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Wednesday, May 01, 2013 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Meet The Entrepreneur Working To Challenge Nokia, Blackberry And Samsung In Africa

Source: Forbes
Alpesh Patel, a Ugandan-born entrepreneur, served as director of sales in Africa for Motorola before quitting the American telecommunications giant to launch Mi-Fone, an African mobile phone brand.
TAGS:mobile applications, mobile phones, technology
Monday, April 15, 2013 — Sub-Saharan Africa

New Dalhberg Study shows how the Internet will drive development in Africa

Source: Press Release
Despite widespread agreement on the web’s potential to transform lives and reduce poverty, there is little information about how policymakers and investors should capitalize on this potential.
TAGS:mobile applications, technology
Thursday, January 24, 2013 — No Region Specified

Mobile health: donors should follow, not lead

Source: The Guardian
No more preempting local demand with substandard products, the mHealth sector needs donors willing to learn from local actors and invest in sustainable business models.
TAGS:health care, healthcare technology, mobile applications, mobile phones, public health, telecommunications
Wednesday, January 09, 2013 — Asia Pacific

S’pore firm and Mongolian government create ‘Medical Silk Road’ to improve healthcare with mobile technology

Source: SGEntrepreneurs
The Mongolian government has partnered with Singapore’s Borderless Healthcare Group to improve rural healthcare through the use of mobile technology. The initiative is dubbed the ‘Medical Silk Road’.
TAGS:health care, mobile applications, rural healthcare delivery, telemedicine
Thursday, October 18, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Handheld Poverty Fighters: Building the Killer Apps of Global Prosperity

Source: GOOD
Among many in the development space, connective technologies are either the cheat code to global prosperity or a false prophet obscuring the real challenges effecting the world’s poor. Officials as high-ranking as Secretary Hillary Clinton have called the spread of cheap cell phones and laptops a driving force against poverty even as many of their most promising applications are failing to deliver on scale.
TAGS:mobile applications, poverty alleviation, social impact
Thursday, October 04, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

How to boost adoption of mobile health care, by report

Source: The Guardian Nigeria
MORE doctors in developed and emerging markets have identified adoption of mobile technology in healthcare as an inevitable means to boost health care services.
TAGS:health care, mobile applications
Monday, September 24, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

LendmeMula introduces ZimSwitch enabled MulaConnect card

Source: TechZim
One of the issues with the LendmeMula micro-credit service that we have covered here before, is that so far borrowers have had to wait for up to 24 hours before they could access the borrowed money in their bank accounts. The money had to be transferred by Lendme to their bank accounts. This made the process somewhat slow, and where a borrower did not have a bank ATM card, they had to pray they could access their money before the banks closed their doors.
TAGS:financial inclusion, microcredit, mobile applications
Tuesday, September 18, 2012 — Asia Pacific

Grameen Foundation and eBay Foundation – A Mobile Commerce Approach to Poverty Alleviation

Source: Huffington Post
Recognizing the opportunity offered by this technology, Grameen Foundation and eBay Foundation began working together this summer to build solutions that address market challenges facing microentrepreneurs in Indonesia.
TAGS:microenterprise, mobile applications
Tuesday, September 18, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa’s best tech minds to meet at Indaba

Source: IT News Africa
Three years on, in every way that counts, Tech4Africa continues to be the premier mobile, web and emerging technology event, and this year’s conference promises to be no exception, congregating some of the best minds in ICT today and bringing a greater than ever breadth and depth of tech talks.
TAGS:conferences, mobile applications, technology
Thursday, August 23, 2012 — No Region Specified

An App For Boosting Social Enterprise Retailers

Source: Forbes
Here’s a good idea: Boosting social enterprise through a useful app. Specifically, one that helps like-minded customers find triple bottom line retailers in their area. Consumers who want to patronize such enterprises get easy access to information they probably wouldn’t know about otherwise. And businesses have an effective way to market their wares.
TAGS:mobile applications, retail, social enterprise
Tuesday, August 21, 2012 — Asia Pacific

Rural banks partner with telcos to boost microfinance

Source: The Manila Times
Rural banks will soon have their own set of “killer apps” to better compete with bigger banks and, more importantly, expand their microfinance services in the Philippines.
TAGS:financial inclusion, Microfinance, mobile applications, mobile banking
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 — No Region Specified

