Mobile phone: a "silver bullet" to disrupt the development objective?

Harsha Liyanage, Principal Consultant, eNovation, UK; Managing Director, Sarvodaya-Fusion, Sri Lanka.

The development objective of traditional stakeholders such as philanthropic donors, policy makers, NGOs and activists, is to raise the living standards of those living below the poverty line, those who live in low infrastructure environments, less educated and often illiterate and subject to violation of their human rights.

Mobile phones are very exciting and promising. Exciting because it is modern and high-tech and promising because it is capable of proposing speedy answers (m-services) to multiple problems such as health, agriculture, commerce etc. There is evidence that the mobile phone can support the global effort to control malaria, control pests and diseases in agriculture and facilitate upmarket linkages for micro-entrepreneurs. But is this the magical moment the development world has dreamed of for generations? 

Mobile phone technology is however admittedly powerful but also disruptive! 4.1 billion mobile phones are currently in worldwide circulation providing a sound hardware platform. It needs only products and services that people can adapt to their needs. ‘m-products’ provide the hope that they can be developed and deployed to achieve the long awaited development objective of empowering 2.6 billion people earning less than $2 a day. 

How realistic is this hope however? And what are consequences of this technology?

FarmerNet (www.farmer.lk) is a mobile SMS based trading platform prototyped by Sarvodaya-Fusion (www.fusion.lk), the ICT4D arm of Sarvodaya (a leading NGO) of Sri Lanka. This experimental product launched in 2009, has two objectives, a) to understand the appropriateness of the mobile technology to the development equation, and b) to understand the feasibility of managing it as a sustainable social enterprise in a competitive market environment. As the experiment continues, it provides some unique perspectives stated briefly below.

Sarvodaya Fusion has also developed a Social Impact Assessment tool to measure the impact of ICTs on individuals. In collaboration with its expert partner (eNovation: www.enovation4d.co.uk), Fusion has designed five indicators to measure the journey one may travel towards empowerment, with the support of technology (‘Theory of Change’) these being:

1. Exposure to technology; 
2. Motivation to use it; 
3. Skill development to handle the technology; 
4. Exploration of the technology (by the user) to broader applications, and finally; 
5. Application of the Technology to realise development goals

Initial trials with six village communities indicate that, the first three steps are feasible and at a reasonable speed. Farmers get excited about FarmerNet and are easily motivated to try it, as they already have access to phones. But the first hurdle encountered at their level of skills has been to SMS text messages. Adult farmers, including women, are not familiar with SMS text messaging and struggle to learn. External support to build their skills has been a requirement. 

FarmerNet has proved that mobile phone based applications can depend on the alternative ‘local skills’ development models, such as support of the early adapters of the technology - the young generation (sons and daughters of famers), to teach and support their adult counterparts in the same family or village. Nevertheless, it does not entirely displace the requirement of help desks, extension support and technology support that resides outside of the local environment. 

Even after ‘Skill development’, more alarmingly, the toughest challenge encountered has been with the ‘Application’ of the technology for development goal reaching. This required “fire-fighting” on multiple frontiers. For generations, these poor farmers depended on small community of trading partners (Middlemen), with multiple financial ties with Moneylenders and trusted relationships. Poor farmers are generally less educated and more exposed to enormous economic and livelihood vulnerabilities. They are not free, to switch technological solutions nor adventure into a new world of opportunities. 

This problem scenario leads to the next major challenge posed by this disruptive mobile phone technology innovation – ‘manageability and control’ of the technology!

Development practitioners working with the “bottom of the pyramid” communities seek holistic results that include social returns in addition to economic returns.

E. F. Schumacher described in his “small is beautiful” publication, that for a technology to be appropriate for the poor, it must have an innate ability to address the issue of equity, gender balance, ability to generate local incomes, be manageable locally. Research evidence supports that mobile phone technology can reasonably facilitate gender equity, and support local income generation (e.g. micro-enterprises). But where is the manageability and control? 

If national development organisations such as Sarvodaya find it difficult to control this technology, imagine what it might be for local communities? The short lifespan of hardware, software and mobile technology platforms continue to show it is not in the hands of local or national boundaries of developing countries alone and most certainly not where the “development objective” is focused upon.

The race to capture the next four billion, at the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BOP) market place, fuel the need for mobile operators to build partnerships between unlikely partners – in order to supplement the value chain of m-services. This often includes partnerships with development sector stakeholders at the global level as well as at national levels. This, in turn, opens up new opportunities for development sector stakeholders to build up win-win partnerships with for-profit mobile sector operators, who hold the leavers of manageability and control of the technology. Nevertheless, this requires rethinking of new business models, where holistic objectives can be respected beyond profit motives.   If this cannot be met then the disruptive power of mobile phone technology might be the “silver bullet” to disrupt the development objective!

Harsha Liyanage

18/05/2011