I was recently interviewed by Education Week, the leading education newspaper in the USA. The article, Mobile Devices Address Technology Equity in Africa, is well written and provides an overview of some of the interesting mobile learning projects in Africa.
For a good roundup, also check out Mobile learning in developing countries in 2012: What’s Happening? by Mike Trucano of the World Bank (follow @WBedutech).
I was interviewed for the November edition of City Views — “your free Cape Town central city newspaper” — about the importance of affordable connectivity for ideas to spread and innovation to flourish (drawing on the ideas of Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson that I spoke about in my TEDx Stellenbosch presentation). Pull quote:
Lots of innovation is happening totally under the radar – in people’s garages, in backyards, in shacks – but these are all pretty small-scale and the lessons aren’t really communicated out. If you can provide a network to connect these people – help them research what others are doing, find that someone down the street who is working on the same thing – then good ideas can be amplifi ed and businesses scaled up. The glue of it all is cheap, reliable internet access.
The whole edition is dedicated to connectivity and creativity in Cape Town — it’s worth a read.
People, Connectedness and Mobiles: How the streets of the mega city will innovate is a presentation I gave at TEDx Stellenbosch on 29 July. The theme of the day was imagining Africa as a vast mega city. The transcript and slides are on the mLab SA website.
Below is the presentation that I gave at the Girl Geek Dinner in Cape Town, 4 May, about women, mobiles (mwomen) and exciting possibilities.
In 2004 I attended a screening of Shake Hands with the Devil, a documentary about General Romeo Dallaire who headed up the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Dallaire was at the screening and discussed his experiences afterwards during a Q&A session. When asked how he thought Africa could become a more peaceful and prosperous continent, he flatly replied: women. He believed that if women were more empowered, and had more prominent positions in government, and that their role as breadwinners, primary caregivers and family supporters were recognised and supported, Africa would be a more peaceful place.
This really struck me. It was something that I had always seen to be important, but until this army general said it so plainly, I hadn’t really believed in the criticalness of women empowerment. Since that night, I do believe it. And so it is an honour to be speaking here tonight, and to be a part of such a great movement: Girl Geeks.
In the last few months there has been a strong focus on women’s empowerment for a different reason: economic gain. An opinion piece published on Bloomberg last year (titled Secret to Rebuilding the World’s Economy by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon) describes how the world’s leading companies are beginning to see women as the next big growth opportunity.
“Investing in women is proven to be smart economics,” said Beth Brooke, Ernst & Young’s global vice chair of public policy, sustainability and stakeholder engagement. “Women as consumers represent one of the largest ‘emerging markets’ in the world next to China and India,” Brooke said, pointing out that women control more than 80 percent of household spending decisions. The focus now is on women as entrepreneurs, employees and consumers, all of which offer unique business opportunities for companies agile enough to take advantage of them.
It turns out that women are the key to rebuilding the global economy. The article says that “exploiting — in the most positive sense — the talents of half the world’s population is a business imperative.”
To me this seems obvious, but apparently it isn’t. More striking than the figures is the apparently new insight that women matter economically. It’s taken reports from Goldman Sachs Group and Ernst & Young, amongst others, to highlight this issue.
Professors from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and researchers from the Korea Labor Institute recently interviewed executives to explore whether a foreign corporation could boost profits by hiring women from the local labor markets where it operates, particularly in regions where women have traditionally been excluded.
They found that firms which hire and promote women to positions of authority enjoy greater profitability, a gain seen in both multinational and local companies. This competitive advantage was especially true at companies that hired women at senior levels.
Who would have thought?! Is anyone surprised by this? And of course, excluding women is costly business:
The United Nations has said that constricting women’s opportunities in Asian and Pacific nations is costing those regions more than $40 billion annually.
OK, so thanks to a few major consulting firms and the UN, we now know that women are good for economic growth. Regardless of whether equal opportunities for men and women is the right thing to do, it is apparently the most profitable thing to do. And like it or not, maybe that is the reason for women finally being included in economic activities.
