AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have waived all overage charges for text, voice and data for affected areas up until June 30^th.  AT&T is deploying additional back up- resources including personnel and COWs (cell-on-wheels) and COLTs (Cell on light transit) and recently announced that it would be making a $100,000 donation to the American Red Cross as part of its Network Disaster Recovery Programme. Sprint’s Emergency Response Team will distribute handsets, satellite COLTS to support interoperable voice and IP data communications, and volunteers to support first responders and government officials.

According to a Verizon spokesperson, the network is operating at almost 100% following earlier congestion and COWS and COLTS have been dispatched to support relief efforts. Additionally, Verizon will deploy disaster relief vehicles equipped with “Wireless Emergency Centres” to the most badly affected areas which are intended to provide charging stations, emergency phones, internet access, support for emergency response agencies and drinking water. T-Mobile announced that 97% of their network in the affected area was operational and that they have dispatched network engineers equipped with COWs and microwave backhaul in areas where service has been impacted to ensure that communication networks are fully functional.

Heavy congestion was reported as the storm approached and carriers are encouraging customers to “text not talk” through their press releases and via social media. FEMA is also encouraging those affected to be “tech ready” and has issued guidelines for back-up device charging solutions and reducing pressure on the network by only making calls to emergency response agencies

The American Red Cross is encouraging residents to use its Tornado app to let loved ones know they are safe through it’s “I’m Safe” feature. The app contains emergency first aid information, response instructions and guidance on positions of Red Cross shelters and relief supplies which are accessible on devices even if mobile networks are down. It also features a warning siren for impending tornados which is activated even if the app is closed.

Additionally, all carriers are providing a mobile donation platform linked to the Red Cross to facilitate contributions to relief efforts. 

Photos: [Top] By Ks0stm (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons; [Bottom] By Sgt. 1st Class Kendall James, Oklahoma National Guard, via Flickr.

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) hosted a conference today in Kabul celebrating women’s benefits from recent technological innovation in the Afghan mobile market. The conference featured presentations on mobile technology programs specifically designed for women, such as a distance-learning literacy program, a family hotline facility, an SMS service for teachers and students to fast-track their progress in education, and mobile health applications during pregnancy. More than 200 women participated, along with representatives from mobile companies, the international donor community, and Afghan and the U.S. Government officials.

“There are many mobile solutions to common problems Afghan women face. Mobile technology empowers women and provides more access to important information,”  said MOWA Minister Husn Banu Ghazanfar in her opening speech.

Echoing Minister Ghazanfar’s remarks, MCIT Minister Amirzai Sangin emphasized amazing advances in mobile technology this last decade in Afghanistan.

“Today, 88% of the population lives within the combined network coverage of the four largest mobile operators: AWCC, Etisalat, MTN and Roshan,” said Minister Sangin.

U.S. Embassy Coordinating Director for Development and Economic Affairs Ambassador Hilda Arellano highlighted the important role the Afghan Government’s regulatory framework plays in the increase of women’s access to mobile technology, and urged all conference participants to go further.

“Mobile technology is a powerful tool for progress and development. If used correctly, it can give a voice to the voiceless, vastly expand access to information and education, and lead economic innovation,” said Ambassador Arellano.

Photo Credit: Jawad Jalali / AFP

Dambulla: An agricultural hub being transformed by mobile

• Topic: mAgri, Connectivity
• Region: South Asia

Dambulla is the central farming district of Sri Lanka, playing host to the largest convocation of growers and brokers in the country. Its markets feed the capital, and neighbouring towns and villages. Here, we speak to farmers who describe how access to mobile and mobile services are transforming traditional farming techniques and enabling entrepreneurs to reinvest the time and money savings that mobile confers back into their businesses.

This video was supplied to us courtesy of Mobile World Centre and was made from Mobile for Development video content. More info: http://mobileworldcapital.com/mobile-world-centre/

Faced with poor reading outcomes on national literacy assessments, Cambodia’s Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport (MoEYS) shifted to a phonics-based approach to teaching reading in 2011 and recently rolled out new reading textbooks for grades one through three. The newness of the curriculum means that many teachers are unfamiliar with it. World Education, Inc. (WEI) is playing a valuable role in helping schools successfully adjust to the new curriculum and promoting early grade reading through their Total Reading Approach for Children (TRAC) project. Made possible through the generous support of an All Children Reading [1] grant, WEI is working closely with local partner Kampuchean Action for Primary Education (KAPE), as well as collaborating with MoEYS to implement TRAC in three provinces in order to improve early grade reading among Cambodian children.

