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NIMD mourns death of Zambian President
NIMD 19 08 2008 NIMD has learned with great sadness the passing away of the Zambian President, His Excellency Mr Levy Mwanawasa.
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NGOS Need to Think Beyond Just Mobile Costs, Consider Policy: A Review by Frederick Noronha
MobileActive.org | News 19 08 2008 Civil society can play a large role in getting people digitally connected, say the co-editors of the new book 'ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks'.
"However, in order to reap the full benefits from connectivity in a long-lasting manner, underlying issues of policy, affordability and technology need to be addressed," LIRNAsia's Executive Director Rohan Samarajiva and co-editor of the book with Ayesha Zainudeen, told Mobileactive.org in an email interview.
Currently Asia is the fastest growing region in the world in terms of connectivity. Read More>> read more
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Welcome, Frederick Noronha and Esther Nasikye (And Goodbye, Cory Ramey!)
MobileActive.org | News 18 08 2008 We welcome to our team two new occasional bloggers from India and Uganda: Frederick Noronha and Esther Nasikye. You will see blog posts and stories from them starting today. Both are experienced in ICT for Development and have a special interest in mobiles for social change. We are looking forward to your contributions, Esther and Frederick, and welcome you to the MobileActive community! Read More>> read more
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Tanzanian electoral reform process gets a boost from South Africa
NIMD 18 08 2008 From 27 ' 31 July 2008 the Tanzania Centre for Democracy (TCD) undertook a study visit to South Africa to enrich their own national reform debate.
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Bolivia’s ongoing crisis
NIMD 15 08 2008 The outcome of the referendum held in Bolivia last Sunday confirms that the country remains heavily divided and at the brink of a further escalation of the political conflict.
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Mobile Projects at the International AIDS Conference: A Report from Guest Blogger Kate Jongbloed
MobileActive.org | News 15 08 2008 Technology-based interventions for prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS took a small but important place on the agenda at the recent 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, reports attendee Kate Jongbloed who runs an insightful blog on development issues. She reports for MobileActive from Mexico. In a session entitled, “Reaching Millions: Youth, AIDS and the Digital Age,” a number of private and non-profit organizations presented their internet and mobile phone based approaches to the fight against AIDS. A full audio and video version of the panel can be found here. Read More>> read more
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Funding Opportunities and Awards for MobileActives
MobileActive.org | News 13 08 2008 Below are some awards and funding opportunities that we have come across that might be of interest to the MobileActive community. None of the opportunities listed are adinistered by MobileActive; we are just the messenger! Read More>> read more
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Guatemala Electoral Court celebrates 25th anniversary
NIMD 11 08 2008 Free and fair elections and increased women participation are two impressive results of the work of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which was established 25 years ago.
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Patricia Mechael: Millennium Villages, Women and Mobile Health
MobileActive.org | News 09 08 2008 In our series of interviews from the Bellagio conference on mobile health, here is David Sasaki's last interview with Patricia Mechael who is coordinating the mobile strategy for the Millennium Village Project. She talks about mobile adoption, user-centric design, women and mobiles, how Millennium Villages is using mobiles to improve health outcomes, and what she sees as the next big projects in mobile health. David Oso: You have worked in a number of countries -- Egypt, Sudan, the UK, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mozambique, Russia, Rwanda, the list keeps going on and on. How are cell phones used differently in these different countries where you've worked? Read More>> read more
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Democracy Alert: urgent statement of concern for Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim
NIMD 04 08 2008 The World Movement for Democracy expresses its grave concern about recent controversial accusations of sodomy against Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
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Krishnan Ganapathy: Without India There is No mHealth
MobileActive.org | News 31 07 2008 Krishnan Ganapathy, a practicing neurosurgeon, is the former president of the Neurological Society of India and current president of the Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation. He is also the co-founder of the Telemedicine Society of India, a member of the National Task Force on Telemedicine and an adjunct professor at IIT Madras and at Anna University. He is currently involved in preliminary studies on the clinical evaluation of patients based in rural areas of India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh using wireless telephony. Along with his colleague Aditi Ravindra, Dr. Ganapathy is one of the leading thinkers on mobile health in India and around the world. What follows is an edited, abridged transcribe from a conversation we had at Rockefeller's Making the eHealth Connection conference. An MP3 of our entire discussion is available for download. DS: A lot of people don't have an understanding of what mHealth is, what telemedicine is, and how mobile phones are being used by physicians, surgeons, and health care professionals. You've been on the cutting edge of all this for a long time ... can you talk to me about how the way you treat patients has changed over the years with the use of mobile phones? Read More>> read more
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Cell-Life Update: Using Mobiles to Fight HIV/AIDS
MobileActive.org | News 31 07 2008 In South Africa, mobile phones and HIV/AIDS are two pervsasive realities. Some 75% percent of children and adults in the country have mobile phones, and according to the National HIV Survey, 10.8% of people over two years old are living with HIV. Almost 1,000 AIDS deaths occur every day. Cell-Life, an NGO based in Cape Town, aims to address this growing AIDS epidemic by using mobile phones.
