Mobile for development - reaching the unreached

This post contributed by Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Hilmi Quraishi.

The mere idea of Mobile for Development (M4D) is to assist international agencies, organizations and NGOs to create practical and sustainable mobile solutions & services to enable social development by connecting them with the people.

M4D assists development sector organizations to take their social agenda using mobile technology. These organizations have a strong social program reaching to their target communities, have a vision to increase their reach through mobile but practically are unable to take this step due to various challenges such as lack of proper partnerships, difficulty in understanding the various partnerships required, lack of resources, less experience in using technology etc; which may occur at any of the stages - design, development or implementation.

We at ZMQ are trying to help them to "Go Mobile". Interestingly, M4D here acts not only as technology partner but also assists in creating partnerships, doing base-line analysis, develop strategies, pilots test application, monitoring & evaluation, scalability, value chain to make a sustainable model and much more. The idea of M4D is to use a holistic approach to build a complete value chain model in the eco-system. The NGOs and organizations can be working in any of the areas - healthcare, education & training, environment & sustainable development, agriculture, livelihood, rural finance etc. They all need solutions to increase their reach and impact.

M4D initiative is a not-for-profit program so it assists organizations in creating the whole system on no-profit basis. More to it, if an organization has a strong program which has a potential to reach to much larger population, but lacks fund, M4D can also assist in getting some part of the resources - maybe from corporate partnerships, telecom operators or international agencies. We would like to offer M4D initiative to all Ashoka Community – Ashoka fellows, Ashoka team & Ashoka offices world-wide.