations working with low-income groups, in rural and urban areas alike, a platform like FrontlineSMS presents exciting communication possibilities.

As compared with African countries, the uptake of FrontlineSMS in India is still nascent. Lack of awareness may be the key issue. What would Banks like to see happen? “We’ve recently had user-organised meet ups in Haiti and Uganda, with others springing up around the world. It would be great to see this happening in India — our ethos and focus is that users should drive deployment of FrontlineSMS, and user-organised meetups are a large part of this.”

If you are using, or interested in using FrontlineSMS in India, then we'd love to hear from you! Please contact us to share your own questions and experiences.

Faster Channels of Communication: A Radio and SMS Initiative in NE Kenya

Infoasaid has recently shared some news about an initiative with Save the Children in Wajir, Kenya, which is using FrontlineSMS to communicate with field workers and community representatives. Meanwhile, the radio is being used to share information about health, education and food security.

The objective of Infoasaid - a consortium of Internews and the BBC World Service Trust - is to improve how aid agencies communicate with disaster-affected communities. The emphasis is on the need to deliver information, as aid itself, through the most appropriate channels. You can read more about Infoasaid's work on their website http://infoasaid.org/

The article is republished below with permission, or read the original post here.

Infoasaid has helped Save the Children to improve its two-way communication with half a million drought-affected people in Northeast Kenya.

The project uses mobile telecommunications and community radio to establish new and faster channels of communication between the aid agency and remote rural communities.It was launched in Wajir County, close to the Somali border, in the fourth quarter of 2011 and will run during the first six months of 2012.

Save the Children runs vital health, nutrition and food security projects in Wajir County, a semi-arid region which has been devastated by three years of drought and serious food shortages. Its operational centres in Wajir and Habaswein will use SMS messages to exchange information with health workers, relief committee members and community representatives in outlying areas.

Save the Children will also sponsor special programmes on Wajir Community Radio, the local radio station. The radio station broadcasts in Somali, the main language spoken by local people. It commands a large and loyal audience within 150 km radius of Wajir town.

Most people in Northeast Kenya are semi-nomadic pastoralists. They depend on their herds of camels, cows, sheep and goats to feed their families and generate a small cash income. Infoasaid therefore set up weekly radio programmes that will inform local people about the latest animal prices and market trends in the area’s two main livestock markets; Wajir and Habaswein.

It also helped Save the Children to design a weekly magazine programme on Wajir Community Radio. This will focus on key issues related to the aid agency’s emergency aid programmes in the area. The radio programmes, which include a phone-in segment, will focus on issues such as health, education and food security and alternative livelihoods.

The mobile phone element of the project will establish FrontlineSMS hubs at the Save the Children offices in Wajir and Habaswein. FrontlineSMS is free open source software that turns an ordinary computer into a text messaging exchange.It will enable Save the Children to broadcast SMS messages simultaneously from the computer to a variety of different contact groups in the field.

Each message is drafted on the computer, which then uses the FrontlineSMS software to send it by SMS to a large group of recipients.In this way, the same short message can be sent rapidly to a group of 50 or more people through a simple operation that takes less than two minutes to perform.

Previously, Save the Children staff would have had to telephone or visit each of the targeted individuals personally to deliver the same message. That process could have taken several days to complete

The FrontlineSMS hubs in Wajir and Habaswein will not only send out vital information. They will also capture and record incoming messages from people in the field. Each incoming message will be evaluated immediately and passed on to the appropriate person for a timely response.

Infoasaid supplied 240 basic mobile handsets and solar chargers to facilitate the establishment of these two SMS messaging networks. The equipment is being distributed to collaborators and community representatives in every location where Save the Children provides local services.

To read the original article please click here.

Empowering communities through Technology: Map Kibera visit FrontlineSMS office

Post by Kike Oyenuga, FrontlineSMS Community Intern

“Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, was a blank spot on the map until November 2009, when young Kiberans created the first free and open digital map of their own community. Map Kibera has now grown into a complete interactive community information project.”

Jamie Lundine, Executive Director of Map Kibera, stopped by the FrontlineSMS office in London to meet with our London team whilst she was visiting the UK. We had a great conversation with Jamie about the way different types of technology can be used to help empower vulnerable communities. She discussed the role Map Kibera plays in community building in Kibera, one of the largest informal communities in the world located on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. She also shared her experience of providing training to youth groups in Kibera, on different types of participatory tech tools including FrontlineSMS.

Map Kibera was started in 2009 as an effort aimed at creating an open street map of the informal settlements of Kibera. This project was significant because mapping hadn’t been carried out by any official source previously. The process of mapping was completed by community volunteers and over the course of three weeks in late 2009, using hand held GPS devices and the Open Street Map open source mapping platform. The mapping itself was done by young ‘digital surveyors’, who were recruited locally and trained to report on their local area. The city mapping project has been so successful that it has since expanded to involve several other communities in Kenya, including Mathare, Mukuru and Kwale.

