Archive for February, 2011

How can mobile phones be used to reduce poverty?

Monday, February 28th, 2011

This is the second in a series of three blog posts on the M4D space by Heather Thorne, Director of ICT Innovation at the Grameen Foundation’s Technology Center.

Grameen Foundation approaches all of its work from a “Theory of Change” perspective, using this as a starting point to ensure activities and outputs are logically linked to the desired outcomes of each program.  AppLab’s Theory of Change is based on research showing that gaps in access to information and services (e.g., health, financial services, agriculture, markets, job opportunities, etc.) contribute to lack of economic opportunity and reduced welfare, therefore leading to or perpetuating poverty.  This is worsened by inability to act on information.  By leveraging mobile phones as a means to eliminate or reduce those gaps, and to reduce friction in systems, we believe it is possible to directly and indirectly reduce poverty. 

Given the potential for M4D efforts to benefit a broad audience but possibly miss the specific needs of the poor, we do a number of things to ensure a focus on the poor and poorest in AppLab efforts, such as:

  • selecting vertical areas known to have a statistical link to poverty (or lever for escaping it):  agriculture, health, livelihoods, or access to targeted financial services
  • incorporation of M&E frameworks and measurement approaches into each implementation
  • geographical targeting focused on regions known to have larger populations of poor and very poor
  • choosing mobile operators with the largest market share among poor populations we serve and choosing other NGO partners who share a poverty-focused mission
  • pricing models, such as cross-subsidization, making services available to those unable to pay

AppLab’s Theory of Change has evolved over the 8 years we have been working in the M4D space, starting first with the Village Phone replication program in Uganda, which extended to Rwanda, Cameroon and several other sub-Saharan African countries, as well as to Indonesia.  Building on this foundation, GF began exploring the potential for providing additional services through the phone nearly four years ago, leveraging the fact that low-end phones were beginning to penetrate even the most remote villages.  We launched AppLab Uganda in 2007 in partnership with MTN Uganda and Google, and spent the next two years developing partnerships with local content providers in agriculture and health, conducting ethnographic research, rapid prototyping and concept testing, developing and testing products, and launching a nationwide suite of applications called Google SMS (GSMS) in 2009.  In Indonesia, GF incubated an Indonesian-owned social enterprise called Ruma, which began to operate the Village Phone business in partnership with a large mobile operator focusing on the low-end market segment.   The model began to evolve as we learned that voice services no longer presented a viable business opportunity due to mobile phone penetration—and the Ruma entrepreneurs began to sell airtime, a similarly low-cost item that people buy frequently, in small denominations, which can be delivered through the phone by people with minimal skill and working capital– increasing and smoothing their cash flow. 

We recently completed what we believe to be the first ever randomized control trial designed to assess the impact of a mobile-phone based service aimed at improving the lives of the poor.  The service we sought to measure was Google SMS (GSMS) Health Tips, and our social impact measurement partner, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), performed the study. 

The learnings from the study were substantial, supporting some of our initial hypotheses and refuting others.  They indicated that when people are made aware of such services, there is indeed demand and usage of them, and that ongoing awareness efforts in general are critical to usage and thus impact.

We also learned, however, that the fundamental drivers of behavior change are not altered simply because of the phone, and if the phone is not addressing each of those drivers, behavior change is unlikely.  (You can read more about the study on Eric Cantor’s recent blog post)  Driving sustained adoption of the information and behavior change, or other outcomes that we envision, requires re-thinking aspects of the service—one of which is the often necessary role of a trusted intermediary in creating awareness and reinforcing the desired adoption of information and behavior change. 

You can read more about trusted intermediary’s and Grameen Foundation’s M4D work in Heather’s final blog post which will be posted later this week.

How can we overcome gaps in Mobile for Development (M4D) projects?

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

This is the first in a series of three blog posts on the M4D space by Heather Thorne, Director of ICT Innovation at the Grameen Foundation’s Technology Center.

The growth in the use of mobile phones in developing countries presents a powerful channel directly to the poor and poorest, and introduces a productive asset that can be used by rural entrepreneurs to generate income, and reach those who don’t yet have access on their own.

“Mobile for Development”, or M4D, has become one of the central areas of investment and focus in the technology and development communities over the last two years.  The goal of such efforts is to use mobile technology and related services to directly or indirectly address the problem of poverty.

