FrontlineSMS has had a strong connection with environmental issues since our Founder had the initial spark of an idea while working on an anti-poaching project in South Africa. We’re delighted to be able to host Een Irawan Putra of KPC Bogor and the Indonesia Nature Film Society to our blog, to share how he used FrontlineSMS in Indonesia to invite he community to help clean up the garbage clogging the Ciliwung River.

KPC Bogor members collecting plastic garbage from the Ciliwung River 2012. Image: KPC Bogor

Community Care Ciliwung Bogor (known locally as KPC Bogor) was founded in March 2009 in West Java, Indonesia to harness the growing community concern for the sustainability of the Ciliwung River in the city of Bogor. We formed to raise awareness about the damaging impact of garbage and waste in the river; as well as mobilize the community to take action.

The community around KPC Bogor was initially formed by our friend Hapsoro who used to share his fishing experiences in the Ciliwung River. “If we go fishing in the river now, there is so much junk,” Hapsoro once said, “All we get is plastic, instead of fish.” It was after an increasing number of similar tales from the community about pollution levels that we decided to  conduct some field research. We set out to find the best spots for fishing along the Ciliwung River, particularly in the area stretching from Katulampa to Cilebut.

Some KPC members work in Research and Development of Ornamental Fish Aquaculture, Ministry of Marine and Fisheries and in fisheries laboratory in Bogor Agricultural University. So while we conducted the research voluntarily, they were always present to offer their skills and ensure our research methods were sound. In addition to the study of fish, some KPC members who work in mapping forest areas in Indonesia helped us to map the river area using GPS. We mapped the points where garbage was stacked, sewage levels and commensurate changes in the river. We also tested the quality of river water by using a simple method called ‘biotilik’, using organisms as an indication of the state of the river water quality in the Ciliwung River.

The results of the research were shocking. We found out that while the people who live along the Ciliwung River rely on its use for daily necessities including cooking, cleaning and washing; the river is increasingly being used as a place to dispose of trash and inorganic waste materials. The research helped us realize just how poor the Ciliwung river conditions were at the time with worrying consequences for the function, condition, and use of the river. Not only did we uncover poor river standards, we also identified that there was a lack of public knowledge about the importance of maintaining a healthy river amongst the community. Waste disposal practices have become rooted in the bad habits that have been ingrained in the minds of the people who live around the Ciliwung riverbanks over a long period of time. People are so used to the methods they use that they do not realize the severity of the environmental damage which they cause.

So members of KPC Bogor got together to ask, “What can we do to save Ciliwung River in ways that are simple, inexpensive and uncomplicated?” From there, a simple concept was born. We set out to recruit volunteers to become garbage scavengers in Ciliwung River. Every Saturday, KPC Bogor members and friends meet from 8 am to 11 am, to pick up any inorganic matter that litters the Ciliwung River and put it into the sacks before sending it to landfills. In many ways, we actually consider this activity as sport in the holiday and a way to meet new friends. It might be hard work that can cause us to sweat, but we understand that even though waste removal is a very simple activity, it important for the sustainability of our river and our community around it. The number of people who come every Saturday varies: sometimes there are only two, other times up to 100 people. For us, the number doesn’t matter. What’s important is that KPC Bogor must continue to remind citizens to take care of the Ciliwung River.

Hapsoro in action in 2010 at the Ciliwung River with a KPC banner (which reads Ciliwung: Our life has fallen to pieces) Image: KBC Bogor

About 3 months ago, we had some sad and shocking news that our friend and leader Hapsoro had passed away. A few of us were worried what would happened to our four year old community and how it could continue without his leadership.  We gathered at Hapsoro’s house before his funeral and we all committed to doing all we could to ensure KPC Bogor’s activities would carry on. We saw how vital this work was for the River, the community’s health and our livelihoods. We needed to honor and commemorate the important service Hapsoro had initiated in starting to form a sense of responsibility and awareness in the community. But how could we mobilize the community like he did?

Hapsoro was a man who always actively sent SMS to all our friends to participate in regular KPC Bogor activities, especially to remind them to get them involved with cleaning the river. With an old mobile phone, he used to send messages one by one to the numbers in his phone book. The day after we decided to keep KPC Bogor alive, I asked permission from Hapsoro’s wife, Yuniken Mayangsari, about whether we could keep using his phone number to send SMS to all the subscribers. She gave me the phone at once without hesitation.

I started using Hapsoro’s mobile phone to send SMS every Friday to the friends of KPC Bogor. When I was using the phone, I realized how patient Hapsoro must have been in sending the SMS alerts about river cleaning over his 3 years of organizing the activities. One by one, each of the numbers had to be selected from the address book and I could only enter 10 numbers at once.  It made getting though more than 200 numbers exhausting and it took me more than two hours! Not to mention when I forgot which numbers I’d already sent the message to. I’m sure there are a few people who got the message twice!

Because of the limited time I could dedicate to sending SMS every Friday, some friends and I decided to try using FrontlineSMS. A friend who lives in Jakarta went looking for a compatible Huawei E-series modem to send and receive messages with the software.  When we were finally able to buy one, we installed it on my laptop and KPC Bogor’s laptop. Now every Friday, we load up FrontlineSMS to send alerts about KPC Bogor activities due to take place the following Saturday. It’s great because I can carry on working while FrontlineSMS is sending the messages. I can easily manage contacts and send alerts to the community in a few simple steps.

