Mobile for Development Blog

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Video interview with IKSL: How to provide the right information at the right time for Agri VAS

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Last month, my colleague Amol Jadhav and I visited the IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited (IKSL) State operations team in Karnataka, India. I’ve worked with the IKSL project for a number of years and I’m always inspired to see the hard work of the IKSL agriculture operations team ...

Flooding in the Philippines: A Look at SMART’s Disaster Response Activities

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On Monday, August 6th, Tropical Storm Haiku hit the Philippines, exacerbating precipitation from the south-west monsoon rains and causing mass flooding affecting 850,000 people and displacing more than 250,000. We provide an overview of Smart's response activities.

Is there a demand for mobile loans?

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The following is a guest post by Elio Vitucci, Managing Director of Experian MicroAnalytics, as part of the series on airtime based credit scoring.

Women’s Access to ICT: Strengthening Policy Frameworks to Address the Mobile Phone Gender Gap

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Discussion around the need for policy frameworks to be strengthened to addressthe mobile gender gap

Hacking for Health: Working with Technology to Improve Healthcare in Malawi

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The following is a guest post by Isaac Holeman. It’s an excerpt that appeared on National Geographic News Watch, as part of the Digital Diversity series. Read it in its entirety here. After driving south to the end of the pavement, we continued on gravel and dirt roads ...

A call towards a “Better Life”: Marketing Agri Value Added Services to Rural Communities in India

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On a recent trip to India, our Programme Director Fiona Smith and I had the opportunity to visit a few Agri VAS field deployments. One visit that stood out was to the Shekhpura Village in Rajasthan (Northern India) to see Handygo’s marketing and sales activities of their ...

Making mobile money work for business

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This is a guest post written by Ignacio Mas, a consultant on mobile money and technology-enabled models for financial inclusion.

Managing Post-Storm and Disaster Power Outages: Is Distributed Generation a Solution?

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The Eastern United States was sweltering at the end of June. The record-high temperatures caused a rare storm called a “derecho” which produces straight-line winds across a wide front of near-hurricane speeds. We look at the implications for power outages in this type of ...

Sec. Clinton highlights importance of closing the gender data gap

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Secretary Clinton on the importance of bridning the gender gap in data

Mobile operator value proposition increasingly aligns with health

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In just the last three years alone, the industry has witnessed significant strides that mobile operators have made in expanding from direct-to-consumer health services to the enterprise health market. Orange, together with GE, has been awarded a contract to integrate the ...

Mobitel’s consumer insight research leads to suite of mobile services for Sri Lankan women

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How Mobitel is using consumer insights research to launch a suite of mobile services for women in Sri Lanka

Talk ‘N’ Text addresses women’s biggest barrier to ownership: affordability

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How Talk 'N' text is enabling women's access and use of mobile in the Philippines through designing a more affordable handset, and offering a product for underserved women to use SMS and voice - Panalo Phone.

How (not why) to design and market mobile information and advisory services for women smallholder farmers

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The recent webinar organised by the GSMA mAgri team focused instead on how to design and market information services to maximise their reach and use among women smallholder farmers. Here’s a quick snapshot.

Research Latest Part 1: Consumer insight research key to enhancing the lives of BoP through mobile

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Recent research highlights the importance of utilising consumer insights research to improve the lives ofpeople living at the bottom at the pyramid.

Pilot-itis: What’s the cure?

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The following is a guest post by Sara Chamberlain, Head of ICT in India for BBC Media Action. This post originally appeared here. Speakers at the GSMA Mobile Health (mHealth) Summit in South Africa bemoaned the ‘Pilot-itis’  – the inability to break out of pilot ...

Mobile-Enabled Savings via the Business Correspondent Model in India

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This is a guest post written by Debbie Dean (Project Director, Micro savings Initiative) and Camilla Nestor (Vice President, Financial Services) from Grameen Foundation.

Female retailers ‘vital’ to Dialog’s rural growth targets

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Female retailers are key to Dialog Axiata's growth in rural areas, thorugh the operator's 5 Star Partner Programme.

Collaboration essential to achieve scale in mHealth

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Across Africa, 6 countries boast mobile penetration rates in excess of 100 percent. Cognisant of the fact that only one Mobile Operator (MNO) across the African continent has 100 percent market share (Ethiopia)[1], it stands to reason that leveraging the reach of mobile ...

Zimbabwe’s Ecocash shows impressive growth

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Econet, Zimbabwe’s leading mobile network operator, launched its “Ecocash” mobile moneyoffering just 8 months ago, and has raced to over 1.5 million registered customers since.

Leveraging Information and Communication Technology for the Base of the Pyramid: Innovative business models in agriculture services

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In 2011, Hystra, a consulting firm specializing in hybrid (social and business) strategies, and its non-profit partner Ashoka, reviewed more than 280 initiatives globally that used Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to provide education, healthcare, agro-services ...