I’m delighted to see that the series of events called Mobile Web Africa, organized by Matthew Dawes from All Amber expanding all over Africa, with numerous dates and instances in south, east, and west part of the continent. As reported before, I took part of the first event last year in Joburg, and this was a very successful event. I was not able to attend the East Africa version, last February, but I heard from different participants that it was also a very good meeting.
I strongly believe that Mobile browsing will grow significantly in Africa, and a majority of people will meet the Web for the first time through their phone. We are still at the very early stage, bandwidth, devices, capacities, expertise and prices need to evolve to create an enabling environment, but it is critical to raise awareness among all stakeholders on the potential of mobile Web technologies. In that regards, all initiatives in that domain are welcome and it is great to see a series of conferences focusing on this technology. Therefore, the Web Foundation is very happy to support them.
More details of the upcoming events:

• The next event, Mobile Web in Africa 2010 will take place 28th September – 1st October 2010, in Johannesburg, South Africa
• Then, Mobile Web West Africa 2011 will take place 2nd and 3rd February 2011 in Lagos, Nigeria
• Finally, Mobile Web East Africa 2011 will take place 25th and 26th May 2011 in Nairobi, Kenya

Stephane

If you are interested to help and can provide some information about the situation in your country, please go to the Ushahidi instance they are running to collect these data. The final paper is expected in a few weeks/couple of months.

I’m looking forward to reading the results !

Stephane

Our meeting marathon continues! 2 more days, Thursday and Friday, leading to the terrible Friday night match (Ghana lost its World Cup football quarter-final match to Uruguay in penalties)! One of the most quiet 3 hours in terms of traffic in Accra in the memories of the oldest inhabitants!

Coming back to our meetings, Thursday was relatively soft compared to previous days, but heavy given that it was an official public holiday day in Ghana. We spent the morning debriefing on the first days and defining an action plan. We will publish it in the next 2 weeks.

Then we had a fruitful meeting with Kofi Appenteng, who is among other things member of the board of trustees of Ford Foundation. Kofi underlined the issues around access to capital in Ghana, and in particular access to capital for IT projects. Kofi mentionned that for development-oriented services, it might be easier to focus on donor funding for initial capital. They are more likely potential investors than traditional business angels.

We then met with a fascinating young entrepreneur, Bright Simons, who is behind a project called mPedigree. This is a mobile service to track fake drugs. It was really impressive to get the whole story, and how he came to the idea, starting from trying to sell organic goods to northern countries. Lots of interesting insight about all the challenges he met and still meeting to implement his idea.

traditionnal entrepreneurship

Finally, we met Dorothy Gordon, the director of Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in ICT. The center has been mentioned by almost all the people we met as a central place in the Ghana ICT scene. Dorothy is a very nice person who is very active to keep the center up to date with latest trend. We discussed how the potential training we have in mind could extend existing courses currently delivered at the center on software development and programming. Lots of potential synergies.

The day ended with a nice dinner in the trendy OSU/Oxford Street area with Mira Slavova, a researcher working at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Ghana. Mira is active in the W3C group on Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D), and we discussed how ICT can help spread new agri technics and support extension agents.

Our last day was very relaxing ! We had only one meeting. We met the CEO and the Chair of the board of the Ghana Information and Knowledge Sharing Network (GINKS). GINKS is a very active well-known network of individual and organizations, linking more than 400 members interested in ICT. GINKS will surely be helpful as a vector of dissemination, and as a major actor for community building. The discussion was very positive on how to promote a better usage, and greater availability of mobile content, and how to extend our initiative outside Accra in all part of Ghana particularly in rural areas.

Mobile Entrepreneurship

During these few days, we learnt a lot, and we met a good panel of the different actors in the domain. However, a couple of organizations have been mentioned almost all the time, and i will ensure that we visit them next time we come. These includes the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Ghana Multimedia Iincubator Centre (GMIC), a World Bank associated ICT Incubator, and the Kumasi University of Science and Technology. Now i will do my best to summarize our findings and next steps in a report to be published by mid july.

As this trip is finished now, I want to thank to all people who took the time to chat with us, and
i want to give a bigger thank to Dr. Nii Quaynor who helped us during the whole week to understand the local context, and to shape our project.

Stephane
Ps: previous posts are now illustrated with pictures !

Ebenezer, Nienke, George, TESA member, TESA member, Franco, Dom, Steve (and behind the camera Steph)

Our visit of Accra and with stakeholders continues. After our first day, we went on and met a couple of very interesting people.

