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The Next Afghan Mobile Entrepreneur

Anushka Thewarapperuma's picture


With as many as 12 million mobile phone users, mobile is booming in Afghanistan (Credit: USAID, Flickr Creative Commons)

Afghanistan has made significant progress in its development since 2001. Yet, these achievements remain fragile due to a volatile security situation and limited human capacity. Of an estimated 30 million inhabitants, 46 percent is under the age of 15 and with high population growth, the country is experiencing a classic youth bulge. In addition, literacy rates remain at extremely low levels (approximately 43% for men and 12% for women).

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

iRevolution
The Geography of Twitter: Mapping the Global Heartbeat

"My colleague Kalev Leetaru recently co-authored this comprehensive study on the various sources and accuracies of geographic information on Twitter. This is the first detailed study of its kind. The detailed analysis, which runs some 50-pages long, has important implications vis-a-vis the use of social media in emergency management and humanitarian response. Should you not have the time to analyze the comprehensive study, this blog post highlights the most important and relevant findings.

Kalev et al. analyzed 1.5 billion tweets (collected from the Twitter Decahose via GNIP) between October 23 and November 30th, 2012. This came to 14.3 billion words posted by 35% of all active users at the time. Note that 2.9% of the world’s population are active Twitter users and that 87% of all tweets ever posted since the launch of Twitter in 2006 were posted in the past 24 months alone. On average, Kalev and company found that the lowest number of tweets posted per hour is one million; the highest is 2 million. In addition, almost 50% of all tweets are posted by 5% of users. (Click on images to enlarge)."  READ MORE

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Washington Post 
New apps transforming remote parts of Africa

“For generations, breeding cows in the rural highlands of Kenya has hinged on knowledge and experience passed down from parents to children. But Mercy Wanjiku is unlike most farmers. Her most powerful tool is her cellphone, and a text messaging service called iCow.

The service informs her when her cows are in heat, which feed might boost their milk output and what their fair market price is. And when she needed a veterinarian recently, she relied on the service’s extensive database. “Otherwise, it would have been hard to find someone qualified in my area,” said Wanjiku, a 29-year-old farmer in Mweru, a village about 100 miles north of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.” READ MORE

Bring in the tech nerds to help expand financial inclusion

Ignacio Mas's picture

(image: Sean Graham, Flickr Creative Commons)

It has become mainstream to think that digital technologies will have a significant role to play in addressing the financial inclusion challenge in developing countries. This may be so, but if all we in the financial inclusion community do is merely add the mobile phone (or the smart card) to our stock of dearly-held beliefs, we will accomplish little. Technology will not work additively; if technology-based models work it will be because they will have changed pretty much everything. I’m not saying that everything will change: I’m just saying that that should be the bet.

Towards A Business Model For Funding African Startups

Note: This blog post is adapted from a much longer discussion by the author under the same title that was published at Tekedia on January 7, 2013. You can read that blog post here. Small sections of this article are identical to segments of the original article.Africa's entrepreneurs are teeming with ideas for innovative startups. But where can they get the funding?

The problem in brief
Africa is experiencing a boom in entrepreneurship due to proliferating Internet and mobile computing technologies. Simultaneously African startups face the often life-threatening impediment of inadequate access to seed and early stage venture capital. Fortunately, a number of developments in other parts of the world point to the contours of an approach to solving that problem in a manner that necessarily starts out small, but that can eventually be scaled in a meaningful way.

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

ICT Works
10 Observations on Technology in Africa from Eric Schmidt of Google

“After a week of business meetings in the cities of sub-Saharan Africa, Eric Schmidt posted a detailed list of observations. As he used to run Google and is still on their board, I'll give him a bit more credit than others who might want to opine after a week's exposure to the continent's dynamism.

Eric starts with 3 positive major trends:

  1. the despotic leadership in Africa from the 1970s and 1980 is in decline, replaced by younger and more democratic leaders
  2. a huge youth demographic boom is underway, with a majority of the population of 25, or even under 20
  3. mobile phones are everywhere, and the Internet in Africa will be primarily a mobile one”  READ MORE

Media (R)evolutions: World Mobile-Cellular Subscriptions by Level of Development

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.