While many reading projects only focus on one area of a child’s reading environment (such as materials or teachers, etc.), TRAC is an innovative approach that addresses reading both at school and at home. TRAC has collaborated with MoEYS to develop short interval reading benchmarks in order to regularly assess students’ progress in acquiring reading skills. The project has also identified and trained literacy coaches for each target school who will work with teachers to assess the children and determine the skill areas in which they need more practice to achieve mastery. The coaches then act as a liaison between the schools and the parents to provide students with the learning support they need by administering TRAC’s Rapid Response System (RRS). The RRS includes garnering parental engagement and support; a Reading Toolkit that includes games, books, and other materials and is linked directly to the MoEYS reading textbooks and benchmarks; and a Khmer language mLearning application for mobile devices that is also directly linked to the MoEYS textbook and benchmarks.

The smartphone market in Cambodia is surging, with 26% of mobile devices subscriptions being for smartphones. Smartphone penetration is expected to increase substantially over the next few years, which will allow TRAC’s mLearning application to reach a significant number of children.

The mLearning application is not only an important component of TRAC, but it will also be the first Khmer language education app for the primary grades. To create this app, WEI has partnered with education software developer Smart4Kids LLC. WEI has divided the grade 1 and 2 curricula into 31 units that are aligned with the assessment benchmarks that TRAC has created as described above. For each unit WEI and MoEYS have identified and provided the appropriate educational content to include in the stories and games on the app (e.g., phonics, sight words, supporting visuals, audio), and then Media One, a local NGO and partner of the TRAC project, provides the illustrations and audio. This material is passed on to Smart4Kids, who integrates it into the app to create engaging learning games and stories.

The open-source app runs on the Android platform. A web-based version of the app has been completed, and a group of students recently tested it out and provided useful feedback. An Android version will be finished for testing in the next quarter, and the final version is expected to be completed by August: Just in time to be downloaded on to the tablets and smartphones that TRAC provides to each target school and on to families’ personal smartphones before the next school year begins.

Photos: Courtesy of the author.

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Mobile health (mHealth) deployments have grown dramatically in recent years, particularly in emerging markets, where base-of-the pyramid populations often lack access to basic health services, but possess a mobile phone. However, despite the proliferation of mHealth platforms, many remain limited in scale and are poorly integrated into existing healthcare systems. Introducing mobile financial services (MFS) within these platforms may offer a way to drive reduced costs and enhanced efficiency – resulting in more affordable, inclusive healthcare systems.

The Emergent mHealth Sector

According to the GSMA mHealth Tracker, there are currently over 900 planned or deployed mHealth products and services globally, with the majority concentrated in Africa and over 100 in East Africa alone. Over the next few years, the global mHealth market is expected to exceed USD $30 billion, according to a recent GSMA mHealth report, as stakeholders look to reduce costs, add value and enhance the reach of health services.

However, despite projections of dramatic growth in the mHealth sector, particularly in low and middle-income countries, current offerings face many challenges. The GSMA report, for instance, suggests that many mHealth services remain limited in scale and lack commercial viability. According to Patricia Mechael, Executive Director of the mHealth Alliance, in a recent interview: “This inability to scale-up is often due to a lack of alignment with national health priorities,” and the lack of clarity within a range of areas, including: responsibility for financing, technology standards and policies to protect patient privacy.

Another key challenge to developing sustainable mHealth programs in emerging markets, according to Mechael, is establishing reliable financial systems with which to pay for the services. While healthcare spending consumes an average of 10 percent of GDP in OECD countries, low-income countries only devote around 5 percent of their GDP to health. Accordingly, health systems in low and middle income countries are often “overburdened and underfunded,” said Mechael, with broken supply chains, under-trained health workers and unequal access to basic life-saving information and transportation.

Harnessing Mobile Financial Services to Improve Health Systems

In the emerging market context, integration of MFS into healthcare offerings can play an important role, contributing to the development of more sustainable business models (among for-profit healthcare providers), higher quality of care and greater access to care, according to Menekse Gencer, founder of mPay Connect, in a recent interview. From governments to private health service providers, harnessing mobile money technology can benefit a range of healthcare stakeholders.

For instance, healthcare providers – both public and private sector – can use mobile money as a means to better control financial flows and shift towards more transparent payments for health worker salaries. According to a recent mHealth Alliance report, of which Gencer was the lead author, current cash or check payment systems can be cumbersome and insecure, creating unnecessary costs for both workers and the provider. Disbursing salaries into mobile money accounts can reduce costs and enable providers to devote more resources towards serving patients.

Mobile financial services can further be used as a tool to incentivize improved performance among community healthcare workers, enhancing the impact of health services. In Pakistan, for instance, the non-profit Indus Hospital, “Pakistan’s First Paperless Hospital,” used mobile money to disburse financial rewards to health workers who screened for tuberculosis (TB) in their communities. The initiative led to a dramatic increase in reported TB cases, which more than doubled during the six months following its launch.

Tapping into expansive agent networks and mobile network infrastructure, integrating MFS may also enable healthcare providers to reach more patients. For example, mHealth providers can leverage MFS agent networks to accomplish shared or redundant tasks, such as signing up users, checking ID and registering phone numbers, according to the mHealth Alliance report.