KPC Bogor’s work with volunteers is now so successful that we started a “Garbage Scavengers Race” which has now become an official annual agenda event in the city of Bogor. Last year, 1,500 people came to the river to help and we collected 1,300 bags of garbage in just 3 hours. We are now preparing for this year’s scavenge due to take place in June 2013. In recognition of the need to tackle root causes of the waste issue rather than just the clean up, we’ve also started to do more than collecting garbage. KPC Bogor now provides environmental education for elementary school children, conducts research on water quality and plants trees around the Ciliwung River. We are also able to regularly assess the river water biota, where we analyze diversity of micro-organisms, plants and animals in the ecosystem. Recently, we even made a film about the waste problems in the Ciliwung River. Now, we use FrontlineSMS to let the community know about our new activities too. Every week we receive SMS from new people who want their mobile number to be added to the subscribers list so they can receive a regular SMS every week with information about how to join in with our activities.

KPC members after a garbage scavenge in 2012 with Vice Governor of West Java (brown shirt) . Image: KBC Bogor

Thanks to the community, the City Government is now giving full support to our activities by giving us budget for waste cleanup efforts through the official budget allocation (APBD).  Once, Ciliwung was a clean river that was highly venerated by the people for its famous fresh water and was relied on by the public in Indonesia for their livelihoods. It was once a source of clean water used for drinking, cooking, bathing and washing. This community wants the condition of the Ciliwung River to return to how it once was, and we’re getting there. One piece of garbage at a time.

You can watch a video with English subtitles about the KPC Bogor community here: https://vimeo.com/30354102

More information about KPC Bogor can be found at: http://tjiliwoeng.blogspot.com/ or via Twitter @tjiliwoeng and Facebook.com/KPCBogor.

With shiny apps hogging the mobile spotlight these days, one could be forgiven for forgetting about SMS (“Short Message Service” or text messaging).  But although apps often disguise themselves as universally useful, their data and hardware requirements preclude their widespread use in poor countries.  Amongst the world’s poor, SMS is still king.  Given the World Bank’s mandate to serve the exactly that population, and in response to demand from staff, I recently attended a 2-day Frontline SMS training here in DC.

The training took place on the 2nd floor of the OAS building, otherwise known as the “OpenGovHub.”  The hub hosts many organizations working at the intersection of data, governance and development, including Ushahidi, Accountability Lab and Tech4Dem.  Though only one block from the World Bank, it definitely has a Silicon Valley vibe – open offices, young CEOs, bumperstickered laptops and standing desks abound.  Thankfully, this open and informal environment carried right into the training, giving participants the chance to experiment with the software and engage in candid discussions with Frontline’s leaders.  Two days of training, only one Powerpoint presentation. I know, right!?

On the second day, I was particularly struck by a question posed by Frontline CEO Laura Hudson.  In explaining the design tenets of using FrontlineSMS, she asked us:  “What decisions can you make that exclude the fewest voices?”  That’s a question the Dispute Resolution & Prevention team wants all staff designing grievance redress mechanisms for their projects to ponder as well.

When equipping a project to receive and respond to complaints, it’s important to remember that all modes of communication contain tradeoffs that exclude different types of people depending on the type of message they have.  Face to face prevents true anonymity.  Mail is slow.  Phone calls can become expensive.  And just to prove that the nice folks at Frontline didn’t seek to brainwash the class, SMS is no magic bullet either!  It can’t be used directly by those unable to read or write and it’s difficult for the elderly and disabled to type on a phone.

But it does have certain qualities which make it ideal for handling complaints:

Affordable - In most countries, sending an SMS is incredibly cheap and receiving one is free.  Compared to a phone call, where cost to the user varies depending on the length of the call, SMS is predictably inexpensive, with a set rate per message.
Asynchronous – Hotlines and complaint desks are great, but are limited to their hours of operation.  SMS enables people to complain at all hours, day and night.  Just like real life!
Digital – If a task team is receiving and responding to complaints and (smartly) wants to track the data, this becomes very important.  SMSes are machine readable and don’t need the extra level of data-entry that a phone call or paper form would require for monitoring and evaluation.
Anonymous – Without having to come in to fill out a form or call in and use one’s voice, SMS enables a low barrier to entry that is difficult to reproduce in other modes.

SMS feedback has unique aspects which make it worthy of inclusion into any grievance redress mechanism and I encourage you to consider adding it to your project.  And in case you’re worried about the technical details, the set-up isn’t hard.  You probably don’t need a consultant.  You’ll need to buy the right hardware, sure, but DRP can help with that.  The really hard part is using that feedback to effectively resolve complaints, drive decisions and improve results.  Fortunately, we’re happy to help with that too.

Read the original post on the World Bank website.

The use of personal mobile phones has increased rapidly, even in remote parts of Eastern Indonesia, revolutionising the way people communicate. I work in a small regional university in Northern Australia (Charles Darwin University) very close to the Eastern Indonesian province of Nusa Tenngara Timur (NTT).

Indonesia from the Satellite

The landscape of NTT is largely rugged and infertile with a short and intense wet season. In this environment subsistence farming, the predominant livelihood, is marginal with many communities experiencing periods of hunger through the dry season. The provision of services to the rural population is difficult because there the few roads are generally of poor quality and frequently impassible in the wet season due to flooding or landslides. For many accessing health services requires walking long distances and the use of public transport where available. It is not uncommon for people in need of emergency care to be carried by a group of villagers to a point where road transport is available.