While these efforts have captured the eye of the press and fueled the eagerness of the donor and practitioner communities, we believe there are a number of gaps in many of the approaches to date, which limit the potential of M4D efforts to yield solutions that are not only impactful in small settings, but that can scale in a sustainable way.  The gaps we see, and the ways we are seeking to overcome them, include:

  1. In most cases, information and technology alone are not the solution. Solving hard social challenges, and in particular, alleviating poverty, is rarely possible by simply making technology available to people with limited skills or understanding of how to search for or apply information.   And information is rarely valuable on its own unless provided in direct context, at the right time, in an actionable form, appropriate language, etc.   This is where the notion of a trusted intermediary comes into play, serving as a bridge to those who are illiterate, do not read English, or own phones, creating awareness of services, and answering questions.
  2. Scalability is necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving lasting impact. Technologies, partnerships, operations, business models, and organizations all need to be scalable in order for M4D efforts to have impact – but focusing on scaling –especially when the economics look good—before proving that a solution has the desired impact first distracts stakeholders from the primary goal.   This requires that social performance measurement be included at various steps in the product development process, and a willingness to revisit your approach until you are achieving the desired impact.
  3. Achieving sustainability is HARD. There is definite potential for sustainable business models in M4D, through cross-subsidization, advertising, sponsored content, loyalty programs, bundling, subscriptions, etc. – but low ability/willingness to pay requires that solutions have a strong value proposition—for the poor and for all stakeholders.  Efforts must be undertaken to validate user needs, test products, operations and business models, to ensure that users will continue to use the service, and that stakeholders derive enough perceived value from offering the solution pay for its ongoing delivery.
  4. Insufficient or short-term grant funding often means that prototyping is possible, but even if promising solutions are identified, the partnerships, field operations, and model-proving pilots don’t have sufficient runway, and there is no time for impact measurement.  Most M4D / social innovation challenges provide limited funding and timeframes (< 1 year), but our experience suggests that effective prototyping, partnership and operations development generally takes >1-2 years to complete.

A few tweaks in the CKW intervention can deliver more impact to farmers

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

A scene from the local Pabbo, Uganda market

 Lydia Namubiru is the Partnership Analyst on our Community Knowledge Worker team in Uganda.

Samuel Olara’s chickens were getting weak and sleepy. He feared they had caught something that would kill them and he didn’t know how to save them. Fortunately, he knew someone who might know. He walked 2 kms to the local CKWs’ home to consult on chicken diseases and their treatments. The CKW in turn consulted his phone and advise Olara to treat his chicken with soda ash. They quickly recovered and were doing well three weeks later when a Grameen Founda­tion team visited his home in Pabbo.

Information can indeed positively change outcomes for many a farmer. However, sometimes, the information package needs to be deeper and more varied than a single remedy or other tip. Micheal Nyeko’s experience illustrates one rea­son why. He is a regular client to the local CKW. He says that he often asks for market prices. Unfortunately, he can’t al­ways put this information to good use. “Sometimes you learn that the price is so much better in the next district. It may even be double but you can’t afford to go there. Can your organization work with organizations that provide transport so they can connect us to those markets?” Nyeko asked the Grameen Foundation staff that visited Pabbo in January. He certainly makes a sound suggestion on how to remedy the situation; albeit one that requires significant investment. The CKW team also has an idea of a technology solution that might help overcome the farmer’s problem while bypassing the logistical requirements of sending out transporters to help farmers. Once the planned mobile market place applica­tion is deployed, we will investigate how much it pulls bulk buyers to rural farm-gates and in the process saves farmers the need to transport produce to physical markets.

Sometimes it takes less than a whole new technical solution to provide information that is complete enough to be actionable for the farmer. Take Alice Aya, an elderly farmer still in Pabbo. She and her farmer group learnt of the op­portunity to sell grain directly to the World Food Program (WFP) from their CKW and have agreed to work together to raise the quantities required by the warehouses. They have since raised 80 kgs of maize amongst themselves, well below the 3000kgs minimum the Gulu warehouse will store but a good start nonetheless. Unfortunately, they have now run out of storage space. “Can you build us some stores here in the villages where we can keep the produce while we raise the big quantities?,” the elderly woman also asked the Grameen Foundation team. Such stores as she suggests in fact already exist or are being planned. Based on her feedback, the CKW team will be publishing a comprehensive directory of WFP rural satellite collection and bulking cen­ters so that farmers like Aya will know where to store and/or minimally process their bulk purchase as they prepare to engage the bigger warehouses.

The valuable insights farm visits like these give us confirm and affirm the need to stay in touch with them. As we move forward with the CKW project, we hope to even further map gaps in the intervention and information it provides as well as those in the broader agricultural system that need to be filled. We are hopeful that this work will go a long way in delivering impact to the farmer.

AppLab’s Initial Social-Impact Measurement Efforts Pay Off

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

From a recent post on the Grameen Foundation blog:

Eric Cantor has led Grameen Foundation’s AppLab efforts in Uganda for the past three years, and continues to serve as an advisor on the project.

Grameen Foundation takes outcome measurement seriously.  We want to make sure that our programs and services are effective, and that we can demonstrate their benefits before implementing programs or practices on a wider scale or urging others to replicate them.

With this in mind, we recently completed one of the first randomized control trials designed to assess the impact of a mobile phone-driven health service aimed at improving the lives of the poor.  The service we sought to measure was Health Tips, part of the Google SMS suite launched throughout Uganda in 2009 with our partners Google and MTN Uganda.  Our social impact partner Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) performed the study.

Read the rest of Eric’s blog post by following this link.