Deep Currents

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics.

There are increasing innovations in tech-enabled activism in the developing world as mobile phone usage reaches new heights, Internet penetration continues to climb, and the social media technologies of Web 2.0 have matured. Here we will briefly discuss (1) basic data on infrastructure, (2) the use of mobile technology as a tool for social change, and (3) the use of Web 2.0 for the same.

1. Basic data on infrastructure

The infrastructure for mobile telecommunications and Internet access continues to roll out at a fast clip with the latter lagging but on a similar curve. (The data that follows is taken from the ITU at http://is.gd/r3m and the MobileActive report at http://is.gd/r2c). For cell phones, the total number in the world is now estimated at 3.5 billion and the average subscribers per 100 in the developed world was 91 in 2006 (up from 5 in 1994) while in the developing world it was 32 (up from under 1). Mobile networks covered 90% of the world’s population in 2007; the global average of penetration is expected to reach 50% in 2008 and a stunning 75% in 2011. There is significant variation by region (measured in subscriptions per 100): 27 in Africa, 37 in Asia, 72 in the Americas, 78 in Oceania, and 110 in Europe. Most of the growth is expected to come from Asia, with Africa’s unsubscribed now termed “the last billion” (http://is.gd/r2d). Internet usage remains at about a third the size at 1.1 billion in 2006. Internet penetration (in users per 100) is 58.6 in the developed world versus 10.2 in the developing, with regional averages as follows: 5.4 in Africa, 17.5 in Asia, 41.2 in the Americas, 41.5 in Europe, and 44.8 in Oceania. Broadband subscribers are far less: 0.2 in Africa, 3.4 in Asia, 9.7 in the Americas, 13.9 in Europe, and 16.6 in Oceania. For a scholarly discussion of what the spread of mobile communications implies for social organization, see Manuel Castells’ 2007 study Mobile Communication and Society, the first chapter of which (http://is.gd/nEO) is particularly informative.

2. Mobile technology as a tool for social change

The arrival of cell phone infrastructure has already enabled new tactics for developing-world political activists (http://is.gd/nEH) and NGOs have been fast followers. As is documented in the 2008 MobileActive report (http://is.gd/r2c), NGOs are adopting mobile phone technology in large numbers and many are finding innovative ways to leverage this infrastructure to accomplish tasks that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible. Of the NGOs surveyed, 67% rated cell phones as helpful or indispensible and 25% said that cell phones have “completely revolutionized the way my organization or project does its work.” The use of mobile phones is naturally dominated by voice and text messaging but other uses include photo and video (39 percent of NGO workers), data collection or transfer (28 percent), and multi-media messaging (27 percent). Some NGO workers are using mobile technology for more sophisticated purposes such as data analysis (8 percent), inventory management (8 percent), and mapping (10 percent). The key benefits that NGOs report include time savings (95 percent); the ability to quickly mobilize or organize individuals (91 percent); reaching audiences that were previously difficult or impossible to reach (74 percent); the ability to transmit data more quickly and accurately (67 percent); and the ability to gather data more quickly and accurately (59 percent). Yet adoption is in its early stages: most of the projects that the report documents are in the proof-of-concept phase and few practitioners or writers could provide strong causal links between the use of mobile technology and accomplishing a development goal.

One of MobileActive’s examples that illustrates how cell phones are enabling what was previously impossible is in the delivery and collection of healthcare information. When there is very little government money for healthcare (e.g. $57 per head in Uganda), the quality of care a patient receives is often limited to whatever knowledge the nurse retained from basic training. With medical staff stretched thin (e.g. one doctor per 15,000) and working under challenging circumstances, simple access to information becomes critically useful for delivering healthcare. Likewise, any statistical data that can inform public health is invaluable. A US-based nonprofit called AED-Satellife has now implemented projects in more than a dozen countries where health workers in impoverished areas use wireless-enabled PDAs to both deliver and collect medical information at the point of care. The public health centers in these countries are now demonstrably better at containing epidemics and many life-saving healthcare practices (e.g. rehydration therapy as the first response to diarrhea) are now common where they were previously unknown.