Map Kibera has now become a spring board for other projects too, including Voice of Kibera which is an interactive citizen reporting program started in 2010. “Voice of Kibera is operated largely by residents of Kibera, and allows community members to reports news events in the area by SMS and by travelling to the local office to make reports,” Jamie explains. This news is then posted to the map of Kibera, and made available online for others to access. The reporters at Voice of Kibera are locally-recruited youth who are trained in reporting techniques. Jamie discussed with us how “Map Kibera is a program that aims to help the Kibera youth have their voices heard.” The journalists, along with the mappers and incident reporters are all youth members of the Map Kibera Trust and are involved with directly involved in managing its programs.

The Voice of Kibera system does not use FrontlineSMS software directly, but the Map Kibera team do encourage others to use our software if it is helpful. “We encourage youth and community members to use the best ICT solution for their current needs and available resources,” Jamie explains. This means training youth on a range of solutions and allowing them to choose the most appropriate (which is sometimes no ICT at all, and rather some sort of offline communication strategy).

Map Kibera offers training on a range of open source technologies to help youth reporters. Jamie highlights that, “the training specifically targets youth because they are eager to adopt new technologies and are invested in the improvement of their community.” The technologies they train on include OpenStreetMap to map the communities, Wordpress for blogging and Ushahidi for mapping incident reports. They also train on FrontlineSMS, showing people how our software can be used to send, receive and manage mass SMS messages. The team train local youth groups, NGOs and community organizations to use FrontlineSMS in order to help other social change projects. In fact it was through Map Kibera training at Plan Kenya that the Jipange youth project in Kenya first heard about FrontlineSMS, and then began exploring ways they could use it for their work as we reported on our blog previously.

The impact of Map Kibera’s work can clearly be seen through the empowerment of youth reporters. The young men and women that are involved receive training, acquire skills and, as a result, a sense of pride and accomplishment as they learn to produce their own media work. The uses of the mobile and media platforms can be determined directly by the reporters as well. For example, one project started by the mappers documented  girl's security and they track danger zones in the community as a guide to women. This was a need defined by the needs of the community and met by the community reporters themselves using technology.

Future plans include moving Map Kibera beyond online access only, and towards using the map data in public displays to help everyone in the local community. A map of Kibera, displayed prominently, could help residents to locate and access services within it. In Kibera, businesses and public service providers are not necessarily formalized. They can move locations or shut down suddenly, it is useful to have a dynamic map that can be readily changed to reflect to most up-to-date version of Kibera.

It was exciting to meet with Jamie, and learn more about Map Kibera’s future plans. Here at FrontlineSMS we are always keen to see how technology is being used in different ways to empower communities. Thanks to Jamie for her visit, and we look forward to keeping in touch with the Map Kibera team as they progress with their work.

For more information on Map Kibera visit: http://mapkibera.org/

FrontlineSMS:Radio Trial continues in Kisumu

Following from the post in September, “FrontlineSMS:Radio Trial Begins,” Geoffrey Muchai, one of our FrontlineSMS developers gives an update on his visit to one of the radio stations which is taking part in the trial. By Geoffrey Muchai, FrontlineSMS Developer

I have been working on the FrontlineSMS developer team based in Nairobi and have recently been involved in the customization of our SMS management tool for radio stations. Radio Nam Lolwe, a radio station in Kisumu, northern Kenya has been participating in the FrontlineSMS:Radio trial and a few weeks ago I went to help with an onsite evaluation of the newly installed system.

Radio Nam Lolwe is the most established radio station in the region and it receives a significant amount of SMS messages from its listeners. Previously, the station had problems storing significant numbers of text messages and the presenters often had to delete older messages from their former system when it hit its 1,000 message capacity. Contrast this with the fact that the morning show at Nam Lolwe receives on average more than 500 messages – and that’s on a bad day. In seeking a different solution, Nam Lolwe have been taking part in the trial of FrontlineSMS:Radio since August 2011 and I went to Kisumu to see how they were getting on. During the four days I was there, there were 1,300 messages received by the newly installed FrontlineSMS:Radio!

To read the post in full, please see the FrontlineSMS:Radio website

Using SMS to Help People with HIV in Rural Kenya

Guest post by Ben Parfitt, Ugunja Research Team

Africa has undergone a mobile revolution, and it is spreading. The health sector is capitalizing on the resulting plethora of new opportunities. Doctors, nurses, health workers and pharmacists often rely on their mobile phones, using them as a reference tool, accessing information otherwise unavailable to them. Among this rapid change, a coordinated movement is beginning to engage people living with HIV, en mass, through FrontlineSMS.

Cleopa Otieno, KenTel National Coordinator, works with a network of 42 telecenters throughout Kenya, providing technical solutions to help communities reach out. KenTel has helped introduce FrontlineSMS to many health centers in Kenya. “Health centers are of great interest,” Cleopa explains. “Last year we began to focus on sending text messages to help people living with HIV.”