For the last few years we have been working with local health departments building capacity in collecting and mapping health information. Through this work we found that whilst SMS was already an important tool health data reporting at some clinics and districts office its use was fairly ad-hoc and unstructured. It was clear that FrontlineSMS could play a useful role for improving the effectiveness of SMS for the delivery of health services. Key in our decision to use FrontlineSMS to support health information activities in this region was the fact that it does not require an internet connection; it was free, efficient, and simple to use, enabling easy implementation at districts and clinic levels.

The Indonesian landscape – a dry, but beautiful plain

Also important was the bottom-up implementation philosophy of FrontlineSMS. In Indonesia over the last decade there has been rapid decentralisation of governance at the district level. This increased regional autonomy allows for most planning and budgeting decisions to be made at the local level. FrontlineSMS fits well into this paradigm, allowing an implementation that supports local programs and priorities. Health workers in this region are generally over-worked and under-resourced so FrontlineSMS is promoted to them as a simple tool that makes their work easier. Through building capacity in the use of this tool, without stipulating what it should be used for, we are developing local ownership and engagement.

We have recently delivered training in West Timor, Sumba and Flores to 11 districts. A total of 40 mobile phones and modems were provided for use at the clinic and district level, with an additional 60 mobile phones given to midwifes for further trials in West Timor. All the participants in the training could see immediate benefits from FrontlineSMS particularly to support programs monitoring pregnant women. Currently rates of maternal mortality in this region are very high. In an effort to tackle this, SMS is being used to assure women are provided with trained assistance during their pregnancy and birth. This has been done through health officers monitoring SMS requests to a mobile phone 24 hours-a-day, seven days a week. FrontlineSMS is now providing a way to conduct this around-the-clock service in a more efficient way. It was also clear from the training that participants could see a wide range of potential applications. FrontlineSMS is now, for example, also being trailed for monitoring Rabies cases in Eastern Flores.

Amaryllis in action, helping to develop user-friendly training materials for local Indonesians

Key to the delivery of this project is our partnership with a local Indonesian NGO (Amaryllis). Amaryllis has assisted with the development of training materials, the on ground training and will conduct follow-up research assessing the sustainability, successes and difficulties in the implementation of FrontlineSMS. The results of this assessment will form the basis of a workshop later in the year to discuss the ongoing use of FrontlineSMS.

The project is funded by AUSAID (Australian Aid) through their public sector linkages program. You can find out more about this project and download the Indonesian Language FrontlineSMS training material here.

Idris at the workshop with FrontlineSMS’s Laura Walker Hudson and Sean McDonald

‘As part of our Masters program at Drexel University School of Public Health, we were afforded the opportunity to work on addressing public health concerns in the Gambia for six weeks in summer 2012. We would be working on a community-based masters thesis. Our project focuses on advancing mobile health concerns by improving dental health practices using SMS messaging, as well as enhancing  vaccine inventory control at village trekking sites. Health workers could manage referrals, follow-up treatment, and reminders to patients using SMS.

We wanted to equip ourselves with an understanding of available software systems that we could use in our project. After much research, it became apparent that FrontlineSMS was the best fit for our project.

Before coming to the training, our group was a little apprehensive about learning and understanding software. None of us have any formal background in software development, so the conference was a little intimidating when we first came across it. But the workshop was run in a comfortable and creative way, so that we all felt very open to learning. It was really awesome to see people from all fields of international development coming together to learn about and implement FrontlineSMS in varying ways.

What the experience taught us…

We benefited from sharing ideas with staff and participants at the workshop, particularly when developing the implementation method for our project, gaining a professional perspective and getting realistic feedback. The brainstorming sessions helped us to confront challenges that we might otherwise have missed. Although there were lots of opportunities for discussion and idea exchange, we would have loved more time to practice with the software and really test out its features.

The workshop has really benefited our work. We were able to tease out and discard unfeasible options for implementations, and consider other approaches. One issue in particular revolved around phone credit. We realized that compliance with the SMS system could be an issue if users are responsible for purchasing credit (airtime) themselves in order to use the system, so we would have to budget for that. Also, training the person who is going to be manning the FrontlineSMS system was have to be factored in. FrontlineSMS is pretty user-friendly and can be used in many scenarios – but thinking through how to properly set up the system really benefits from proper training.

We have since presented to university faculty and staff, and received great acclaim for our progress. We are looking forward to the actual implementation of our work and to seeing all of our hard work come into fruition.

Thank you!!’

Laura Walker Hudson, who helped run the training, said;

“Idris, Tomi, and Tosin were fantastic participants and their energy and enthusiasm really set the tone for the workshop – even though they’d had the longest journey to get there. Their project, from the start, was a great use case and we spent the two days refining it and thinking about key issues to address, like data integrity, sustainability, and how to roll out the system”.

We look forward to seeing how they take their plans forward and hope we’ll get a follow-up post very soon!

FrontlineSMS runs workshops on a pay-per-place basis in Nairobi, London and Washington, DC. Email us to register your interest or request a workshop near you.

The aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings demonstrated yet another significant marker for citizen journalism. Felix Salmon, in an excellent post on the Reuters blog, wrote that the manhunt for a suspect in the bombings “in many ways represented the first fully interactive news story.” The crisis again demonstrated the value — and risks — of citizen reporting via social media.

