A Malawian perspective on FrontlineSMS
Josh Nesbit – a Senior in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University – spent the best part of this summer working in a rural hospital in Malawi, where he also implemented FrontlineSMS. Here, Alexander Ngalande, the Home-Based Care nurse at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete, talks about his experiences of the software, and how it has impacted healthcare... Read More
FrontlineSMS on the frontline
The October 7th, 2001 invasion of Afghanistan didn’t only mark the beginning of the “War on Terror“. It also paved way for the introduction of the first mobile phone networks into the country, networks which today find themselves pawns in a game of cat-and-mouse between the Taleban, the government, security forces, mobile operators and aid agencies working... Read More
Zimbabweans speak out through SMS
International press interest may be on the wane following the heady heights of recent months, but the daily struggle continues for millions of people living in Zimbabwe. An inflation rate of over two million percent – usually a leading headline in itself – merely serves as a backdrop to the political manoeuvring taking place following the recent flawed presidential... Read More
The Social Mobile Long Tail 2.0
A few months ago I finally got round to diagramming what I thought mobile applications development in the not-for-profit space looked like. I came up with this, and called it “Social Mobile’s Long Tail“. It was based on the original Long Tail concept, first talked about by Chris Anderson in a Wired Magazine article, when he used it to describe consumer demographics... Read More
Text messaging. Democracy. Coffee
What a week for FrontlineSMS. Activity was already on the rise – we’re preparing for the launch of a new version of the software at Global Messaging 2008 in Cannes next month – but with news breaking this week on its use in Zimbabwe by Kubatana.net has come an additional flurry of press and user activity. A number of Africa, technology and mobile blogs picked... Read More
From conception to replication
Tonight, a hundred and fifty farmers and their families who I have never met will be going to bed better off. Not only is this significant for the farmers, it’s also significant for me. Because without FrontlineSMS, which is being used to provide coffee prices to these smallholder farmers, this would not be happening. There’s a tendency to think that, as a free entry-level... Read More
When actions DO speak louder than words
Winston Churchill once famously remarked that it was “better to be making the news than taking it. To be an actor rather than a critic”. But there are times when this simplifies, and trivialises, the complementary roles that ‘actors’ and ‘critics’ can play. Half-a-century on, modern technology has empowered ‘critics’ in ways Churchill... Read More
Considering Africa
During the summer, sandwiched between the end of my first Stanford Fellowship and a trip to Uganda with Grameen, I was asked by the Corporate Council on Africa to give an interview about my work. They were putting together a feature on “ICT innovators” for their Africa Journal, and wanted to talk about FrontlineSMS. I’m always happy to talk about my work –... Read More
Bridging the knowledge divide
A common theme in my work, and in many of my conference talks, centres around a very simple message – appropriate technology. It’s nothing new, and as a concept has been around since the 1970′s with Fritz Schumacher’s defining book, “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered”. During my recent interview with Nokia’s “New... Read More
Citizen journalism or citizen empowerment?
It’s been a funny old week. After last weeks Mongabay.com interview, news broke on another subject – the use of my FrontlineSMS system in the monitoring of the Nigerian elections this coming weekend. NMEM, the Nigerian NGO who are running the project, will be using volunteer observers to text in any observations (good or bad) as they go through the voting process. There... Read More