Another example from MobileActive is the use of cell phones as mobile sensing devices for gathering high-resolution data about environmental conditions. In a pilot project in Ghana’s capitol city of Accra, Eric Paulos of Intel Research added carbon monoxide sensors and GPS trackers to a set of cell phones and distributed them to cab drivers and students to carry with them during their normal travels around the city. Accra is notoriously polluted by auto emissions, dust, and cooking fires. When Paulos entered the mobile phones’ data from 24 hours of continuous sensing into Google Earth, what emerged was a heat map (right) that showed considerable variation from one location to another. (The taxi drivers began discussing how to avoid the polluted areas as soon as they saw the map.) Paulos’ goal is to design similar systems for many other kinds of environmental hazards that can be picked up with sensors, leveraging personal phones to gather data that would be impractically expensive to do otherwise.

A third example is FrontlineSMS (http://frontlinesms.com/what/), free software that uses the simple technology of SMS messaging as a platform for complex tasks such as running surveys, providing automated information, broadcasting announcements, and conducting general communications for groups of any size. The software requires just a laptop connected to a cell phone (not even an internet connection), bringing the total roll-out cost under $1,000. It is being used by several dozen groups in about forty countries: for example, a Lebanese group uses it for education on human rights, a South African group uses the tool to provide feedback to community radio programs, an Albanian group uses it to monitor corruption in public services, and in Uganda another group uses it for community healthcare.

3. Web 2.0 as a tool for social change

Nonprofits’ use of Web 2.0 does not appear to have been studied in near such depth as their use of mobile technology, and Internet usage remains minimal (17.4%) in the developing world, but there is nonetheless a diverse and growing set of experiments. The oldest tool under current experimentation is the email list, as witnessed by MoveOn.org and its recent project Avaaz (http://www.avaaz.org/) which uses a set of email lists to coordinate collective action on global issues such as climate change and human trafficking. The more recent round of innovations adds social media and other tools of Web 2.0 into the mix: blogs, video sharing sites, photo sharing sites, social networking sites, and mapping mashups. One well-established example is the blog aggregator Global Voices (http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/) which assembles content from bloggers throughout the developing world with the express purpose of providing views of the world that are not represented in the mainstream media. Bloggers have come online from many developing nations in the past several years, many with unique perspectives to offer. The International Herald-Tribune recently described how a small cadre of bloggers has begun furtively publishing their views about life in Cuba by posing as foreigners to trick hotels into allowing them to buy Internet access (http://is.gd/nEE). Showing even greater bravery, a club of teenage boys began blogging from within Burma during the recent crackdown and had then to go into hiding from the police (http://is.gd/nEG). Bloggers have also been helpful in less repressive parts of the world, such as gnarlykitty, a teenage girl in Thailand who typically writes about fashion and television but took a break during the soft coup of 2006 to publish a report of what she saw at a massive protest during a moment when the government had shut down access to the mainstream media (http://gnarlykitty.blogspot.com/2006/09/mob-at-paragon.html). These are the kind of views that Global Voices targets.

Democracy activists in Egypt have been quick to experiment with social networking sites such as Facebook and the “microblogging” service Twitter (which can broadcast SMS messages to mobile phones) on top of email, blogs, and video sharing in their fight to build a domestic pro-democracy movement while evading arrest by the state police (http://is.gd/nF1). Though a heavily-subscribed Facebook group failed to result in a strong turnout at a critical juncture, and the government has responded with heavy force, the lead activists continue to express a strong desire to find new and better ways to organize (http://is.gd/nF2).

Finally, two cases that illustrate the power of mapping mashups are the maps of election fraud in Zimbabwe and election-related violence in Kenya. The Zimbabwe fraud map (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007922.html) tallies links and the location of media coverage describing events that count as election fraud according to international standards agreed to by the Southern Africa Development Community. (The blog can only be published because it contains no original media content, since even online media publishers have to be registered with the government in Zimbabwe.) While the Zimbabwean population is notably disconnected from global communications, the map may be helpful in alerting Western media and its readership to the scale of the charade. By contrast, the map of election-related violence in Kenya (http://www.ushahidi.com/timeline.asp) is generated from citizen reports and may have been quite useful to the many Kenyans (though still a small percentage) who have online access.

Written: June 6th, 2008