The Tuesday started with a meeting with three representatives from a student association of the Ghana Telecom University College. The university has a few student associations focusing on different topics. The one we met is called TESA (TEchnology Students Association) and as its name tells, is focused on technology. Not all students of the world are so forward thinking and pro-active. The three people we met, including the president Ebenezer Kwaku Ofori Atiapa, contacted us after reading our blog posts on the launch of the project. They understand clearly the potential of mobile technologies for the future, and the added-value for their members. Very impressive.

NCS old Satellite Bandwidth

We then meet with Kafui Prebbie from iVillage. I knew Kafui from a past EU project (DigitalWorld Forum) on which we worked together. We had a very fruitful discussion about who we should target, how to outreach to potential entrepreneurs that are out of the university system (e.g. public competition), how to build a local community focused on mobile content and services, and what are the barriers and potential incentives for entrepreneurs to jump on our targeted training, and on the mobile ICT wave.

The third meeting of the day was with Nii Okai, a freelance developer, with mobile competencies and experience. Nii gave us a good overview of existing local ICT-related networks (Linux group, Google group, etc.), and challenges he faced as an individual to build and deliver mobile services. We then visited the Ghana Telecom University College (GTUC) and met its president, Dr. Dakwa who gave us an overview of the university as well as expressed his interests in the initiative, and the interest of GTUC to include mobile training in its student and professional courses.

Finally, we met with Kofi Worlanyo, CEO of Gasscomm, the Ghana Association of Software and IT Services Companies who presented his association, and the list of his member who are active in the mobile content and applications front. This gave us a good overview of the Accra ICT business landscape, and enabled us to arrange a set of meetings with the most relevant players. The day ended with our participation to the ISOC Ghana meeting which gathered around 30 people. I had the opportunity to present our project, and we got feedback from the different participants pointing the most recurrent points: skill gaps, hard access to shortcodes, etc. (the complete output and findings of the visit will be gathered in a public report in the next few weeks).

That was a full day starting meeting at around 8am and returning to the hotel at around 10pm!

Isoc Meeting

Wednesday was not more relaxing! Most of the day was focused on meeting with industry. We started with Bsystems, then Network Computer System (NCS) ran by our close friend Dr Nii Quaynor, who was instrumental in the organization of the week. We then met with Ashesi University, which is a private university considered by most of the people we met as one of the top ones in IT training. Ashesi already has a course on mobile programming based on the MIT EPROM content and a dozen of students are following it. Ashesi is also looking at launching a Mobile Monday Accra. This would nicely fit with our work. They are also interested to expand their current courses to integrate more technologies and mobile business aspects.

In the afternoon, we continued our tour of IT companies, meeting with Sisco (Somuah Information Systems) a company offering mobile solutions to their customers, Rancard, the leading local mobile aggregator, and Soft Tribes.
All these meetings were critical for us to capture the challenges and issues IT companies are facing when investing in mobile content and applications. Almost none of them are currently focusing on end-user products, but only on customer solutions (B2B instead of B2C). The case of Rancard is different. They are by far those who understands best the mobile market, and the opportunities that are currently missed. While they don’t have entrepreneurs as part of their current customers, they believe that the market can expand in that direction.

Like Tuesday, the last meeting ended up at 9pm, and we were back at the hotel, for a final dinner meeting with Yaovi Atohoum, working for the Association of African University located in Accra. yet another full day!

Stephane

Our team includes George Sadowsky, one of our consultants, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, a W3C staff member doing volunteer work on this project, and Nienke Akkermans, a student of VU Amsterdam, who is working on exploring the potential of W4RA project in Ghana. We are also accompanied by two Vodafone staff from UK, Steven Wolak, and Franco Papeschi.

The objective of the mission is to talk to all potential stakeholders — ICT companies, universities, business sector, telecom operators, professional training institutions, mobile entrepreneurs, students, NGOs, etc. — and refine our plans to fit with the local context and identify promising partners.

The first day was very successful in that regards. On Monday we spent most of the day talking with Vodafone Ghana, and then met with Mark Davies, a very successful entrepreneur in Accra, founder of busyinternet, busylab and esoko project (aka tradenet).

In both cases, the discussions were very fruitful. Vodafone Ghana is very excited to help and support the project. We met three different teams and they are all very enthusiastic about the project, and will be more than happy to help, help us in setting up the project, but also help future entrepreneurs to deploy their businesses.