St Paul’s health center in Ugunja, western Kenya, formed part of a pilot study, to investigate the effectiveness of using SMS to support those living with HIV. In this rural town near the Ugandan border, nine out of ten residents regularly use a mobile phone, according to our recent survey. And of those, over 72% ranked mobile telephony as the most important technology they use to get information and to communicate.

The pilot study involved sending a course of SMS messages to 268 people living with HIV up to three times a week. Trial messages included: “Wash hands with soap and safe water before handling food, eating and after visiting the toilet. Wash fruits and vegetables with safe clean water before eating them.” It was hoped that such advice would help prevent infection and illness among those most vulnerable.

Important lessons were learned through this pilot study. It was revealed that patients knew how to act, but many were not aware of the underlying reasons for doing so. Yet it also became clear that too much was being communicated in too short a time frame and they soon became overwhelmed. The patients wanted to know why this information mattered and they wanted clear, practical solutions dealt out in small, manageable chunks.

It also became clear that technology couldn’t substitute the face-to-face community meetings which penetrate many corners of life in Ugunja. We learned that FrontlineSMS is to be used in addition to, not instead of, such personal that are so ingrained into everyday life.

The health center is now preparing to roll out the initiative to all of its 450 people living with HIV. Many different people – staff and volunteers – are helping prepare for this roll out. Three students, from the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, have helped lay the foundations for this roll out, compiling a digital database from which to send mass messages using the FrontlineSMS service. They have also supplied a laptop for the health centre to use, along with basic IT training.

St.Paul’s nutritionist, Isaac Masinde, is one of three healthcare workers managing content. He is working with FrontlineSMS to deliver nutritional interventions, especially for people living with HIV who become undernourished. “It is important to remind them of the most effective times to eat and to take their food by prescription dosage," Isaac explains. “We advise them on dietary measures to be taken to improve their BMI. I can see that this is picking up gradually.”

This may be just the beginning of using technology to help support people living with HIV. “We want to make further use of an interactive voice recognition system, allowing patients to call the health centers, listen and leave questions,” explains Cleopa. By using a range of communications tools it is hoped that the health center can reach and help support as many people as possible.

Ben Parfitt worked in rural Kenya as part of the Ugunja Research Team this summer. Kindly supported by the ICT4D Collective at Royal Holloway, University of London and by the Royal Geographical Society’s Gumby Award. Visit www.ugunja.wordpress.com to follow the team’s progress.

Two Cities, One Event: SMS to Map – Using FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to Tell Your Story

Want to know more about using mobiles for social change, crowd sourced mapping, and how the two can combine? Keen to learn more about FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, and how these software tools can be used together to enable positive social change? If you have questions about these tools which you’ve never had the chance to ask then Monday 7th November is your chance, at upcoming event: SMS to Map: Using FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to tell your story. This exciting event will take place in two cities on one evening; at the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya, from 6-8pm EAT and then later on at Goldsmiths University of London, UK, at 7-9pm GMT. Both events will host presentations on FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, and will also hear from some community experts who have used these tools together in action for social change projects in various different countries and contexts across the world.

There is a wealth of experienced speakers contributing to the event, including: Laura Walker Hudson (FrontlineSMS), Heather Leson (Ushahidi), Sharon Langevin (FrontlineSMS:Credit), Limo Taboi (Ushahidi), Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network), Linda Raftree (Plan International) and Claire Wardle (freelance trainer and researcher, currently working with the BBC College of Journalism). With this agenda the event will have something for novices and experienced techies alike! And if you'd like to come you can register here today!

FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi have been used together in many powerful and inspiring ways; to monitor elections in Nigeria; to map harassment on the street of Egypt; to track incidences of violence against children in Benin; to demonstrate and challenge incidences of human rights abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and these are just a few examples. FrontlineSMS provides users with the ability to send receive and effectively manage large numbers of SMS, and Ushahidi software enables information visualization, interactive mapping and information collection through crowdsourcing methodology. When used together the tools enable people to collect SMS data and then visualize it with powerful results, as the case study examples show.

The aim of this event is to provide a meeting space for the communities of those who use or are keen to learn more about both FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi software. FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi technologies often appeal to similar audiences: those supportive of open source software, and those working for social change in contexts where people may struggle to get their voices heard via other means. We’ve also got a similar ethos towards prioritising the importance of understanding people who use our tools, and being committed to building and supporting our community of users. And as if that wasn’t enough cross over both teams of developers work from the same offices in Nairobi, too! Through facilitating this event we hope to build on existing collaborations and inspire more future uses of FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi together.

The event itself will be co-hosted by FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, the iHub (Nairobi, Kenya) and Goldsmiths University (London, UK). Many thanks to the iHub for hosting the Nairobi-based event and to Goldsmiths University of London for sponsoring the London-based event, as well as to all others who have helped pull this exciting event program together. We all look forward to seeing you there next week!