Citizen reporters broke much of the news, though they still needed broadcast media to help spread it. In some cases, citizens were able to capture iconic photos of events. Others were able to tell compelling stories about how the emergency affected their lives, including obeying the “stay in place” request by government officials during the manhunt. It has been widely reported how quickly social communities also got information wrong, including falsely accusing suspects. But I’ve seen a nearly equal number of reports showing how quickly these communities were able to self-correct their own misinformation.

Hurricane Sandy: user-contributed content featured heavily in coverage. (c) 2012 by Charlie Walker, used under a Creative Commons attribution license. User profile can be found here

There are plenty of examples of news outlets reaching out to citizens in the wake of a rapid-onset, large-scale crisis to tap into this data. During Hurricane Sandy, coverage heavily featured contributed content, including photographs (right). The Boston Marathon bombings were another example. NBC featured Instagram photos to illustrate how creepy Boston’s empty streets appeared during the manhunt for one of the suspects.

Outside of a crisis event, however, professional news outlets don’t offer the same type of participatory engagement for citizens. That’s not to say that news outlets ignore citizen reporting; indeed, their work is increasingly embraced. But for major outlets, citizen reports tend to be siloed off in many instances, even on a stand-alone site such as CNN’s iReport and Al Jazeera’s Sharek. Other outlets have formed creative partnerships to create citizen-specific sites — Reuters and Global Voices, for instance, or the combination of YouTube, WITNESS and Storyful that makes up the Human Rights Channel.

There are compelling reasons, of course, that emergencies spark this type of reporting mash-up. For instance, I suspect the sheer scope of large-scale emergencies strain newsroom staff and editorial policy to the point of bending the rules. Accepting unprofessional photos and stories to capture the magnitude of each crisis is in many cases standard procedure now.

wrong place, wrong time

There’s also the wrong-place-wrong-time scenario. The unpredictability of a crisis, combined with the ubiquity of mobile phones able to capture photos and videos, mean the average person is far more likely than newsroom staff to be in position to report information about a crisis as it unfolds.

I also think there’s a sense that an emergency event also compels more people to want to participate in news. We saw a tremendous amount of frustration with limited media information in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, which prompted many people to seek other outlets to post their stories, photos, and information. Sites for collecting photos, such as Flickr and Instagram, often serve as a rallying point for people to organize visual information during crisis events. I bet many of these photographers don’t think to share images that might be considered newsworthy in other contacts.

Still, it seems strange to me that a large-scale emergency event should be the only moment when this approach is adopted by news outlets. Couldn’t citizens bring the same value — personal stories, local context, and even volumes of personal data — to nearly any news topic of interest?

In March 2013, Time magazine published “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” Steven Brill’s account of flaws in the U.S. health care system. To their credit, Time has two areas allowing citizens to contribute further stories, one called “Sound Off: Are Medical Bills Too High? Tell Us Why” and another called, “Social Reactions: #BitterPill.” The first isn’t much more than a glorified comment section, and the second is a scattered collection of social media postings related to the article.

Surely, of all of the topics of national interest, citizens have the motivation, passion, and personalized context necessary to provide compelling additional coverage for a health care system that nearly everyone agrees is broken. It’s great that Time has a place to collect these stories, but as near as I can tell, there was no reporter working to aggregate and share the follow-up information in a meaningful way, perhaps by using Storify to curate the most compelling stories. Nor was there a reporter trying to make sense of reader input or reactions, the way Andy Carvin approaches Twitter during breaking news events. Why is “regular” news different from an emergency event, when Time and others are clearly willing to invest in curating citizen contributions?

If news outlets are willing to bend the rules, so to speak, during times of rapid-onset crises, they should be able to develop engaging strategies to inspire citizen reporting for other events of local or national importance. This approach would complement the work already done during emergencies by providing nuance, context, and perhaps even overlooked voices in our professional news coverage.

This post originally appeared on the PBS Idea Lab blog and was republished with permission. You can read the original post here.

Technology companies are in the business of changing habits. Creating a new tool, and getting people to use it consistently, means trying to change something about the way people get things done – moving from analogue to digital, from manual to automated, from one app to another, from WordPress to Tumblr.

FrontlineSMS is no different. We’re trying to make it easier to use simple text messages to do complex things. For FrontlineSMS to really work for an organization, we recognize that we have to see not one, but two changes take place.

First, organizations have to shift  from whatever technology or communications channel was in use before, to that plus SMS, or maybe just SMS. This is complex enough, requiring users to think through what is different about SMS than their previous solution – there may be privacy and data integrity concerns, there may be budgeting differences, staffing may need to change. We spend a lot of time talking with users and clients about these issues. Examples of actions that may arise from this type of change would be a new data protection policy, staff being issued additional phones for use just for work, or monitoring of a control group to ensure that use of SMS is not skewing data collection.

But second, and at least as important,  is adoption and rollout of a new platform – the organizational change process inherent in starting to use FrontlineSMS. Dealing effectively with this challenge goes to the heart of the FrontlineSMS theory of change.