I had the impression that we are coming at the right time as Vodafone Ghana is just starting to focus on Value-added services (VAS) and is in the process of deploying new platforms, and mainstreaming and easing integration of third parties services. As a follow-up of these meetings, we will develop a white paper on the different type of technologies we have in mind, and the level of services telecom operators can provide to ease the development of businesses and services on these technologies. This will allow Vodafone to tell us the levels of support they want to provide on the different technologies, enabling us to scope a bit better the training program we are targeting.

We ended our meeting with the visit of Vodafone internet Cafes. Vodafone is running 11 internet cafes all over the country. Each has a fiber optic providing 40 MB/s: FOURTY MEGABIT PER SECOND! just incredible ! They are running two rooms at their facilities in Accra and they are full all day long. It is really nothing to do with traditional internet cafe i saw in other countries. This is top-notch classy stores, air conditioned, with high-end computers, as well as slots for laptop. Lots of people are using these cafes as their business place, staying all the day! They are selling in these cafes orange juices… and they became the first orange juice reseller in the whole country!! they might make more money with orange juices than with internet access!!! This is just incredible. The whole story of these cafes are really unbelievable. That said, given the bandwidth, that enables also potential video applications between the different cafes in the country, and that might be useful for broadcasting training sessions in a workable way. This is something i will keep in mind.

The second meeting we had was with Mark Davies. Mark is not only a very successful entrepreneur, but he is also a fascinating guy. We chatted almost two hours with him and that was very fruitful. What we learnt mostly is the need for better communications between the different parties: ICT companies and universities are not talking together, making students not very well fit for employment, the hands-on expertise and problem solving skills are missing. ICT companies and Telecom operators are not talking together, and the lack of easy availability of things like shortcodes are major barriers for mobile service deployment. According to Mark this is the major issue for now, and creating a regular event ala Mobile Monday might help a lot. The technical training would also be useful for companies to send their staff and acquire missing skills.

Concerning entrepreneurs, Mark is more doubtful. He believes that entrepreneurs can be successful after some time in the industry where they acquire some professional expertise. Students are very unlikely potential good entrepreneurs, due to lack of understanding of business (keeping books, etc.). He also believes that access to finance is a major challenges. It is usual to get loans at a rate above 50%, FIFTY PERCENT! As incredible as the Vodafone juice business!! There are business angels, and venture capital firms, but they are not very open to ICT businesses, and even less to students becoming entrepreneurs. Very interesting insights, and facts, that help us understand the context a bit better.

During the next three days we will continue our meetings, and i will also continue this series of posts. At the end of the week, we will work all together on a global report to capture the result of the week, and we will share our views with the community.

Stay tuned!

Stephane
PS:  Im not yet able to illustrate this post with nice pictures, but will when I’m back!

Our first objective is to meet and discuss with Vodafone Ghana, with who we are going to work closely. Then, obviously, it is essential to know better developers, and developer networks, the entrepreneurs community, and see what are their analysis of the current situation. Why aren’t there more mobile applications?  Why aren’t there more social and business entrepreneurs going mobile?  How can this capacity building initiative in mobile technologies and business lead to a vibrant ecosystem? What kinds of other initiatives (regular meeting ala Mobile Monday) might attract attention among the most brilliant potential entrepreneurs and help them to enter the mobile world as a way to access the Web.

Practically, we also want to understand what type of structure for the training program (length, localization, etc.) would fit well within the Ghanaian context.

So lots of questions to answer during this trip!  Stay tuned, as we will report a couple of times while there, and bring back results of our investigations, and nice pictures and video.

PS: Obviously, any idea or feedback on the questions above are welcome, through this blog or privately to us

Steph

Vodafone is providing the Web Foundation with $1 million over 3 years to pilot mobile training laboratories in Africa, with the aim of helping  individual entrepreneurs to learn relevant technology and business skills to start new mobile services. The first laboratory will be launched in Ghana during 2010. Our objective is to create dynamic mobile Web and voice ecosystems that will enable entrepreneurs to launch their own sustainable businesses, as well as enable all segments of the population to have access to new and innovative services that are useful and usable.

Lunch Break

Last week, I attended the National Forum on Mobile Applications for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development organized by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). I gave the opening talk at this interesting event (slides). Apart from disseminating information about the Web Foundation, I was particularly interested in attending this event because, to the best of my knowledge, this was a first time a regulatory body was taking the lead on mobile applications for social development. The process is very interesting.

TRAI is aware of the potential of mobile phones to deliver public services to underprivileged communities in India, and wanted to gather all stakeholders to ensure that the conditions are set for the number of social-oriented mobile applications to take off. I wish it is opening a new era where telecom regulation authorities are more drivers then followers !

