Wireless Democracy: Innovation in Africa

On March 29 I attended “Wireless Democracy: Innovation in Africa,” a small panel discussion at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The panel included Wayan Vota (Inveneo), Sean McDonald (FrontlineSMS), Katie Dowd (Advisor for Innovation, Department of State) and Paul Lubeck (Global Information Internship Program, UC Santa Cruz.)

Wayan began by discussing his experiences at Inveneo and provided a profile of the company’s successful history. Inveneo is a small non-profit organization with a total staff of 15 people based out of San Francisco and Washington, DC. Despite the small team, Inveneo’s work has impacted many populations worldwide, with a primary emphasis on Africa. The organization's main goal is to build capacity locally through the training of ICT professionals in remote areas of Africa so they can utilize technology. As Wayan stressed, it is imperative not only to provide “appropriate technology” (technology that can be maintained locally without the high expense of shipping it back to the manufacturer abroad in case anything breaks) but also to train people “to support this technology locally”. Inveneo often has to work in remote areas with no access to internet and other forms of modern technology, thus it has to be innovative to provide low cost ICT solutions to such regions. One example is the company’s initiative to develop low wattage equipment that can be used in remote areas.

The event continued with Sean from FrontlineSMS discussing his experiences working for the open-source software charity – regarded as the first social media tool for the poor. FrontlineSMS is a back-end interconnection tool that can be downloaded and used to send SMS communications to help people connect fast and efficiently without the need for an internet connection. This application is now used all over the world by millions of people, especially in rural regions and disaster relief areas. Using SMS to communicate allows for more privacy, and the system follows an efficient rule of constraining each message to 160 characters. While the ability to exchange SMS communications does not eliminate a need for improved infrastructure, this service puts people in touch in a timely manner and allows for efficient exchange of important and time sensitive information. FrontlineSMS includes the following family of projects: FrontlineSMS Legal, FrontlineSMS Medic, FrontlineSMS Learn, FrontlineSMS Credit, and FrontlineSMS Radio.

I found FrontlineSMS Credit to be interesting on many levels; launched by Ben Lyon in 2009 it was instrumental in creating the inexpensive technology to expand the mobile financing sector. According to an interview given by Ben in 2010, this application is a back-end interconnection tool that allows microfinance institutions to interface their own databases with the mobile payment systems run by mobile networks. So when an MFI customer makes a repayment via SMS, the following steps occur: 1) the MFI receives the SMS that the payment has been made, 2) the MFI’s records are updated automatically, and 3) the deposit is recorded on the MFI’s SIM card showing that additional funds are available to be loaned out again or paid out into the MFI’s bank account.

It’s interesting to note that later in 2010 Ben left FrontlineSMS Credit to start Kopo Kopo – an organization that aims to link mobile money networks with banking software. According to the FrontlineSMS Credit blog, “Ben has set his sights on bringing mobile money to microfinance institutions in ways that FrontlineSMS is not built to do – creating full-on, web-based, back-end integrations between banking software used by even the largest MFIs and mobile money networks like M-PESA."

Katie Dowd from the Department of State continued the conversation on mobile innovations and various ICT projects. In her presentation she mentioned initiatives such as Civil Society 2.0, Apps4Africa and usage of Ushahidi to demonstrate how the Department of State is using technological innovation for its work abroad.

Finally, Professor Lubeck gave an interesting overview of the Global Information Internship Program (GIIP) at the University of Santa Cruz, California. As he mentioned, this program was developed by graduate students as a way to escape ‘academic despair’ and find ways to use ICT to tackle serious challenges around the world. Professor Lubeck – like Wayan Vota - highlighted the importance of building local capacity. In order to achieve this, the GIIP program sends its fellows to NGOs abroad where they can live for three to four months and train local staff to use a variety of software and equipment.