We believe that lasting change happens at project and team level. Solutions are best designed by the people who have the problem they address – and that people up and down the chain of authority have different problems. Wherever in this hierarchy the technology is aimed, change which does not effectively take root in teams will not germinate successfully. For technology to be picked up by an organization at large, it must make sense to the people who will be using it – and this may not be the same tool at different points in the hub-and-spoke system or the food chain. We need to design systems that deliver what different people need at their own level. Adoption of technology will be easier if it uses appropriately accessible hardware, affordable or cost-effective and easy to maintain; if the interface is simple to use and easy to pick up; and if control and use of the platform rests at the level of the problem it seeks to solve.* If teams can see how a tool helps them do their jobs, they are more likely to embrace it. Staff at ActionAid Kenya expanded their use of FrontlineSMS from communications with communities to chasing monitoring reports, once they saw how effective it could be to reach remote staff. US Embassy libraries all over the world downloaded FrontlineSMS to keep in touch with communities – but they did so separately. For us, the team is the node of change.

Critics of ICT for development (although this post applies at least as well to ICT in any field, including business) are keen to see technologies moving beyond endless pilots to rolling out at real ‘scale’. An important understanding of scale, for us, is  FrontlineSMS in use by many nodes at once – and in future, aggregated to a central node where data analysis, cost management, and process-shaping can be carried out. This is a fairly rare conception of scale, at least when it comes to SMS, where scale tends to be seen as vertical – many SMS sent to many people at once from one central node.

FrontlineSMS training for WorldVision in Voi, Kenya, 2012 (photo credit: Laura Walker Hudson)

It’s also a new way of dealing with SMS data, in particular – SMS is already in use informally by people in every profession, all over the world. Respecting this and giving teams a tool to manage it where they work just means formalizing what’s already happening, and opening the door to aggregating that data and understanding it, later on.

To bring this back to adoption and rollout – our stated mission has long been lowering barriers to driving social change using mobile technologies. We know that building an easy-to-use, free or low-cost platform that uses last-mile technology is a lot of the battle – but we haven’t completely cracked this yet. We still need to help users navigate a fragmented mobile market and figure out complex and confusing coverage and pricing models. But making technology palatable and easy to use without expensive reinforcement is a large part of the problem, solved.

Making SMS truly powerful for teams is applied technology at its purest – taking SMS, which has been around for over twenty years now, and making it easier to use. We think more people should take this approach, as we’ll discuss in a forthcoming blog post. This is the missing link between taking the most widespread digital platform the world has ever seen, and turning it into a powerfully versatile, frontline business tool.

* SMS is great for this – it’s everywhere (as the speaker from Thoughtworks, said, for maximum reach, use SMS). it’s resilient, predictably costed, platform agnostic, and already in people’s pockets.

UN Special Envoy to the Western Sahara Christopher Ross landed in Morocco last Wednesday. While the international community anxiously waits to see where his next round of negotiations go, here’s a peek into the lives of those affected most by the outcome – Sahrawi refugees. For once, a little hope for the future coming from the Sahara…

Desert SMS

45˚C days and 0˚C nights—welcome to winter in Sahara. Thanks to a small innovation grant from UNOCHA, I recently spent the holidays in the Western Sahara Refugee Camps. In short, I was there exploring the applicability of mobile communication tools within humanitarian coordination and refugee/IDP camp contexts. The real aim: create a sustainable feedback loop between beneficiaries and food aid providers using the lowest common denominators of technology possible.

Charting it out: communication flows help identify core information managers and their “constituents” Photo Credits: Rosa Akbari

I first visited the camps in June 2010. After a brief stint in Haiti, the Sahrawi camps became a counterpoint to understanding humanitarian process flows at a manageable pace. For quick context, the Algerian camps house refugees born from conflict over the Western Sahara. There are five residential camps + one administrative (Rabouni). Sahrawi and expatriate authorities operate from Rabouni, while the actual organization of daily aid distribution occurs at local levels. [aerial views: http://goo.gl/maps/3aRxG]

In 2010, the Sahrawi Red Crescent (SRC)—the lead humanitarian coordination agency in the camps—managed 27 food distribution points for nearly 125,000 beneficiaries. They have since expanded to 116 distribution points: one per bario [neighbourhood]. Understandably, this has made distribution logistics and staff coordination increasingly complex. Thus my efforts quickly evolved from technological experimentation to practical implementation, relying solely on FrontlineSMS.

Technically speaking, the pilot was quite basic. It required establishing direct lines of communication between aid providers and beneficiaries that were both practical and easy to explain. While I explored a few open source platforms, FrontlineSMS was by far the easiest to install and most intuitive to use (especially as someone working solo). Once I introduced the software to Sahrawi partners, this became all the more apparent.

Crawl – Walk – Run

On the ground, the implementation process distilled into three-steps. The first required an honest assessment of technical applicability. (Or rather, is there a real need for innovation?) The second, to build local trust in the software itself. And last, to stand up the system and see how it performs.

Step 1: Ensure Relevance

Before anything, I familiarized with the status quo. How does communication around distributions work? What are relevant information flows and points of exchange? Where are the gaps? After a week with field teams, their “coordination ecosystem” emerged. Discussions with field managers made it readily apparent that internal communication habits were unreliable at best and non-existent at worst. Beneficiaries also made it clear that they wanted (and deserved) to know more from humanitarian leaders - good, bad, and otherwise.

In this instance, the Sahrawi were primed for innovation. All families own at least one cell phone, maintain consistent access to electricity (via solar panels), and have a history of adopting new ideas within the camps… even those introduced by external parties. After watching their mobile habits, it was also safe to assume that employing SMS for humanitarian coordination would not require huge behavioural shifts.