The event was well attended. Between 100 and 150 people were there, and most of the sessions were quite interesting. First of all, it is important to note that in most of presentations, particularly on case studies, the usual barriers were mentioned: languages, illiteracy, and ICT experience. Obviously, the language issue is particularly important in India (23 official languages, 12 scripts), and the lack of support of e.g. Hindi is critical, particularly for Web access.  Hindi is the fifth most spoken language (see the language ranking from Ethnologue.com) in the world with 182 millions of people, 182 millions of people that are not able yet to fully enjoy the Web, and particularly the mobile Web.

In terms of illiteracy, as I mentioned a in previous post, it is important that many speakers mentioned the potential of IVR systems (voice-based services). I particularly liked the presentation of life line India, a project driven by OneWorld-India, providing education and agriculture support through a voice-based system. It is a mix of an IVR system, and human interaction (recording answer in specific languages), due to the lack of language support in speech technologies too.

Among the difference sessions, one was particularly interesting for me about e- and m-governance. Here again, for the first time, I was surprised to hear people in charge of India eGovernment framework saying that they have been working since few years on their program with was computer-based only, and now they are realizing that the mobile revolution is here, and they have to adapt to it, and integrate the mobile dimension. In all the conferences I have attended during the last two years, I was always surprised to see people working in such projects, yet overlooking the mobile channel. So things are moving forward slowly, because there is still work to do to demonstrate the full potential of mobile technologies. For now, it strikes me to see people in the e-government session focusing almost only on SMS applications, and mobile banking, even if this is excluding all those who cannot read and write, or those who can read and write languages not supported by SMS/current mobile banking systems.

Unrelated to mobile, it was interesting to see the timeframe of e-government framework, going over multiple years before any services are provided to people.

Local Tour Operator

I have the impression that we are in a middle of paradigm shift moving from such framework to a more dynamic and quick concept which is open government data, where government focus more on releasing data, than developing services, which can be done by third parties. Releasing data can be far quicker, and create far more innovative services, that a more formal closed e-government framework. but this is not the topic of this post !

There were also very good talks and use-cases on m-health systems. One particularly impressive was from the India Institute of Public Health. It is about setting up an infectious disease surveillance system using mobile phones to replace paper transmission from field workers to public authorities. What is impressive about the system is that not only it demonstrated that the time between detection of an infectious disease outbreak and reaction of public health authorities is reduced a lot, limiting the impact of the outbreak on population, but it also demonstrated that the time saved on paper reports, plus the money saved on different costs (transport, postages, etc.) makes the system globally sustainable. For those interested, i put online the proceedings and some of the talks.

Another point, I was impressed by the explosion of mobile penetration in India. in March 2004, there were 33.7 millions of subcriber. 6 years later, 565 Millions ! over 50% of the population of India ! The forecast are even more impressive: 1 billion of subscriber by 2014 ! other interesting info: the forecast are that 50% of the subscribers will have a smartphone by 2015 ! These numbers are the reason why TRAI is willing to move wuickly on enabling a mobile ecosystem, and ensuring that lots of applications will be delivered on the mobile channel.

All in one, this forum was a nice initiative, and it was also a very interesting conference. Talks and speakers, in a vast majority, were very interesting, and i learnt about lots of initiatives in health, agriculture, and government, which all were very inspiring. I hope this will give ideas to other regulatory authorities to take a proactive role in promoting the development of mobile application for social development.

What I took away from the event in terms of greatest interest to the Web Foundation:

1. It is critical to promote the use of more advanced technologies such as mobile web and voice compared to traditional SMS
2. It is critical to promote the use of open standards, particularly on voice technologies, accessibility, and mobile web content and mobile web applications development
3. It is critical to investigate language issues, particularly on mobile browser, as this is a major barrier now
4. On a different topic, it would be interesting to conduct comparison and analysis between initiatives on open government data, and e-government framework: pro and cons, complementarity and so on

Stephane

I feel that this event was successful for many reasons. First, it was helpful to gather in the same room people from different background, and to have discussions across the combination of expertise areas. At the end, I had a far better understanding of the issues facing organizations like MARP or Sahel Eco, including what they are doing in the field, their needs in terms of information exchange, and so on.  How the Web might help them also became a little more clear.

