mobile application

Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE), a non-profit organization uses mobile phone games to improve literacy skills in emerging countries.  Founded in 2004, MILLEE develops human-centred, immersive and enjoyable language learning mobile games which are modelled after the traditional games children play in the community. In India, MILLEE is using mobile games to impart English literacy skills to the poor children attending public schools. Mobile phones have also facilitated out-of-school learning. The organization has confirmed the effectiveness of mobile phones in learning through field projects in India.

Mobile phones provide a cost-effective, easy to use and fun medium for learning. Issues with mobile phones such as small screen, small keyboard and limited amount of storage have not proved to be hindrances for MILLEE. MILLEE is scaling up its English literacy program in India and also expanding to China, Kenya and other emerging countries. The rapid proliferation of mobile phones provides an excellent opportunity for expanding into many countries. India, for example, has more than 600 million mobile phone connections.

COOPEUMO, a grassroots farmer’s cooperative with more than 350 small scale farmers as members provides a number of services to farmers such as technical assistance, credit and training.  Last year COOPEUMO started a pilot project called DatAgro to provide SMS based information to farmers. The service started in April, 2009 has been supported by DataDyne, Federation of Agrarian Innovation, UNESCO, Entel PCS and two Chilean newspapers- El Mostrador and El Mercurio.

By providing information related to supply and product prices, climate conditions, and international markets; the initiative allows small scale farmers to align with the market needs. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones, farmers today have access to such information. ‘Last week I received one (message) about the weather so I didn’t plant anything because of the information I received and I planted yesterday, after the rain had stopped’ says Hugo Tobar, a farmer. Ninety percent of adults in rural areas of Chile have mobile phones. Farmers today consider mobile phones as a necessity and not a luxury.

In February, the Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF), selected 8 projects from its ISIF 2010 program to which it would provide grant funding. ISIF is a "small grants program aimed at stimulating creative solutions to ICT development needed in the Asia Pacific Region." This year they recieved 207 submissions for their grants, from 25 different countries. The awardees are from Vietnam, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia/Timor-Leste.The projects focus on health, IT infrastructure, multilingualism and general access to information.

About 1 year ago, some colleagues from graduate school and I had the privelage to work with DataDyne for our final project for our studies. We had the opportunity to work with Dr. Joel Selanikio, the co-founder, and evaluate user adoption of DataDyne's EpiSurveyor in Kenya.

If you are not familiar with EpiSurveyor, I won't hesitate to say that you should be. EpiSurveyor is one of DataDyne's key products and has won a number of acolades and awards over the past few years (including the 2008 Tech Museum Award for Health, the 2009 Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, and the MIT-Lemelson award for Sustainability).

The basic premise is that a user can download the software from the web and create forms for data collection. Data can then be collected regardless of internet or mobile connection, as the mobile phone acts as a database. Once the user has a signal, they can send that data to be aggregated at a central loctaion.

This post contributed by Ashoka's Osman Ashai. The following is Part 2 in a case study series following Ashoka Fellow Hilmi Quraishi's collaboration with Microsoft to use mobile technology to educate the public and health care workers about Tuburculosis prevention and treatment.