Posts Tagged ‘Indonesia’

AppLab Indonesia wins Global Telecoms Award for Best Mobile Application Innovation

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Congratulations to the AppLab Indonesia team!

From Left Aldi Haryopratomo (Ruma), John Stefanas (Qualcomm), Camilla Nestor (Grameen Foundation)

Together with our partners, Qualcomm Wireless Reach®, Ruma and Bakrie Telecom, the AppLab Indonesia team was awarded the Global Telecoms Award for the Best Mobile Application Innovation on June 7th in London.  This is well deserved recognition for the considerable investment of time, energy and creativity of the AppLab team, led by Farid Maruf in Jakarta and guided by Sean DeWitt in our Washington, D.C. office, who over the past several years has worked tirelessly to create our technology innovation hub in Indonesia.  Heather Thorne from our Seattle office and Happy Tan in our Manila office have also played instrumental roles in this achievement.

First Village Phone Operator graduates from AppLab Indonesia Solutions for the Poorest program

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Indonesia, in partnership with Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach initiative, and social business PT Ruma, operate a mobile microfranchising program to provide the poor and poorest with business opportunities based on the mobile phone.  Currently the micro franchisees sell mobile phone airtime credits to their customers.  Most poor people start their micro-franchise with $11 for working capital.  For the poorest of the poor this can present a challenge.  Grameen Foundation designed a program to enable the poorest to participate in the mobile microfranchising program.  It consists of a working capital loan of $11 and intensive support from our field officers on setting up and running the business.  Micro-franchisees in the program graduate when they have paid back the working capital loan.

Suwadih (L) and Ibu Hanifa (R sitting)

Ibu Hanifa, 30, recently became the first micro franchisee to graduate from our Solutions for the Poorest program.  Along with her husband Suwadih, she is the parent of two, a 4th grader and a 8 month old.  They live together in the same house with Suwadih’s parents and his brother and family  in Kuniceran (on the western outskirts of Jakarta).   Ibu Hanifa’s income from reselling mobile airtime supplements Suwadih’s home based electronic repair business.  Ibu Hanifa is our best airtime reseller, with around 10 daily transactions. We are very proud of the hard work that she has done and we look forward to more members of our Solutions for the Poorest program graduating.

Update from AppLab Indonesia - Serving the Poorest

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Jason Hahn is the Business Development Manager for ICT Innovation at the Grameen Foundation in Seattle.

We just released a case study on using Grameen Foundation’s Progress Out of Poverty Index (PPI) with PT Ruma to help them ensure they reach their goal of working with the poor and poorest.  You can read the case study here.

In addition to the Grameen Foundation’s AppLab activities in Ghana and Uganda we are also very proud of our AppLab Indonesia and the innovative work we do there in conjunction with our local social enterprise partner, PT Ruma.  Working with PT Ruma we have built a network of 6,400 predominately poor village based entrepreneurs who sell mobile airtime and other telecommunications products to their neighbors (and boy do they sell - they reached over 560,000 customers as of February 2011) and increase their income while doing so.

Of those entrepreneurs who remain in the program more than 4 months approximately 50% double their income.  Increasing their income is a significant goal as  AppLab Indonesia and Ruma have worked together to use Grameen Foundation’s Progress out of Poverty Index to recruit the poor and poorest as entrepreneurs.   63% of the entrepreneurs working with Ruma are poor (living on less than $2.50/day) and 10% are the poorest of the poor (living on less than $1.25/day).

In a prior post my colleague Heather Thorne emphasized the importance of partnerships to success in ICT4D projects.  We’re very grateful for the generous financial and technical support provided by Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach initiative without which it would have been very difficult to accomplish this work.

In early April we will be breaking new ground with a series of mobile applications that will provide the poor, who may own a very simple mobile phone, with access to information they didn’t have before.  Sorry to be purposefully vague but we need to keep some surprises for the unveiling!

Harvard Business School Students Assist AppLab Indonesia

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
HBS Team in Jakarta

HBS Team in Jakarta

We are being assisted this week by a crew of Harvard Business School (HBS) graduate students who have volunteered to assist Grameen Foundation and its sister social enterprise in Indonesia, PT Ruma, on developing business plans for some new pro-poor products. The HBS students will spend 2 weeks in Indonesia. During that time, they will review and further develop the business model for the AppLab-sponsored jobs market application, Kerjalokal.com.  Their recommendations will fit into Grameen Foundation’s ongoing work to incubate and launch sustainable social enterprises that make use of ICT innovations to help the poor improve their lives and livelihoods.

Posted by:  Ross Jaax, AppLab Indonesia Program Manager

AppLab in Indonesia: New Beginnings

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Village Phone Operators recording transactions manually

Village Phone Operators

As we get underway with our application development in Indonesia, we are looking at those Applications that will assist people in the informal job sector, the source of livelihoods for most poor Indonesians.  The informal sector encompasses the lower end of the labor market, for those those working as maids, gardeners, drivers, and other day laborers. It also includes millions of small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) who engage in such businesses as selling snack food and sundries from roadside kiosks, cooked food from push carts, and pre-paid airtime for wireless communications.
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Grameen Foundation´s ICT Innovation Program – Approach and Philosophy

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

We officially launched our Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Program two years ago, when we began our Application Laboratory (AppLab) efforts in Uganda.  This initiative, in collaboration with the mobile operator MTN and Google, built on the successful Grameen Foundation/MTN Village Phone Program.  With over 10,000 Village Phone Operators, this served as a unique testing ground for developing applications and information services tailored to the needs of the poor.  Over nearly two years we explored the potential of more than 50 services, actively tested a subset of these, and in the end of June launched a suite of five services nationwide (additional details at www.applab.org). (more…)