With $2M from Eric Schmidt, biNu brings smartphone apps to dumb phones

Source: GigaOM
Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures is leading a $2 million Series A round in biNu, an Australian startup that enables feature phones to run cloud-based smartphone apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google. BiNu highlights the opportunity in developing markets where smartphone penetration is low.
TAGS:investment fund, mobile applications, mobile phones
Tuesday, July 17, 2012 — South Asia

Poor women to get mobile feeds on their financial info

Source: The Hindu Business Line
Poor women in Andhra Pradesh could soon get access to their financial transactions on mobile. About 90 lakh women members of self help Groups (SHGs) in Andhra Pradesh can look forward to this facility, thanks to a mobile book-keeping project being launched by the State Government.
TAGS:Microfinance, mobile applications
Thursday, June 21, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Mobile Money: How Cell Phones Can Fight Hunger in the Sahel

Source: Huffington Post
Some five billion people worldwide were using mobile phones in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union, with the strongest growth taking place in developing countries. Africa is the fastest growing mobile market. In the past six years, the industry estimates that the number of subscribers has grown nearly 20 percent each year. At this rate, we can expect to see some 735 million cell phone users in Africa by the end of 2012.
TAGS:mobile applications, nutrition
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Grameen Foundation, KfW and CARE's Access Africa Fund Invest in World's First 100% Mobile Microfinance Institution

Source: PR Newswire/Market Watch
Grameen Foundation, KfW and CARE's Access Africa Fund announced they have each purchased a 25 percent stake in Musoni Kenya, the first microfinance institution to provide financial services to the poor entirely via mobile phones. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, it provides microloans largely to people who are underserved by the formal financial sector. This investment will help Musoni Kenya grow its operations, deepen its penetration in rural areas where financial inclusion is lowest, and pave the way for it to receive a license to accept savings deposits from the Central Bank of Kenya.
TAGS:Microfinance, mobile applications
Thursday, May 10, 2012 — South Asia

New Apps for the Bottom Billion

Source: Technology Review
When it comes to mobile communications, there's still a lot of room for innovation at the bottom. In Bangalore, India, researchers from the University of Toronto and Microsoft are now imagining new business models for the world's poorest phone owners by adapting a little-known protocol that can receive pictures as bitmapped text messages. The technology could readily be used in the roughly 1.5 billion low-end Nokia and Samsung phones in circulation.
TAGS:mobile applications, social business
Tuesday, April 03, 2012 — Latin America

In Chile’s Slums, A Lesson in How to Make Apps for Social Good

Source: The Washington Post
How many of the hundreds of thousands of mobile phone applications seek to do truly great things, such as lift people out of poverty or improve health care for the poor?
TAGS:Base of the Pyramid, mobile applications, social impact
Friday, February 17, 2012 — Sub-Saharan Africa

The Quiet Revolution in Social Impact

Source: PandoDaily
There are currently 30 million African migrants who have left their home countries to find work elsewhere. They support more than 300 million people in their home countries, remitting essential food and goods, and in aggregate represent more than $10b in annual economic activity. This is an economy without an infrastructure, however, relying on informal channels and bribes to function. South African entrepreneur Suzana Moreira is working to change that. Her startup moWozauses SMS to help African migrants order, pay for, and select a place for parcel pickup.
TAGS:Base of the Pyramid, mobile applications, social impact, startup
Monday, February 13, 2012 — No Region Specified

The Future of mHealth: Mobile Phones Improve Care in Developing World

Source: Forbes
People in developing nations depend on mobile phones to access health services and prevent disease, as mobile technology creates a platform for improving healthcare in remote, underserved areas.
TAGS:mobile applications, public health
Wednesday, February 08, 2012 — No Region Specified

Are Mobile Solutions Overhyped?

Source: CNN
Are mobiles just another high-tech solution to what are essentially systemic and deeply rooted problems? Are mobile solutions for combating global poverty overhyped?
TAGS:mobile applications, mobile phones, poverty alleviation
Monday, January 31, 2011 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Booting Up Tanzania With Help From Google

Source: Fast Company
When Joshua Stern, a graduate of Stanford with a degree in computer science, served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania from 2006 to 2007, one thing soon became clear. "The major takeaway there," he tells Fast Company , "was that the best development work being done was being done by these local groups, community-based organizations." The small groups were often the most effective--yet they had no web presence, no effective way to communicate with other small NGOs or to raise f...
TAGS:consumer products, mobile applications

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