Our Story
FrontlineSMS empowers people to create their own social change
BushBuckridge, South Africa: Women spending most of their days queueing for water. Photo credit: Ken Banks, kiwanja.net
“The default position for many people working in ICT4D [information and communications technologies for development] is to build centralised solutions to local problems – things that ‘integrate’ and ’scale’. With little local ownership and engagement, many of these top-down approaches fail to appreciate the culture of technology and its users. … My belief is that users want to have their own system, something which works with them to solve their problem.”
Ken Banks, January 2009
Mobile technology is helping the world tackle key health, social, environmental and development challenges because of its accessibility, reach and ability to transform the communities it touches. One of the leaders in this field is FrontlineSMS founder Ken Banks — innovator, technologist and anthropologist — who has played a formative role in the application of mobile to social change.
In the late spring of 2005, Ken was working to find a way to way to help authorities engage and communicate with the public on the wildlife conservation efforts in South Africa, without relying on the Internet. Ken realized he needed to a system that could send, receive, and organize text messages through a mobile device and a laptop, and thus the original concept of FrontlineSMS was born. The software was made available online in 2007 and made open-source in 2008. In 2009, after years of work traveling and talking about the software, Ken hired the first member of staff – our Lead Developer, Alex.
Since that time, FrontlineSMS has experienced rapid growth. Our team now covers three continents and over fifteen people, with offices in London, Washington DC and Nairobi.
Learn more about the FrontlineSMS Family and the our growing team.
See more of our FrontlineSMS story: Mission, Family, Users, Software, Team, Media, Credits, Contact us
