Ken Banks

Mobile commerce is quickly becoming one of the most cost-effective, far-reaching means of giving the 'un-banked' poor their first taste of financial services. Yet many of these services are almost entirely informal, connected to neither banks nor traditional forms of regulation. A new initiative -- CreditSMS -- aims to integrate m-commerce with traditional financial management tools, thereby formalizing the informal and bridging the financial divide.

The widespread popularity of M-PESA in Kenya and GCash in the Philippines shows that people throughout the developing world are eager to leverage the technologies they have (i.e. mobile phones) in order to gain access to the services they need (i.e. savings, credit, remittances and insurance). What is interesting is that many innovations in this field tend to be initially developed not by corporate researchers but by the 'un-banked' themselves. Instead of loading pre-paid airtime into their phones, for instance, many users began instinctively sending the airtime activation codes to their friends via SMS, which gave rise to a de facto airtime sharing service.

What I find particularly interesting about the mobile-for-development field is how a disproportionate amount of innovation occurs in the very places where resources and funding are often in shortest supply. Just as mobile payments started off as an indigenous phenomenon long before Vodafone, the British government and Safaricom brought the world M-Pesa, numerous mobile health initiatives start off as innovative, small-scale projects before the bigger players spot their opportunity and attempt to take them to scale. One can only imagine the number that fail and fall by the wayside before they get this far -- Darwin's "survival of the fittest" can be equally applied to the mobile applications world as our own.

Artwork: Chip TaylorThat said, projects can reduce their chance of failure by following a few key steps. One of the prerequisites to designing a successful mobile solution is that the problem solver have a firm understanding of the problem. Equally, engaging local partners and organizations at the earliest possible opportunity is key and not only aids implementation but also ensures relevance and the best chance of long-term sustainability and success. Not only do projects which follow these rules just "look right" in ethical and implementation terms, but they also end up being the ones which generate the most excitement, and hence the greatest opportunity for replication.

For most of us, not knowing what the weather is going to do might at worst result in a soggy barbecue or a washed-out cricket or football match. For a farmer in the developing world it could result in the loss of an entire harvest which, at best, makes life that much harder or, at worst, brings on financial ruin or considerable human suffering. If enough farmers over a wide geographical area are affected, widespread famine becomes a very real possibility.

Africa is home to around 700 million people who depend on the land for their living -- that's a staggering 70 percent -- and three-fifths of those are subsistence farmers who generally produce just enough food to support their families. Despite its dominance, subsistence farming comes with its fair share of challenges, which include anything from a lack of access to appropriate tools and domesticated work animals to poor-quality soil and lack of irrigation. If that wasn't enough, climate change is set to join the list.

We read a lot about the delivery, and popularity, of SMS services such as market prices, health advice and job alerts in developing countries, information there is clearly a need for. Only last week Grameen's AppLab initiative, in conjunction with Google and MTN, launched a suite of SMS services in Uganda. These are the services you'll get to hear most about when you search the Web, trawl the blogosphere and attend various conferences on the subject. It all seems pretty sewn up on the content side -- I mean, what else could people earning a few dollars a day (at most) possibly want?

I remember my days back in Nigeria, where I worked for the best part of 2002 at a primate sanctuary in Calabar. The mobile phone networks weren't quite operational yet -- there was sometimes a signal and sometimes it worked -- but the number of Internet cafes was on the rise. I remember going in during the evenings, usually to find people generally entering competitions to win cars or holidays, looking at females (and males) in varying degrees of undress, trying to find a partner on a dating site, or sending and receiving e-mail. Clearly, this wasn't the only use of the Internet in Calabar, but nevertheless it interested me to see what people did online once you gave them the opportunity to get there. Let's put it this way, few people were doing their homework, looking up university education options, checking the price of matoke or learning how to stay fit.

Few companies innovate with the intensity and frequency of those working in mobile, and today's present is a future that only a handful of people would have predicted just a few short years ago. While most of us happily soak up rampant innovation as mere consumers, a handful of people in the hallowed corridors of mobile R&D labs are already working on the next big thing -- the phones we'll be carrying around in our back pockets in 2012 and beyond.

Very occasionally we get a glimpse of this future. Nokia recently went public with their "morph concept" phone -- an idea which seems so crazy and off-the-wall it might actually be possible. Who knows, maybe it's being field tested right now, although we wouldn't know it. A morphing phone could disguise itself as anything from a watch to a handbag, making spotting one incredibly difficult.

A little over a year ago I found myself sitting in the San Francisco offices of an international humanitarian NGO (nongovernmental organization). Their main focus at the time was a major human-rights treaty, and they wanted advice about mobilizing rural communities to lobby their governments to ratify it. There was clearly great potential for a mobile phone-based solution, and they wanted me to help them understand how text messaging -- and my FrontlineSMS platform in particular -- could be of use.

