AudiencScapes

By Peter Goldstein, Project Director, AudienceScapes

USAID held a panel discussion on mobile phones and development today that did a good job of highlighting the promises and challenges of using mobile phone applications to improve people's lives. Clearly, mobiles apps are proliferating in the development space, especially in health, education, finance and the delivery of government services. But success is contingent on the right environment -- regulatory, cultural, informational and commercial -- to achieve scale beyond the scope of most pilot projects.

"This field is littered with pilots that never scaled," observed Eduardo Jezierski, vice president of engineering at InSTEDD, which promotes the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to deliver critical information in humanitarian and relief settings. Jezierski said it is essential to work closely with local mobile service providers to make sure that any app fits well with their business structure and goals so it has a chance to propagate and scale. App proponents also need to understand the local ethnography of mobile usage: Who in a family controls mobile phone use? Who reads or responds to SMS messages? Who purchases time credits? "These kinds of details can determine the success or failure of a project," Jezierski noted.

Factors Affecting Success

Tom Kalil, deputy director of policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted wide disparities among countries in regulating and taxing mobile phone sectors. These factors can play a major part in rendering mobile development apps practical and affordable for potential users. "There are huge differences in permitted charges," he noted, adding that some countries actually tax mobile phones as luxury goods, inhibiting their use. "Are [governments] encouraging competition? This is essential," Kalil said.

The potential for mobile apps to positively impact development is growing by leaps and bounds as lower-cost handsets and expanding networks make phones available to even the most remote and impoverished citizens around the world. Ted Okada, Microsoft's director of U.S. global strategic accounts, noted that mobile phones are fast approaching commodity status, evidenced by the $15 Vodafone 150. Okada also pointed to mobile operators' internal USSD messaging systems as the "sleeping giant" in the mobile app space because they hold out the possibility of offering value-added services to phone users in a secure and private manner.

Kalil chimed in that mobile phones provide people in developing countries with access to "the cloud," potentially allowing them to ask questions that others within the cloud-be they other people or simply content websites-can answer. In essence, users become plugged in to the resources of the Web via a mobile phone, expanding their knowledge reach exponentially. He added that "there is great potential to do things at scale" via mobile phones, and he cited the well-known case of mobile money service M-Pesa in Kenya, which has attracted millions of users in a few short years of operation.

A Cautionary Tale: Haiti

But this doesn't mean that implementation is an easy task. Maura O'Neill chief innovation officer at USAID, recounted a telling example from Haiti, where USAID is working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to get mobile money off the ground. She described a tense meeting with various local actors -- notably, Haiti's central bank, commercial banks and cell phone operators -- to organize the distribution of some $12 million in relief payments to Haitians by the Red Cross. The idea was for the Red Cross to remit some $12 million in voluntary relief payments via mobile phone SMS. The Red Cross would send mobile vouchers to individuals' cell phones, which recipients would then be able to cash in at local banks.

The central bank representatives did not like the idea that such large-scale money transfers would ostensibly take place outside the normal regulatory framework. The cell phone companies were not happy that the Red Cross was not using one of them for the mobile voucher payment system (O'Neill said Mobile Accord provided that service). Meanwhile, the commercial banks felt that the system was undercutting their ability to collect service charges on money transfers that would otherwise have come through normal remittance channels.

USAID and Gates also had to contend with the fact that the normal wait at a bank during the crisis period was about two hours. Thus, if all the vouchers were sent simultaneously, there would be an overwhelming flood of customers. One idea was to send out the voucher SMS messages in phases, but this raised the question of how to decide who would get these messages first, and what would happen if one person who did not receive one found out that someone else did receive one. There was also the very real risk that a recipient's phone might not have been charged at the time of sending the voucher, in which case the person ran the risk of having the voucher expire before he or she had a chance to cash it in. As O'Neill noted, "in Haiti, charging (a phone) is a real limiting factor" in phone use.

A Tool for Entrepreneurs

On the bright side, all of the panel participants agreed that mobile phones are opening up fertile ground for entrepreneurship in developing countries, both in terms of local people developing applications for mobiles as well people using mobiles to run businesses. Jezierski, whose organization sets up local innovation centers, said it is essential to have local people with local knowledge develop mobile apps. In his view, donors should devote time to empowering these local entrepreneurs, either through sponsorship of technology labs or by facilitating business relationships with mobile operators.

Photo Courtesy of Wayan Vota via Flickr.