Mobile phones-Africa

rapid prototyping for mobile apps workshop

"In Lagos, everything is informal. Authorities in the city acknowledge that as much as 80 percent of the work force—and Lagos has between nine and 17 million inhabitants, depending on where you draw the boundaries and who’s doing the counting—is involved in the informal sector. The federal government also suggests that somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of the country’s economic activity derives in some way from the informal sector—and this means that, in aggregate, merchants like Prince Chidi Onyeyirim and Fatai Agbalaya are more important to Nigeria’s future than Shell, Mobil, and Chevron, the multinational oil giants that pump sweet crude from the Niger River Delta." Open City-http://bit.ly/1Yau4f

here’s the official FrontlineSMS / kiwanja.net position on what I consider five key “mobile tools for development” areas – location in the “long tail”, scaling, replication and growth, open sourcing and access to “the cloud”.

New pilot study using the same methodology of financial diaries, this time for small businesses. Daryl Collins. Link to study broken

Presentation from Steve Vosloo

remittance

Ideo design thinking

The receiver does not need to have a bank card or a bank account to access the money sent to them, they simply withdraw their money from one of the 4,300 FNB ATMs across the country.

The T.27 is the brainchild of McLaren F1 designer Gordon Murray and Zytek Automotive Technology.
The car has been designed in a way that minimises the use of materials and keeps the embedded carbon of the vehicle as low as possible. A spokesman for Gordon Murray Design said the body panels, for example, would be made from material originating from PET bottles.

Google Trader is a marketplace application that allows you to buy and sell goods and services on your phone using SMS.

Umesh Chandra of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, is building a network protocol that will enable basic cellphones to connect via SMS with internet servers.

SA Insurance + USSD

Under this pilot, an easy payment scheme was offered on handsets to women consumers at a weekly installment of Rs100 over 25 weeks. Conducted across over 2,500 villages, the pilot received a heartwarming response and received over 27,500 applications, the release added.

A three-year pilot program to use cell phones as a platform for literacy in Niger. The purpose of the pilot program is to use information technology (mobile phones) as a complement to traditional literacy training, providing households with the opportunity to practice their literacy skills via SMS.

Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones

Uses older version The Grid without location based features, and SMS twitter integration.

Uganda's marketplace for products and services.

Researching Income-Generating Uses of ICTs: a fair chunk of ICT4D research looks at social development: health, education, governance, community empowerment, gender equality. But the number one need of the world’s poor is money.

Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks began the Mobile Learning for Mathematics pilot in South Africa in October 2008, working in collaboration with the South African government, MXit, WebAlt, and the Meraka Institute. The project is an invaluable demonstration of the added value mobile communication can bring to education in a sustainable, scalable, and affordable way.

The role mobile phones play in developing economies and the impact that mobile money can have on the lives of the financially underserved and the illiterate.

Mobile related reports

Artefact-http://www.artefactgroup.com/

Kontax