The second point that impressed me was the positive energy coming out of all the presentations. We heard about stories of community radio and their roles, we heard about the burkina-ntic network, and all the activities of the impressive people from Yam Pukri. We heard about all the projects IICD is running in Mali and Burkina and their impact. Few other people from ICT companies like Softnet-Burkina were also very interesting. In the agroforestry domain, We also heard about the Africa Regreening Initiative, and what innovative farmers are doing and their incredible results. This was really refreshing. In Europe, or western countries in general, it is very rare to read or watch positive stories about Africa. It is always about disaster, starvation, wars, etc. But there are incredible stories, impressive successes, and very enthusiastic organizations and people, and we can see that energy in action, very much like what I witnessed in Kenya, or Uganda when I visited these countries with Tim last november. This is very exciting !

Obviously, this was just a first step, and we have to move from observation to action now. But this visit and this workshop were very positive, and very promising for the future. I will summarize in a future post, the different action areas we identified, and our next steps.

Ps: we also published all the photo and video we took during the whole week.

Stephane

I’m starting to investigate the business side of ICT4D projects. Identifying the business model is (or should be!) obviously a critical dimension for most ICT4D projects. Indeed, that’s the study of how to make services at least self-sustainable, or to provide revenue to the provider.

Identifying the cost is the easier part. There are different kinds of costs.  Globally you can split them in two major categories, related to the development, deployment and bootstrapping costs, and to the operation of the services. IMHO, it is also relatively easy to find donors funds and grants to cover the development/bootstrapping costs, as far as the proposal identifies the operation costs, and provide a model to cover them. Evaluating these costs is not the issue and there are some hints in the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development roadmap, but how to cover them is the right question. There are two sides to consider, the business side, and the technological side, which is the implementation of the business side through the technology used in the project.

Concerning the business side, i believe we can split the investigation in two parts:

• Commercial Models
• Non-commercial Models

Commercial Models

What I call a commercial model is a model which has the goal to get money, directly and indirectly, out of the service operation. Direct models are those where users pay for the service directly. Indirect models are those where the money comes from a third party (not the users).

Concerning the direct model case, the tricky questions are to know first if people are willing to pay for the service. Does the service, in essence, provide a real, valuable impact to people so that they are willing to pay for it? Then how much does the service help them or save in terms of time/money? Identifying the net gain, and thus defining the right price, related also to the disposable income is critical.

Concerning the indirect model case, there are different options. The most common one is advertisement. They are all kinds of possible options for ads, in all technologies: ring back tones, SMS banners, Web banners, etc. But who is paying for these ads? How? Is there  risk of collusion between the ads and the service itself? Is there an example of someone successfully or unsuccessfully implementing such a model in an ICT4D project? There are options other than ads such as using the customers’ network to make surveys, or to sell information about e.g. customers interests and search terms and so on. Here again, for me, this is more intellectual discussions than concrete examples.

Non-Commercial Models

What I call a non-commercial model is a model where the integration of an ICT service has the objective to increase the efficiency or the coverage of a particular non-ICT activity, typically the provision of a public service such as agriculture extension or education. In such case, the principle is to demonstrate how the operational costs can produce more efficient services based on similar costs already existing. These non-commercial models are the ones that have to be considered when developing pilots which aims is to be adopted by public authorities, and which goal is to deliver public services. How to measure efficiency of a particular service, how to measure the impact per $ invested in two different cases are not easy questions.

User Costs and technical implementations

In all cases, it is critical to take also into account the costs induced at the user level. Typically, the cost of sending SMS, or placing a phone call, or using data services. In case of non-commercial models, where the aim is to provide public services, there are technical solutions to cover these costs for some technologies (a free phone number, call-back…) and some regulatory solutions too.

On another side, it is also critical to understand how the technological choices impact the relevance of the different business models. In direct commercial models, it should be transparent, or at least very easy for the user to pay for the service. In indirect models, it should also be easy for entrepreneurs to get the money back, without too much hurdles, and requirements for advanced business deals with big companies (like e.g. mobile operator).

Here again, these aspects (user costs, technical implementations) are partly covered in the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development roadmap.

To summarize, I’m realizing these days that while this is topic that is discussed in all the conferences and discussions I’m participating in, I cannot find valuable literature references, or project examples that could help me compiling a list of options with cases to illustrate them. In this post, i tried to develop a skeleton of a resource that could be helpful, lots of questions, and ideas, but no real meat, no methodology or examples. It is for now an empty skeleton, and it is at a level where all the discussions are happening today IMHO. What’s needed is illustration, cases, studies. I’m sure some of you have done studies in this scope, or are running projects in which you considered this question. I would be happy to get feedback, either publicly here, or privately (boyera[at]webfoundation.org), and start developing this work from field experience.

Steph