Step 2: Build Trust

Once we confirmed operational relevance, the SRC and I focused efforts on one daira [district] – four (4) neighbourhoods housing 1305 families. As such, I worked closely with a core group of eight (8) humanitarian coordinators stationed at various points along the distribution chain. They became my initial “mobilizers,” helping hone training and implementation procedures in preparation for future scale up. My goal was to make this group as comfortable as possible with FRONTLINESMS and its rollout. In turn, they would train fellow staff in the remaining 26 districts. Their buy-in was crucial to creating a sustainable system.

It did not take long to get them on board. Within a day of introduction to FRONTLINESMS, they were playing with the software on their own, sending me text messages in Arabic and dreaming up other use cases. More importantly, they implored colleagues to text back and play along. I found this supremely important as local-to-local suggestions always carry more weight.

Step 3: Try It Out

Surprisingly enough, implementing the software was the easiest part. We were able to integrate FRONTLINESMS into the information chain relatively naturally because we were so familiar with existing communication flows sans tech. All I did was write a “script” that outlined who was involved in the pilot, suggested message content, and estimated times for when to send SMS. Again, FRONTLINESMS was not an end all solution; the point was that people had to improve communication habits regardless of technological aids or not. The FRONTLINESMS pilot was just a catalyst to start getting the right information to the right people.

Lessons Learned

From the Trees & the Treetops

Because I had no formal organizational affiliation, I worked directly with Sahrawi authorities… on their terms.  I was also lucky to live with a family in the district I worked in. This provided a chance to witness distribution routines from both ends of the spectrum – working alongside staff by day and discussing observations with beneficiaries by night. Some of the most important information I gleaned came from offhand conversations with women in my host family. Did they know why the day’s scheduled distribution did not come? Did they even know there was a distribution planned for the day?

These dual vantage points kept me one step ahead of information flows at all times. For example, I found out about truck malfunctions in Rabouni [administrative camp] as they happened. I would then wait to see when that news would reach beneficiaries, if ever. This constant top/down observation kept beneficiaries’ voices at the forefront from day one.

Keep It Simple

Evolutionary innovation is rapid and unpredictable. It requires a great deal of adaptability and trust building for all parties involved. The smaller the implementation group, the easier this is to manage.

The Western Sahara camps are unique in that they are wholly self-administered. Sahrawi serve as aid administrators and recipients all the same. Organizationally, this means there’s only one agency responsible for distribution in the last mile: the Sahrawi Red Crescent. For me, this meant working with one partner and one partner alone. I found this immensely helpful, especially as I was a one-person team.

In addition, start-up costs were extremely minimal. The most expensive part of this entire project was my flight from Montreal. The USB modem was US$65 and SIM cards/mobile credit racked up to a grand total of US$20 for a month of unlimited texts plus calls. While the latter cost is entirely dependent on the country you work in, you’d be surprised how cheap SMS plans can be. Simply put, FRONTLINESMS is ideal for bootstrapping projects in the field.

Takeaways

I think it’s most important to make sure there’s actually a problem to address before you propose a solution. Furthermore, is the introduction of new technology even necessary? Too often people get wrapped up in the novelty of tech without critically assessing the context in which it will be applied. From my experiences, technology is never an end all, be all. It only improves human processes if the time and place are right.

Finding the right people to work with is also crucial. Suleiman, the distribution field manager, was my go to man. I could go on for days on how much this fellow does with such few resources, but if it wasn’t for his supremely amenable nature, none of this would have worked. For all intents and purposes, I was just some kid with tech tools. He gave me a chance and kept an open mind.  It was a nice reminder as to the importance of finding passionate partners in the field and work with them, not just for them.

Finally, whoever said work and play don’t mix is surely missing out. The point being – if you and your partners are not having fun, something’s gonna give.

What’s Next

Escalating situations in Mali and the Sahara in general have meant that expat visits to the camps are on hold. While I am still working remotely with the SRC and local NGOs, it is a tad more difficult to watch progress from abroad. These unexpected constraints inherently reminded me that you don’t have to accomplish everything in a day. Take a breath. Think it through. Do it right.

That said, initial efforts did reach the right eyes and ears. Because we had a working pilot up within a week, the accessibility of FRONTLINESMS was readily apparent. Coupled with extremely low implementation costs, FRONTLINESMS quickly stuck on people’s radar. I was (and am still being) approached by Polisario authorities and external organizations with requests to broaden the work and build it into organizational communication plans. Despite the abrupt departure, this is highly encouraging.

Conclusions

Given the advent of open source technologies and rapid proliferation of mobile use, UNOCHA (among other humanitarian agencies) has also recognized it’s time to adapt. Funding pilots like mine is one of many ways institutions are adapting to the digital age, the White House included. I can only assume there’s plenty more to come.

For better or worse, refugee camps and forgotten conflicts will always exist. It is only a matter of time before innovative solutions from the “ICT4D” world are applied to these contexts… whether it’s on my watch or the countless others’ who want to expose actionable voices from those most vulnerable. With tools (and communities) like FRONTLINESMS to back us, it’s safe to say we’re just getting started.

Promo Cards: Before heading, I printed “promotional postcards” as a bit of a social experiment. (Thanks again Theo.) The thought was to pass these out during food distributions and see if women texted the number provided.