For more info and/ or to register now visit: http://smstomap.eventbrite.com/ To follow the event on Twitter use the hash tag #smsmap We will be blogging about the event, and hope to make videos of presentations available after the event too

FrontlineSMS introduced to youth group in Kenya

The FrontlineSMS team is always keen to engage with those using FrontlineSMS for social change projects across the world. It is really valuable for us to hear user’s stories, and find out the advantages and challenges of using our software in action. This summer, Tufts University student and FrontlineSMS intern Emily Wyner visited Nairobi, with support from Groupshot and the Institute for Global Leadership, to find out more about FrontlineSMS users in this buzzing city. Here she shares her experiences of helping a youth project get started using FrontlineSMS software.

Throughout my time with FrontlineSMS, one thing has become very clear: effective program design is crucial to successfully integrating mobile software into social change initiatives. I was delighted when given the opportunity to help Plan Kenya (part of Plan International) in piloting their use of FrontlineSMS to help support their local partners.  This was my chance to observe and assist the process of getting started with FrontlineSMS from initial thoughts, plans, and assumptions to final implementation. I have discovered some interesting things along the way, and it’s great to be able to share the beginning of this journey.

My initial visit with Plan Kenya was really exciting. I first spoke with Aggrey and Irumu, members of the Plan team, to give them a thorough run-down of what FrontlineSMS software is and does. They asked some brilliant questions about cost and requirements, and were keen to lay the groundwork for a sustainable project. We brainstormed smart ways to pilot the software on a small scale, such as using it for internal office communication and management or setting up one Nairobi-based youth group with FrontlineSMS to determine if it improves relations with their members.  Soon enough, I was sent onward to meet with Purity and Bernard,  Plan Kenya’s ICT experts. They too were very enthusiastic about the software, and promised to be in touch regarding some of the pilot prospects.

Following this they arranged for me to meet with some representatives from Jipange, an umbrella organization of 16 youth groups in the Embakasi area, and one of the organizations Plan Kenya supports. I went to meet with Jipange accompanied by Purity and Aggrey, as well as Adam from Groupshot and Jordan from TechChange, too. Plan Kenya had set up the meeting in order to discuss and arrange for Jipange to pilot FrontlineSMS in their programming.

Jordan, Adam and I began by giving the members of Jipange an overview of FrontlineSMS.  Along the way, there were certain reactions that really stood out and some really insightful  questions. I particularly remember a young woman named Wanjiru, founder of The Change Initiative, asking whether or not FrontlineSMS would allow her to send text messages to certain groups of people at a time, such as all the leaders of the 16 groups or all the members of one particular group. This led us to explain the suitability of the FrontlineSMS contact groups function for this project. This is the kind of question that is great to hear when introducing a new technology tool.  It asks if FrontlineSMS has the capacity to do what Jipange already does (or needs to do) in a cleaner, faster, and easier way.

This is key;  when a preexisting organization adopts the use of FrontlineSMS, the software should not necessarily fundamentally alter their programming; rather, it is a tool by which the programming can be made more efficient and effective.  For all new users of FrontlineSMS it is necessary to know your target audience, why you are going to reach them, and how you intend on presenting yourself as a reliable, trustworthy communicator.

One eye on technology and the other on program design, the discussion with Jipange continued on with both eyes focused.  More and more Jipange members joined in with questions and comments. People were chiming in with ideas about how FrontlineSMS could be used in good governance initiatives or the formation of a Jipange-run business. It became clear that everyone was set on starting to use the software.

Going forward, Jipange members (and the Plan Kenya staff who work with them) will now be in control of when and how they begin to use FrontlineSMS. They know the basics, there is support from FrontlineSMS if needed,  yet most importantly they have a clear vision of how they intend on using FrontlineSMS for fundamental communication that is essential to their programming.

It will be great to keep in touch with Jipange and their progress with integrating FrontlineSMS into their daily activities. The members I met were enthusiastic and innovative, and it will be exciting to hear about the ways they go on to use FrontlineSMS in future.

Good luck, Jipange and all new FrontlineSMS users out there!  Don’t forget to keep in touch.  One of the best resources we have is each others’ stories.

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If you're interested in using FrontlineSMS for your work:

You can download FrontlineSMS for free here on our website.

You can connect with other FrontlineSMS users and the team by joining our community forum here.

Find out how others are using the software by reading user guest posts on our blog here.

New radio documentary shows how FrontlineSMS connects farmers in Kenya

cause and effect essay on obesity

em>Clare Salisbury has recently completed her MA in multimedia broadcast journalism at the University College Falmouth, Cornwall, UK, and this summer has been making a radio documentary on the impact which technology is having on administering aid in Africa. Clare is particularly interested in the ways that mobile and internet technology are influencing small scale farmers, food producers and NGOs. She recently met up with some FrontlineSMS users in Kenya, and in this guest post she shares some of her experiences.

“In the summer of 2011, I travelled to Kenya to make a multimedia documentary about the impact of mobile phone technology on farmers and NGOs that support them. Although I was prepared to see mobiles everywhere, driving from the airport into the city, I couldn’t believe the enormous billboards advertising mobile operators which lined the motorway. The next morning, I sat in a shopping mall in Nairobi and watched as people literally battled for space inside the nearest mobile phone store. People were even queuing to get in the door.