Cell-Life's "Cellphones for HIV" project continues with two new pilot projects. Read More>> read more
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Berhane Gebru: Disease Surveillance with Mobile Phones in Uganda
MobileActive.org | News 30 07 2008 Berhane Gebru is Program Director at AED-SATELLIFE, an international organization which aims to strengthen health care in resource-poor countries by providing disease surveillance solutions and health information distribution to rural healthcare workers using mobile technology. He took some time out from this week's meeting on mHealth and Mobile Telemedicine to describe SATELLIFE's current project in Uganda which equips rural health workers with PDA's and GPRS wireless access points in order to transmit their health data collection to the ministry of health. We also discuss an upcoming project, currently being field-tested, which would allow those same health care workers to make their disease surveillance reports using simple mobile phones.[Editor's note: A full case study of AED Satellife's project is written up in our recent report "Wireless Technology for Social Change," commissioned by the UNF/Vodafone Group Foundation Technology Partnership] At the bottom of the post you can download an audio recording of our entire 20-minute conversation. This is an edited and abridged transcription. Read More>> read more
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What is the M-PESA of Mobile Health?
MobileActive.org | News 30 07 2008 Mobile banking has been touted as such a wild success story for one simple reason: mobile phones have penetrated the market in rural areas of developing countries in the last five years more successfully than traditional banks have been able to over the past 100 years. You can travel to any remote village just about anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa and it is rare that you will find a bank; far rarer that you will find an ATM. (I remember waiting three and a half hours to use an ATM once in Namibia.) But you are guaranteed to hear ringtones. Read More>> read more
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Mobile Reporting in Africa: Guest Blogger Erik Hersman
MobileActive.org | News 29 07 2008 For the last year there has been quite a bit of talk about mobile phone reporting in Africa. For good reason too, since this lowers the technology barrier to getting stories out of hard-to-reach places. Imagine, all you need to do is find a journalist and equip them with an adequate mobile phone Now you can record interviews in video and audio, take pictures and upload in almost any part of the continent. Read More>> read more
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DemocracyAlert: Urgent Statement of Concern for Malaysian Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim
NIMD 28 07 2008 The World Movement for Democracy expresses its grave concern about recent controversial accusations of sodomy against Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
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Suriname: Democracy training programme initiated
NIMD 23 07 2008 The Democracy Unit in Suriname, the local partner of NIMD, met with local political representatives, launching the first steps towards its young politicians training programme.
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Texting for Beethoven: The New York Philharmonic Goes Mobile
MobileActive.org | News 22 07 2008 A few weeks ago, audience members at a New York Philharmonic concert in New York City's Central Park voted for the encore. Given two options -- Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee," the audience members texted in their votes. About 74% of respondents voted for Hendrix, so that piece concluded the concert.
Vince Ford, the Philharmonic's Director of New Media, told MobileActive a bit about the orchestra's first steps into mobile marketing. "We have offered ringtones on our website for two years now, but beyond that we haven't done much with mobile," Ford said. Read More>> read more
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From Favelas to Townships: Mobile Use in Low-Income Populations
MobileActive.org | News 16 07 2008 Mobile phone use is booming. There are close to 3.5 billion mobile phones in use, and mobile penetration rates are increasing quickly, especially in developing countries. This rise of mobile phone use by low-income and so-called 'base-of-the-pyramid' users raises a number of questions. Are low-income people using mobile technology in different ways than their higher-income counterparts? How can mobile phones be desiged and used in ways that are useful to these populations? Two new studies--one of favelas in Brazil and the other of a low-income township in South Africa--seek to answer these questions. Read More>> read more
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Community Radio and SMS -- A Guest Post by Bruce Girard
MobileActive.org | News 16 07 2008 By Bruce Girard, reposted with permission. At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, an informal survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal. Read More>> read more
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Community Radio and SMS -- A Guest Post by Brian Girard
MobileActive.org | News 16 07 2008 By Brian Girard, reposted with permission. At first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, an informal survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal. Read More>> read more
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SMS as a Tool in Election Observation
MobileActive.org | News 12 07 2008 In 2007, Sierra Leone had its first election since the end of a 10-year civil war. Previous elections had been run by the United Nations (UN), and there was fear that these highly contested elections would not be run fairly and transparently under the Sierra Leone National Election Commission (NEC). Read More>> read more
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The News is Coming: Local News with SMS
MobileActive.org | News 12 07 2008 The news is coming. Or at least that's what Guy Berger titled his Knight News Challenge project, which aims to connect diverse populations in Grahamstown, South Africa to news through mobile phone- based citizen journalism and news delivery. Berger, head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University was recently awarded a Knight News Challenge grant, which funds "digital information innovations that transform community life."
Berger sat down with MobileActive to talk about the project. "This is hyperlocal," he said. Read More>> read more
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Launch of Malian Centre for Interparty Dialogue and Democracy
NIMD 11 07 2008 31 political parties participate in initiative to promote democracy in Mali.
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Local News with SMS
MobileActive.org | News 10 07 2008 The news is coming. Or at least that's what Guy Berger titled his Knight News Challenge project, which aims to connect diverse populations in Grahamstown, South Africa to news through mobile phone- based citizen journalism and news delivery. Berger, head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University was recently awarded a Knight News Challenge grant, which funds "digital information innovations that transform community life."
Berger sat down with MobileActive to talk about the project. "This is hyperlocal," he said. Read More>> read more
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