Quick and dirty translation for non-Spanish speakers:

[FRONT] Receive food  // send your comments (# on reverse) // Receive a confirmation

[BACK] Send your comments to # // examples: “we received flour in Smara Farsi on 7 January,” “the fish is good,” anything you want.* (all comments are kept anonymous)

The MFarmer SMS service, a project of the Nakaseke Community Telecentre in Uganda, helps farmers in rural areas to connect with better markets. It encourages two-way feedback with farmers, buyers and agro-processors, and other service providers. The project is designed to help farmers access agricultural market price information and weather information through their mobile phones.

We are using FrontlineSMS to manage, send and receive SMS. The key advantage of FrontlineSMS is that it can be customised to suit any organisation’s needs. You can adapt it for all sorts of services, and communicate with your community about anything: agricultural market price information, weather, natural calamities, or an alert system.

Haji Muwanga is a farmer benefiting from the program Photo Credits: Peter Balaba

The project intends to reach 600 farmers by the end of 2013. Last year, 34 Farmers were trained in the application of the service – one of them was Haji Siraje Muwanga (pictured left). Muwanga lives in Kiziba, in Nakaseke District and relies predominantly on farming to support his family. He grows bananas, maize, beans and coffee. He also rears cattle and keeps poultry to supplement his income and household food requirements. Some of the challenges he has encountered in the past include poor storage facilities and poor prices for his produce, especially during the most productive parts of the harvest.

He says, “Our major challenge is that most farmers sell to middlemen who buy our produce at low prices. In most cases we don’t know if they are buying cheaply, which is why we fall prey to them!”

The Mfarmer SMS  service has helped Muwanga to link up directly with buyers. He once received a message from the Telecentre showing that someone was looking for beans. As he says, ‘last season I planted 300 kilograms of beans, which I had bought for Uganda shillings 800 per kilo costing me Shillings 240,000 (about $96 US), and I harvested 2800kg.’ After responding to the message, the buyer bought 2500kg of beans at 1300/= per kilo; thus earning 3,250,000/ (USD1300). He will keep 300 kg of the total crop for planting next season.

Muwanga calls the opportunity ‘a god-send’ – because of MFarmer, he has managed to send his three children back to school. Two are taking vocational training courses in Computer Repair and Maintenance and Motor Engineering, and the youngest completed his O’Levels (secondary level education) in 2012.

As a farmer, Muwanga says he’s happy because most farmers need agricultural price information, especially about maize, beans and coffee.  He is optimistic that this service will benefit his fellow farmers and urges them to seize such opportunities.

The project was supported by United Nations Economic Commission for Africa within the framework of resolutions made during the African Knowledge Network workshop held on 22-23 November, 2011 at UNECA, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It is coordinated by Mr. Balaba Peter of Nakaseke Telecentre who has been contracted by ECA for a short dedicated period of time.

The resolutions recognized that the growth and penetration of ICTs, particularly mobile phones in Africa, is attracting both solution providers and development actors in the development of community-based applications in supporting areas ranging from financial services and government service delivery to support the socio-economic sectors in agriculture, health, education and commerce, etc.

Hence, there was a need for Telecentres to adopt new and crosscutting applications to serve their communities better and to ensure sustainability. The Mfarmer SMS project at Nakaseke has been stimulated by the fact that mobile phone penetration within the area, as in many other African villages, is high and most households have access to mobile phones.

I recently joined FrontlineSMS on an internship, as Community Project Assistant. I’m a recent graduate in Computer Science, so I’m very passionate about technology and the great impact it has on social change. I am working closely with Sila Kisoso, the community support manager to support user engagement. This internship with FrontlineSMS is a great opportunity for me to learn more about user experience, a key consideration when building an application.

Community Engagement with SMS Workshop Photo credits: Sila Kisoso

Given the incredible growth in mobile usage in the last decade, it comes as no surprise that many organisations are embracing the use of mobile technology to expand their reach and engage with communities. This has come with its fair share of challenges, given some of the limitations of technology such as poor mobile connectivity in some areas, SMS has become the more reliable and inexpensive option. FrontlineSMS supports the utility of text messaging as a communications platform, and we hold workshops from time to time to educate our users on how to maximize the use of FrontlineSMS as an SMS platform. As an intern, I was excited to be part of one such workshop, the Community Engagement with SMS Workshop, held this past January. The workshop got off to a great start, with Laura Walker Hudson, CEO of our Foundation, starting us off with group introductions and also requested participants to share their expectations of the workshop. It was clear within the next few minutes how eager everyone was to make the day a great learning experience.

The sessions were interactive, actively engaging those in attendance, something I found truly enjoyable. Laura tackled questions from the participants, using previous case studies detailing how various organisations are using the software to engage the communities they work with. We had a great turnout of participants from a range of international organizations such as World Vision International, Danish Demining Group among others.

There was also a one-on-one session explaining how to set-up FrontlineSMS; we learnt how to troubleshoot mobile connection (a popular FAQ among our users) with FrontlineSMS using a modem. We launched v2.2 that morning and our participants had the opportunity to test it first-hand. Laura explained some of the new features that had been introduced to the new release, 2.2.0 which included Subscriptions, which enables users to enable people to sign up for messages that interest them. For example, someone could join a group for farmers by sending in a keyword; all the updates sent to the farmers group would then go to them. You can even auto-reply to confirm your subscription. Web connection is another great activity which allows one to send SMS up to a web server or service such as Ushahidi or even Twitter. Other new improvements in the software include Basic Authentication, where a user can be able to set up a password for their platform across the network so at improve on security.