This is, of course, just another day in the capital. During my week in Kenya I would see that the real changes are happening in the hands of people based in rural areas. For these people, the possibilities opened up by access to a mobile handset are life changing.

Whilst in Nairobi I met John Cheburet who founded a radio programme in 2008 to complement the work of The Organic Farmer’s magazine and other outreach work. His programme focuses on agricultural techniques in a programme aired on two national radio stations.

John uses FrontlineSMS to manage the growing number of text messages he receives from the farmers who tune in every week. It’s a great tool as far as production goes; especially because he can send reminders to his listeners about upcoming programmes. John also admits that it’s a great way to think up content, for example– if he wants to make a programme on successful chicken farming techniques, he can easily find a farmer who’s working with chickens to interview by flicking through his SMS message inbox.

Click here to listen to John, of  The Organic Farmer, speak about his use of FrontlineSMS.

Moreover, this feedback ensures his programmes are reactive to the opinions of the listeners which enriches his programme. ‘Farmers know things’, he told me, ‘for a radio programme to be interesting, there has to be a two way communication.’

But as I found out later in my trip, this conversation  facilitated by FrontlineSMS is happening in more than just two directions. In Busia, a border town between Uganda and Kenya in the western region of the country, I met Emmanuel: a small scale dairy farmer who trains his peers and neighbors as part of the Send A Cow project.

He was carrying a copy of The Organic Farmer magazine. It turned out he never misses an installment of John’s radio programme on the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation (KBC). I asked him whether he ever texts into the show. He said he does, and that through the programme, he has made contact with other small scale farmers across the country and exchanged many ideas and techniques.

Emmanuel had clearly been motivated by the success and potential of text messaging. He told me how he encourages all the farmers and he helps to train them to use SMS effectively. This encounter was fascinating and it showed me that whilst the concept of text messaging is a simple two way dialogue, combined with a powerful radio presence, the two way conversation is only the beginning. As John said to me back in Nairobi; when he is producing, he likes to imagine that as well as disseminating information on The Organic Farmer, he is really only contributing to a much bigger knowledge exchange throughout the farming community.

I learned during my trip that mobile phones are changing the future for the small scale farmers in Kenya. And the many potential benefits of mobile technology continue to be explored. Spending a day in Nairobi’s sophisticated iHub innovation space for the tech community offered me an enormously exciting insight into what mobile technology tools could be to come for farmers in Kenya and across Africa, too. As international infrastructure accelerates to accommodate the technology being developed, farmers in Africa are increasingly able to benefit.”

You can find Clare's full radio documentary, as well as more audio and photos from her trip on her website here: http://aidtwenty.wordpress.com/ If you are interested in the powerful combination of mobile and radio technologies  check out our FrontlineSMS:Radio project website here: http://radio.frontlinesms.com/

UN uses FrontlineSMS to help manage aid response in East Africa

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em>By Lisa LaRochelle, FrontlineSMS Project Assistant FrontlineSMS is being used for social change in many different ways across the world. Common use case examples include election monitoring, provision of health information, and agricultural support –  these kinds of use cases have direct positive impact on people’s lives. Yet here at FrontlineSMS we have seen increasing numbers using FrontlineSMS for organisational management, which has indirect benefits for people which are

far harder to measure and demonstrate; helping organisations to work more efficiently, communicate more easily with their staff, and move information around more swiftly. Examples include using FrontlineSMS for monitoring and evaluation, data collection, and internal communication. It is this latter kind of FrontlineSMS use case that we recently discussed with Sanjay Rane, Information Management Officer at the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Kenya.

Mobile phone penetration is high in Kenya, and the UN OCHA staff members that Sanjay works with all have their own mobile phones. The convenience and accessibility of SMS appealed to the team, and FrontlineSMS is a low-overhead way of managing text messages to and from groups. “For the last couple of months we have been using FrontlineSMS as an in-house communication tool,” Sanjay explains “and it has certainly helped foster better information sharing among the OCHA Kenya team.”

SMS offers an immediacy and intimacy that can be seen as unique from other methods of communication. People always have their mobiles close to them, and generally read messages quickly. This has certainly shown to be the case in OCHA’s experience. They have found that using SMS helped them to reach staff, especially during an emergency occurring in off hours, when most of the staff do not check their emails. OCHA Kenya can use the tool to send out urgent updates to the team.

One of the major benefits of using FrontlineSMS is the ability to manage SMS more easily than using a simple phone handset. When trying to send out messages using a handset, Sanjay found it difficult and time consuming to add and delete people’s contact information, send messages to multiple contacts at the same time, and maintain groups of contacts. FrontlineSMS offers a simpler solution: the ability to sort contacts into groups so that, for example, an emergency alert text can be sent out to a large group of staff at once. It is also possible to set up key words and automatic replies with FrontlineSMS, so the system can automatically send people important advice and information.