Private sector stakeholders, such as for-profit healthcare providers, mobile operators or financial institutions, can also benefit from the integration of MFS into the health ecosystem. According to Gencer, leveraging MFS can support more sustainable business models for mHealth providers – boosting revenue through new value chain participants, and lowering costs incurred as a result of cash management, fraud, and settlement of remote payments for diagnostics and other services. Mobile operators looking to bolster revenues, further, may find value in offering health-focused mobile money products (such as the mobile health insurance product offered in partnership with Safaricom in Kenya).

Enhancing Health Access through MFS

Integrating MFS into healthcare systems in emerging markets further holds broad benefits from low-income, mobile phone-toting patients. According to Mechael, “Mobile money can provide a secure, easy way to pay for health services in developing countries, where most healthcare spending comes out-of-pocket.”

Additionally, providing low-income populations with alternative mobile financial services, such as savings, insurance or loans, can better enable them to afford health services, according to Gencer. In Part II of this blog series to be published next week, we profile a few companies that leverage the M-Pesa infrastructure to offer these alternative financial resources.

Resistance to Change

Integrating new technology into established systems is not always easy, and existing players may be resistant to changing the status quo. Barriers to adoption may include issues of privacy, security of clinical data and limited evidence or research regarding how integrating technology (such as MFS) can improve health outcomes, according to a Vodafone mHealth report. Government healthcare providers, specifically, with their layers of bureaucracy, may be slow to transition from paper-based to mobile payment systems, despite the promise of a long-term pay-off.

Further, while mobile money is growing at a rapid pace, “it is still not ubiquitous,” said Gencer. Accordingly, she suggested: “any decision to use MFS for health must be accompanied by a full understanding of the extent of the MFS infrastructure in that market.” According to an mHealth Alliance report published in March 2012, leveraging MFS for health initiatives can have prohibitive set-up costs, due to the cross sectoral and highly fragmented nature of the mobile money industry.

Mobile financial services hold tremendous promise for transforming existing healthcare systems in emerging markets, benefiting all stakeholders, including patients. However, limited scalability among existing mobile health offerings suggests that this potential has yet to be fully capitalized upon. Achieving effective platforms will require key healthcare players to proactively research and adopt these new technologies. Further, innovators will need to continue developing user-friendly, interoperable services that reach those who need them most.

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Smallholders form the majority of farmers in most of the developing world (over 60% in Africa); and smallholder agriculture is increasingly important, both to boost national productivity and rural incomes. Smallholders therefore need adequate support to adjust to the changes, produce efficiently and participate in an increasingly globalised agricultural market for improved livelihoods.

For many farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, access to timely and relevant information regarding production, technology, production standards, input and agricultural finance remains a major challenge. Governments over the years have been unable to adequately support producers to access information. In reality, farmer extension ratios in most countries are getting worse than they were some two decades ago.

The emerging experience in the financial sector in using mobile technology such as M-PESA to reach the unbanked is providing some vital lessons that can be adopted in other sectors of the economy including agriculture. Indeed, mobile technology can play a key role in agricultural development and; it is gradually emerging as a major tool for helping nations support farmers to produce efficiently and to meet growing food standards. If properly adopted, mobile technology can increase access to relevant information for smallholders on production, technology, finance and marketing of farm produce. In countries like India, services such as m-Kisan are already reaching hundreds of thousands of farmers in rural areas through mobile technology. Countries such as Kenya and Nigeria are equally engaging mobile technology to either distribute input, subsidies or weather information to farmers. In my view, employment of mobile technology in the sector will improve support for farmers, improve compliance with sector standards, increase access to high value markets and in the long run revolutionise the sector.

However, deriving the full benefits of mobile technology in agriculture will depend on factors such as the effectiveness of public-private sector collaboration in agriculture extension services, effective analysis of farmer needs and proper focusing of mobile agriculture services to meet identified needs. Content for mobile agriculture services must be fit for purpose – timely, localised and of high quality to be relevant for farmers.

An area of growing debate with regards to mobile agriculture services, and one which is likely to affect public-private sector collaboration in delivering extension services, is the design of mobile agriculture services. Will mobile agriculture services be designed to benefit the majority of smallholder farmers? And will the focus on smallholders generate the necessary economic benefits for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to continue to offer their infrastructure for extension services? In addition, the issue of competitive versus complementary approaches to agricultural information provision is generating reasonable debate in agricultural extension circles. My question is – will state extension systems see mobile agriculture services and products (operated mainly by MNOs) as a threat or opportunity to be leveraged to reach the majority of smallholders?

The next posting of this blog will take on some of these debates and explore ways to overcome emerging constraints and maximise mobile technologies to improve agricultural productivity and rural incomes.