Towards the end of the programme, we went into groups of four where each group was expected to come up with a communication strategy illustrating how the software may be deployed, taking security, sustainability, accountability, and monitoring and evaluation into consideration. The winning team project was proposing to use FrontlineSMS to report sensitive cases of sexual abuse in the community. They effectively outlined how the software can help reduce the occurrence of these incidences by providing a platform where one can report without fear of prejudice or stigma. The group clearly explained how they would deal with data security issues were clearly outlined in this project, which was an important factor to consider. Each of the members of the winning team was honoured with a FrontlineSMS badge as a token of appreciation for their efforts in simulating that project.

Laura with the Workshop Participants Photo credits: Sila Kisoso

The sessions were well paced and time allocated for each item on the agenda was adequate; though there was so much discussion and people were so interested that we think the next training is going to have to be two days so as to cover the functionality of the software more exhaustively as well as give more time for Q&A.

All in all, it was a day well spent.

Motorola M3888

I had my first mobile phone in 1999, a metallic blue Motorola M3888. Its street name was “phone booth” because it was the cheapest mobile phone available, even though it was a luxury. It cost 14,000KES ($160) – a gift from my father bought during a Safaricom Valentine’s Day special. I could make calls – for 40KES (50 cents) per minute, and send SMS, and that was it; I loved that phone!

Today, you can buy a phone for as little as 1,000KES ($12) and make a call for 1KES ($0.01) per minute. 14,000KES will get you two Android phones – which, like many handsets, enable you to do far more than just send and receive SMS and make calls.

In 1999, few realised how significant mobile software development would be to the Kenyan economy; as an income driver, employment option, and as part of our financial infrastructure. Kenya now has 26 million mobile subscribers. According to the GSMA – the global trade body for mobile network operators – the number of African mobile phone users has grown by nearly 20% every year since 2007; and Kenya is at the heart of this technology boom. It is home to M-Pesa; a well-known innovation that has defied the old order and created a ripple effect and a new wave of innovation in financial services. Today, 50% of Kenya’s GDP moves through mobile money, and M-Pesa reportedly handles $20 million a day in mobile money transactions.

Nicknamed ‘Silicon Savannah’, Kenya’s IT initiatives have already propelled the country to the forefront of the industry in Africa. In 2007, Kenya set its Vision 2030, incorporating IT development as a pillar of its economic growth. While in some parts of the world the emphasis has been on equipping mobile phones with everything you might find on your computer, in Kenya the focus has been on developing new technology that can enhance everyday living. Whether it is moving money without a bank account, reporting incidences of corruption or sharing health education to new mothers; this innovation is being made possible using even the most basic mobile phone on the market. A thriving industry has grown up here, and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, around the development and sale of mobile apps which allow you to do everything from finding a hair salon to chatting with friends to taking a photo and sharing it via email or social media – critically, most for the feature phone market.

In 2011, it was reported that Africa had 500 million mobile phones; 485 million of which were non-smartphones. There is a great demand in Africa for tools and apps for the non-smartphone user. This population live, on average, in areas that lack mobile (internet) connectivity or have access to mobile connectivity but can’t afford it. SMS remains a powerful platform in these communities. In the coming years we’ll see the development of cheaper, more robust smartphones; hopefully reduced pricing for mobile data; and as a consequent rise in the uptake of high-end mobile communications. For rural and low-income populations, however, SMS will continue to be a critical platform. I’m excited to work with our users to support them engage communities, manage staff and gather and visualize information in increasingly sophisticated ways, through FrontlineSMS. \o/

Kenya is the heart of technology in Africa and where FrontlineSMS strategically set up its offices in Nairobi. Being new to Mobile for Development (M4D), myself, I am fortunate to join one of the best teams in mobile software engineering whose core mission is to lower the barrier to communication while serving a wide base of users, reaching over 40,000 users in 135 countries. I joined the team mid-last year as the Community Support Manager in our Nairobi Office, where our in-house software developer team is based. We are housed close to the iHub, alongside other similar organizations such as Ushahidi, Kopo Kopo, Praekelt Foundation and M-Farm among others.

Flo and Sila on her first week at FrontlineSMS (credit: Rick Roxburgh)

In the last eight months I’ve learned a lot about ICT4D, as a newcomer to the field – from colleagues, of course, but most of all from our users. Our users have taught me how essential SMS is and how versatile FrontlineSMS is through the innovative ways they have adopted it in their work.

We are always interested to share your stories and photos. If you would like to share your use of FrontlineSMS, in the form of a blog post or case study, and have it featured on our website, please get in touch with me at sila@frontlinesms.com. We have already seen great value in sharing user experiences empowering other users to see the potential of SMS in their work.

Read the guest blogs we have posted by clicking here. We would also love to receive photos of your team using FrontlineSMS in the office or better yet, in the field. We are also currently collecting photos of our users in celebration of FrontlineSMSat7 sharing their message to the world on how they are using FrontlineSMS. Join in and share yours to sila@frontlinesms.com! We will post it on facebook and even tweet about your work!

Share your user story and empower others in the process \o/. I look forward to hearing from you!