The OCHA Kenya team had such success with their experience that they decided to implement FrontlineSMS to facilitate communication with a larger group of humanitarian partners in Kenya, as a preparedness tool for the referendum in 2010. They are now exploring the possibility of using SMS to help coordinate with agencies responding to the current East Africa drought. This is an indication that FrontlineSMS is enabling improved communications management in a way that was otherwise not possible.

It was the capacity to manage data in combination with the popularity and simplicity of SMS which led Sanjay to FrontlineSMS. “At OCHA Kenya, using SMS for internal communication is very popular, as it is a familiar communications tool. We have found it really valuable to use SMS for communicating with colleagues on important humanitarian developments in Kenya,” Rane says. Organisational management, although behind the scenes, can provide huge social benefits by enabling those working for NGOs and INGOs to communicate more effectively and do their challenging jobs more efficiently

Researching FrontlineSMS use at radio stations in Kenya

Re-posted from FrontlineSMS:Radio blog

FrontlineSMS:Radio is being developed and deployed in collaboration with the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR) at the University of Cambridge. This partnership represents a unique opportunity to gather evidence about how audiences interact with radio stations via SMS and how these interactions can affect their participation in public affairs. CGHR are utilising this opportunity to research whether and how innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are enriching citizen-led governance in Africa, in particular through the combination of radio and SMS.

Entitled, New Communications Technologies and Citizen-led Governance in Africa, the two-year CGHR research project is now well into its operative phase. Between July and September, CGHR’s research team will start conducting fieldwork in Kenya and Zambia to critically analyse how technology is being utilised on the ground. Working closely with local radio stations, the project will seek to capture how information flows through local networks and how new communication technologies, such as mobile phones, interact with older ones. It will also set out to analyse how the hybrid of mobile phones and the radio fit together in long term patterns of use of communication for political participation.

Read more on the FrontlineSMS:Radio blog

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“Farming Out” Agricultural Advice Through Radio and SMS

This post is the latest in the FrontlineSMS Mobile Message series with National Geographic. To read a summary of the Mobile Message series click here. Amy O'Donnell, Project Manager, FrontlineSMS:Radio

The Organic Farmer, a Kenyan magazine about ecologically friendly farming practices, recently launched two radio shows aimed at smallholder farmers. John Cheburet is spearheading the use of FrontlineSMS on the radio shows, and, as Project Manager of FrontlineSMS:Radio, I was keen to speak with him. Radio represents the dominant media source for many people worldwide and it offers a vital tool for outreach, particularly to rural communities. FrontlineSMS:Radio works with community stations to discover how combining mobile phone technology with radio can engage listening audiences.

John Cheburet is a radio producer and a pioneer, offering a farmer information service for small-scale farmers and actively seeking new technologies to improve outreach. He is seen by the farming community as a friendly source of information which is vital for their livelihoods. While The Organic Farmer (TOF) was born as a print medium, John sees radio as a way to increase awareness and reach more farmers.

John’s listeners own an average of 2.5 acres. Many farm for subsistence and sell surplus to cover household needs and also pay school fees for their children. They may not have received training or know about the latest technologies, and they seek access to solutions and advice."

“In Kenya, agriculture is the mainstay of the economy and the population depends on the land both directly and indirectly. The country is a major exporter of tea and coffee, and 70% of the workforce is in agriculture and areas that service this sector.”

Read more

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What is your Mobile Message? Sharing ideas via National Geographic

“Today, with over 500 million mobile subscribers across Africa alone, and more people around the world owning a phone than not, mobile phones seem to be everywhere,” points out FrontlineSMS founder Ken Banks in the opening post of  our National Geographic  blog series: Mobile Message. There has been a remarkable growth in mobile phone use in recent years, and increasingly mobile phones are being used for innovative social change projects. Last year Ken was awarded the title of National Geographic Emerging Explorer, in recognition of his work in the field of mobile for social change. In December 2010 FrontlineSMS launched our ongoing Mobile Message blog series via National Geographic, to help share exciting stories about the way mobile phones are being used throughout the world to improve, enrich, and empower billions of lives. Here we provide an overview of the diverse range of stories that have been shared in the series so far.

Mobile for development

In his introduction to the Mobile Message series Ken Banks traces the journey of mobile use in international development from 2003, when “he struggled to find much evidence of the revolution that was about to take place,” up to the present day, when mobiles are now being used globally in projects for health, agriculture, conservation and so much more. From his eight years experience in the ‘mobile phones for development’ field, Ken shares his knowledge on “the importance of building appropriate technologies, the importance of local ownership, and the need to focus some of our technology solutions on smaller grassroots users.” It is these principles that shape FrontlineSMS’s work, and these are also the themes that shape our Mobile Message series with National Geographic.