So, it came as something of a surprise when I recommended they look more closely at rural radio instead. Although I'm a great fan of mobile phone technology, it isn't by default the best tool for reaching out to rural communities. Radio -- far from being outdated and irrelevant -- remains a powerful, relevant and far-reaching medium. Unrivalled, in fact.

What happens when a rural farmer needs to arrange transport to get his produce to market? Or a health care worker wants to check the availability of a drug in a nearby clinic? How about a trader who wants to find out the price of a commodity in a nearby store, or a person who needs to get in touch with a nearby family member in an emergency? Right now, in almost all cases, these people would either jump on a bike, run, send someone else to do it, not bother, or reach for their mobile phone.

When we think about rural telecommunication we almost always – by default – think of the mobile phone. And why shouldn't we? It feels like mobiles are everywhere, and they're highly regarded, not just among rural communities but also the international development community that sees them as the one tool with the best chance of closing the digital divide. So the focus on mobile technology continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, almost to the point where little other wireless technology is considered. If there isn't mobile coverage in an area, then little appears possible. WiMax is still a dream, so let's move on ...

"An article recently published in the popular press has suggested that there may be a link between the increase in numbers of mobile phone masts and the reduction in local sparrow populations. The number of sparrows in Britain has effectively halved from 24 million approximately thirty years ago to a present day figure of 14 million, a decrease of almost 50%."

-- Ken Banks, report to the Vodafone Group Foundation, December 2002

If you were thinking of designing or building a Web site, you'd be in luck. If you were thinking of writing a suite of financial management software, you'd be in luck. If you were even thinking of creating the next big video game, you'd be in luck. Visit any good bookstore, and the selection of self-help books and "how-to" guides leave you spoilt for choice. People have been working on these things for ages, and good and bad practice in Web site, financial software or games development -- among many others -- is well established. The biggest challenge you'd likely face is deciding which book to choose. If you're anything like me, you'll leave the store with at least a couple.

Unlike the plethora of self-help guides on the more established topics, if you were looking to do something with mobile phones, you'd likely have mixed results. There are plenty of books available extolling the virtues of Java, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, C++, Symbian, Android and just about any other development environment or platform out there. Combine that with the growing field of mobile user interface design, and you'd think that pretty much everything was covered. But there is one thing missing, although you'd probably only notice if you're one of a growing number of developers turning their attention to the developing world.

In Ghana, it's popularly known as susu. In Cameroon, tontines or chilembe. And in South Africa, stokfel. Today, you'd most likely call it plain-old microfinance, the nearest term we have for it. Age-old indigenous credit schemes have run perfectly well without much outside intervention for generations. Although, in our excitement to implement new technologies and solutions, we sometimes fail to recognize them. Innovations such as mobile banking -- great as they may be -- are hailed as revolutionary without much consideration for what may have come before or who the original innovators may have been.

The image of traditional African societies as predominantly "simple hunter-gatherer" is more myth than truth. The belief that Africa had little by way of economic institutions and processes before the arrival of the Europeans is another. As Niti Bhan pointed out during her fascinating "Life is Hard" presentation at the Better World By Design Conference earlier this month, many rural communities today are familiar with concepts such as loans, barter, swap, trade, credit and interest rates, yet the majority remain excluded from the mainstream modern banking system and have never heard of things like ATMs, banks, mortgages or credit cards. It's not that people don't understand banking concepts; it's just that, for them, things go by a different name. In Kenya, as few as one in 10 people may have a bank account, but that doesn't stop many of them from using a number of trading instruments or running successful businesses. Technology can certainly help strengthen traditional trading practices, and we know this because when technology is made available, the users are often the first to figure out how to best make it work for them. Mobile technology is today showcasing African grassroots innovation at its finest.

It's official. Or so it seems. Already the most active handset manufacturer in the developing world, Nokia this week made an announcement that places it well and truly at the heart of the international development effort. It's a move that mirrors the company's "developed world" strategy -- a move from out-and-out hardware supplier to one of a more inclusive services-based outfit. As if (very) successfully designing and building low-cost handsets for emerging markets wasn't enough, Nokia will now start offering emerging-market specific data services through its low-cost phones. And we're not talking music or games here. We're talking agriculture and education, and that's just for starters.

According to Nokia's official press release:

ICTs are regularly touted as holding great potential to enhance the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), working for positive social and environmental change around the world. With many NGOs working in difficult and challenging conditions, any technology that enables improved communication is sure to be welcomed. However, while the development community has traditionally been quick to grasp emerging technologies -- mobiles in particular -- the same cannot be said for their conservation counterparts.

Beyond the use of animal tracking devices and GIS (geographic information systems), there have traditionally been few innovative, conservation-based ICT applications to speak of. For much of the conservation community, ICT was limited in use as a general communication and administrative tool, centered around office-based computers and computer networks, or the use of high-frequency radio and services such as Bushmail in the field.