 

Women in tech drive change in the Middle East

Please watch Women Entrepreneurship to Reshape the Economy through Innovation in MENA, at the European Development Days live on Tuesday October 16 at 11:00 AM cet

Across the developing world, women business owners are far more prevalent at the informal and micro-scale than growth oriented small and medium sized enterprises.  Women still face an uneven playing field in education, employment, earnings, and decision-making power.Women tech entrepreneurs have the potential to change the face of the MENA economy. (Credit: moderntime, Flickr Creative Commons)

The Middle East and Northern African (MENA) region faces its own particular set of challenges.  In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the development of strong economies and opportunities for both men and women to pursue a livelihood without barriers is integral to the future of the region.  There is an enormous enterprise and job creation agenda to be fulfilled in the Middle East. A recent study by the OECD notes that today, only 27% of women in the region join the labor force, compared to 51% in other low, middle and high-income economies, and only 11% are self-employed, against 22% of men.

What’s Next for Mobile Money?

In recent years, mobile money has attracted sustained attention in ways that few other mobile services have. And for good reason: from East Africa to Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere, mobile money services are growing and diversifying into fields such as savings and insurance. Kenya-based M-PESA remains the global leader, and the benefits from increased market efficiency, consumer risk-sharing and third party utilizations are significant. But mobile money can no longer be considered an isolated phenomenon, and as it matures, a variety of new challenges and benefits will influence its developmental potential.

Mobile money is changing the financial landscape around the world. What's next? (Credit: Flickr Creative Commons, Gates Foundation)

Although it is notoriously difficult to make predictions about such a fast-moving and wide-ranging industry, in the new edition of Information & Communication for Development 2012, we highlight some emerging issues in mobile money that will likely become relevant in the upcoming years.

Media (R)evolutions: Mobile Cellular Subscriptions by Income Group

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.


Need to buy Treasury Bills and Bonds? There's an app for that!

OK, not exactly an App, but investors in Kenya will soon be able to buy T-bills and bonds offered by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), as agents of the Treasury, through their mobile phones (with or without a bank account)!

Buying T-bills and bonds through your mobile phone? It's possible! (Credit: kiwanja, Flickr Creative Commons)

This innovative project, led by CBK, with the support of the World Bank, is known as Treasury Mobile Direct. It will aim to extend the use of mobile technology beyond money transfers and broaden the choice of savings products for retail investors. Potential investors will only need a mobile phone line and a subscription to a mobile money service, which will enable telecoms operators open an electronic account with the Central Securities Depository (CDSC) or CBK on their behalf. These accounts are a requirement if you wish to invest in Government debt. The service will include purchase, interest payment and redemption of securities (short-term paper and bonds) through the mobile platform.

Media (R)evolutions: Internet Users Divide

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.


Expose, engage, empower: Connecting unlikely entrepreneurs in the mobile era

The Smart Rickshaw Network could improve traffic conditions on Indian roads. (Credit: Hyougushi, Flickr Creative Commons)

“SRN: Smart Rickshaw Network” by Aadhar Bhalinge – a prolific technology developer from India – is the winner of m2Work, the mobile microwork innovation contest that infoDev and Nokia launched in February. The infoDev team has taken a closer look at his and the other five finalists’ backgrounds, and we found some helpful insights about new sources of innovation, their promise, and their needs.

To put these lessons in context, let’s take a look at the microwork ecosystem before m2Work. Microwork platforms, like Samasource and MobileWorks, were already connecting thousands of people in developing nations with jobs like moderating websites, tagging images and video, and so on. But these platforms were most useful for workers with access to computers with broadband, which are the exception rather than the rule in many regions.

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Frontline SMS
New Resource: Using SMS as an Effective Behavior Change Campaigning Tool

“Behavior change campaigning is inherently interactive. In order to encourage positive behavior change it is important to not only push campaign messages out to people, but to listen to the responses. To run a campaign which has a real impact, you need to listen to ensure you’re being heard. This is one of the main reasons why SMS – as a widely accessible and inherently interactive communications channel  – is an ideal tool for campaigning.

This is the topic explored in a new resource which FrontlineSMS is releasing with Text to Change today; best practices when using SMS as a behavior change campaigning tool. This resource has been put together collaboratively to provide an introductory guide, suggesting some key points which can usefully be considered if you are planning to use SMS as a campaign tool. The resource is by no means exhaustive, but it outlines some key considerations which can hopefully serve to help guide discussions around best practices in SMS campaigning.” READ MORE


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