Mobile Technology gives Zimbabweans a Voice

Mobile phones often have the power to circumvent traditional forms of media, in areas where conventional news outlets are controlled or manipulated by the government. This was clearly shown in the second post in our Mobile Message series; entitled Mobile Technology gives Zimbabweans a Voice. In this post Ken Banks interviewed Bev Clark, founder of Zimbabwean civil society NGO Kubatana, and program director of Freedom Fone. Bev discusses how the use of mobile has helped address the challenge of state controlled media in Zimbabwe and “keep people informed, invigorated and inspired.”

Kubatana runs an SMS subscriber system using FrontlineSMS, and they have 14,000 people on their contact list. They use SMS to share news headlines and notifications of events, and also to encourage a two-way dialogue. They ask subscribers to respond with their views and opinions, by posing questions on social justice issues. By doing this, Bev explains, Kubatana is able to “extend the conversation to people living on the margins of access to information.”

Mobile Banking in Afghanistan

The global presence of mobile phones has also encouraged a wealth of mobile banking (m-Banking) and mobile finance, in areas you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Jan Chipchase, Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog Design, tackled the topic of m-Banking in Afghanistan in the third post of our Mobile Message series. Afghanistan is an interesting case, as Jan explains, being “a country challenged by limited access to traditional banking infrastructure and widespread distrust of formal institutions.”

Jan conducted a field study in Afghanistan in 2010, which focused on use of m-Banking services such as M-Paisa. He looked at how “m-Banking has been extended to include bill payment, buying goods and services, and full-fledged savings accounts.” His study “aimed to highlight the sophisticated strategies that the poorest members of societies adopt in managing their limited resources.” Jan drew some interesting points from his research, and concludes his post by stating that “there will come a point when the idea of using mobile phones for banking will be as globally prevalent as credit and debit are in the U.S. today.”

Technology Helps Break Silence Against Violence in Haiti

Mobile technology is clearly used for incredibly diverse purposes. The fourth Mobile Message post looks at how SMS can be used to help break the silence against violence and human rights abuses in post-earthquake Haiti. Aashika Damodar, CEO of Survivors Connect, writes about how her organisation had worked alongside Fondation Espoir, a Haitian nonprofit organization, to establish a text message helpline to report violent crimes in Haiti.

The service, called Ayiti SMS SOS helpline, provides an option for anyone in Haiti to text if they witness or experience an act of violence. A team of trained helpline operators respond to the SMS, and direct people to relevant services needed to help. As Aashika points out “the need for a reporting system is dire. Thousands of displaced people still live in camps with little security or privacy, making them susceptible to threats and abuse.” Using SMS means help is more accessible to many of those who are vulnerable.

FrontlineSMS is used in this project to manage sending and receive messages. Aashika shares details of why this project chose to build their service around text messaging. “SMS is cost effective, discrete and fast, all of which work to the benefit of our target groups.” This summarises why many projects choose to use SMS to support their social change projects.

Supporting Africa's Innovation Generation in Kenya

As well as increased efficiency, advances in technology also encourage innovation. Erik Hersman, co-founder of Ushahidi, wrote the fifth Mobile Message post about iHub (Innovation Hub); a project that brings together Nairobi's entrepreneurs, hackers, designers and investors. He explains how “leapfrogging PCs, Africa's burgeoning generation of mobile tech-savvy entrepreneurs are bursting with ideas and practical inventions, from African apps for smart phones to software solutions that address uniquely local challenges.”

You can feel Erik’s genuine enthusiasm for the many new and exciting ideas emerging: “real-world solutions to problems found by micro-entrepreneurs and everyday Africans... Here, we see ingenuity born of necessity.” The i-Hub provides a communal space for over 2,500 members of the technology community in Kenya's capital city. There are a growing number of “smart, driven and curious technologists with a leaning towards all things mobile” in many major African cities like Nairobi, Accra and Lagos, and Erik makes clear that “it's an exciting place to be, and the future is very bright indeed.”

Mobile Technology Helps Every Person Count

The sixth instalment of Mobile Message comes from Matt Berg, a technology practitioner and researcher in the Modi Research Group at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Discussing the value of increased accountability and recording capacity provided by technology, Matt looks at how using tech can help “poor or homeless people be counted as individuals with needs and rights - and receive their share of social resources.”

An example shared in the post is that across the Millennium Villages in Africa mobile technology is improving people’s access to social care in a project called ChildCount+. Matt discusses how “community health care workers (CHWs) register pregnant women and children under five using basic mobile phones and text messages... Using these patient registries, CHWs can make sure that all their children are routinely screened for malnutrition and receive their immunizations on time.”

Through a variety examples of work being done in India and in Africa Matt makes the overarching point that the recording systems provided by technology can provide increased access to services for vulnerable people, who can often get left out otherwise. In short, as Matt puts it, “technology is making it increasingly possible to count things, and thereby to make people count.”

Award winning FrontlineSMS

FrontlineSMS continues to be acknowledged for its powerful work in the field of mobile technology for social change. The latest Mobile Message post is an interview with Ken Banks, based on his recent award of the 2011 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest. Ken received the award for creating FrontlineSMS software, which is now used by thousands of non-profit organisations in over 70 countries across the world.

As we can see from this summary the power of mobile is reaching around the globe, being used in a remarkable variety of ways. Visit the National Geographic website to read any of the above posts in full, and keep an eye out for future posts which we will be reposting here on the FrontlineSMS blog.

An SMS "kickstart" for Kenyan farmers

In this, the fifteenth in our series of FrontlineSMS guest posts, Rita Kiloo – Customer Care Executive at KickStart in Kenya – describes how their use of the software enables them to extend and improve their outreach efforts among rural farmers in the country "KickStart’s mission is to help millions of people out of poverty. We do this by promoting sustainable economic growth and employment creation in Kenya and other countries, and by developing and promoting technologies that can be used by dynamic entrepreneurs to establish and run profitable small scale enterprises.

In 1998 we developed a line of manually operated MoneyMaker Irrigation Pumps that allow farmers to easily pull water from a river, pond or shallow well (as deep as 25 feet), pressurize it through a hose pipe (even up a hill) and irrigate up to two acres of land. Our pumps are easy to transport and install and retail between $35 and $95. They are easy to operate and, because they are pressurized, they allow farmers to direct water where it is needed. It is a very efficient use of water, and unlike flood irrigation, does not lead to the build up of salts in the soil.

With irrigation, farmers can grow crops year-round. They can grow higher value crops like fruits and vegetables, get higher yields (the Food and Agriculture Organization reports that irrigation increases crop yield by 100-400%) and most importantly, they can produce crops in the dry seasons when food supplies dwindle and the market prices are high. Because of the long dry seasons and growing population, there is potential for many thousands of farmers to start irrigating without flooding the market. There are local, urban and even export markets for the new crops.

A few months ago we decided to start using text messaging as part of our outreach efforts to farmers, and had heard good things about FrontlineSMS. Basically, we now receive lists of mobile numbers of prospective clients from our sales teams - these are clients who have visited our dealer shops countrywide, and who have shown an interest in our irrigation pumps. They usually leave their contact details with the sales people at the shop.

At the end of every month I receive a copy of the contact lists from at least 70 sales people, which may total about 5,000 contacts. I randomly pick around 500 to 1,000 mobile numbers and put these into an Excel spreadsheet. Once this is done, the numbers are uploaded into FrontlineSMS and we send out a uniform SMS to prospective buyers of the pumps. Here is a sample of the kinds of messages we send out:

Kumbuka kununua pampu ya kunyunyiza mimea ya MoneyMaker. Kwa maelezo zaidi, piga simu kwa 0725-xxxxxx

("Remember to buy the MoneyMaker pump for irrigating your crops. For more details, kindly call 0725-xxxxxx")

The texts are scheduled for every week of the month, and are categorized into territories, allowing us to keep track of the areas where the interest is coming from. There are a number of advantages in using FrontlineSMS, one of the main ones being that I am able to reach more farmers through SMS than I would be able to by calling them one-by-one. We are also able to keep in more regular contact with interested farmers, and remind them about the pumps. Not all of them buy pumps straight away".

Rita Kiloo Customer Care Executive KickStart Kenya Program www.kickstart.org

Mapping medicine availability via SMS

Medicine stock-outs are a potentially lethal problem in a number of African countries, yet governments insist they don't occur. What could be more powerful than a map which contradicts this claim? Last week activists in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia started surveying clinics in their respective countries, checking stock levels of essential medicines, including:

• First-line anti-malarials
• Zinc 20mg tablet
• Penicilin
• First-line ARVs
• Metronidazole 200mg tablet
• Ciproflaxicin
• Amoxicillin suspension
• Ceftriaxone
• Cotrimoxazole suspension
• ORS - Diarrhea

Each of these are seen as essential in varying degrees to fighting disease and illness, and are widely used when available.

Armed with the data, activists report their results via structured, coded SMS - "x,y,z" - where the first number represents their country code (Kenya, Malawi, Uganda or Zambia), the second their district or city, and the third the medicine which they found to be out of stock.  These messages are received by a phone connected to a computer running FrontlineSMS, which then runs an automatic script which validates the data before it is sent over the internet to a Ushahidi-powered website.

From there the results are automatically displayed on a map, below (click to visit the live site).

As of today, there have been over 250 stock-outs of these essential medicines.

Since the data is automatically populated, the map represents an almost real-time picture of stock-outs in the four target countries. After a successful launch and a week piloting the service, the "stock-out hub number" will now be distributed to medicine users throughout each country so that anyone with a mobile phone can send in a stock-out report. Unlike reports from official, known data collectors, these messages will firstly be checked by staff at Health Action International (HAI Africa) before being posted up on the map.

The technological portion of the campaign was implemented by Michael Ballard and Claudio Midolo, both Open Society Fellows from the Department of Design + Technology at Parsons the New School for Design in New York.  Ndesanjo Macha also helped in getting FrontlineSMS up and running in Uganda and Malawi.

For further background information and up-to-date news, visit the "Stop Stock-Outs" website.