But what about women and technology? (This is a Girl Geek Dinner after all!) Well, in the context of what I’ve been speaking about, an interesting initiative was started last year called mWomen, which is about increasing mobile access to women in the developing world for their socio-economic advancement. It is a relatively new focus area within the mobile for development (M4D) space, inspired by a report Mobile & Women: A Global Opportunity, and driven by the GSMA Development Fund. The report identified a sizeable gender gap in mobile phone ownership in low- and middle-income countries: there are 300 million fewer female subscribers than male subscribers in these countries. Across all countries a woman is 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. By region this figure is:
Stemming from this gender gap are two key opportunities. Firstly, there is money to be made here: over the next five years women could account for two-thirds of all new subscribers. The gender gap represents $13B in unrealised per annum revenues for mobile network operators (MNOs).
Secondly, this is a chance to genuinely empower women, which has a series of positive knock-on effects. The report found that:
These are very powerful and exciting reasons to close the gender gap.
So why is there a gender gap? According to research shown in the report, the barriers to womens’ adoption of mobile phones are:
The GSMA Development Fund wants to address the gender gap so that both the economic and social benefits can be realised. As a target, it wants to halve the gender gap, from 300 million fewer women to 150 million, within three years. Apparently there has been significant interest shown by mobile operators, vendors, governments and NGOs to partner with the GSMA to fund and jointly deliver projects to close the gender gap in developing countries.
Of course there is a tension in such a programme between extracting the greatest possible profit from this new subscriber base while also ensuring that they enjoy the greatest possible social benefit from it. Commercial and social opportunities can work in opposites. So the question is: how to balance this tension and create programmes that are economically sustainable as well as genuinely uplifting for women. According to the report, examples of how to achieve this include:
Part of our mission is to creatively and effectively implement these actions, and to come up with others, and I think that there are many others.
Mobile is Africa’s great success story. The technology can genuinely empower women. It not only provides a mechanism for distributing information, but also for giving women a voice, and access to opportunities. Both of which have been denied women for far too long.
A project that I’ve lead over the last few years is Yoza Cellphone Stories. We publish short stories on MXit and a mobisite for teens and young adults to read. Remember, South Africa is “book-poor” but “mobile phone-rich”. We have 63,000 subscribers on MXit, 56% of which are female. Our stories are about romance, relationships, fashion and soccer. But they have social messages in them about issues such as AIDS, peer pressure and sexual abuse. And our readers are engaged enough to respond. An example is Sisterz 2: Hidden Danger, about a teen girl’s mother who hooks up with a boyfriend that keeps walking into the teen’s room while she’s getting changed. Throughout the story there is a tension that the mother’s boyfriend might abuse the daughter – a very common occurrence in this country. I urge you to spend a few minutes reading through all the comments on this chapter, where we asked whether maybe girls shouldn’t wear skimpy clothes because this is what causes men to get ideas (we use deliberately provocative prompts to get the readers talking). You see from the comments that this really struck a chord with our readers who, in a public forum, told their own creepy stepfather stories, or mothers who vowed to protect their children from such men. So I have personally seen the empowering effects of mobile phones.
I’ve recently joined the mLab Southern Africa, an incubator for mobile apps and content services. We have a focus on M4D and want to position ourselves as key players in the mWomen space. So if you have a mobile app or content idea – especially with a women focus, please come and talk to me.
I’d like to close by saying that we all need to be active players in developing solutions not just for women, but that empower women, and to work on removing the economic, social and cultural barriers to use of those technologies by women. There are very exciting possibilities ahead. Imagine what can happen when 300 million more people are connected and empowered to use the tools in ways that we have not yet thought of. I’m confident that we have the experience, the creativity and the initiative to make these possibilities happen.
This is my “brag pack” for 2010. Read the one for 2009.
What I did
As fellow for 21st century learning at the Shuttleworth Foundation I spent the year focusing on my m4Lit, or mobiles for literacy, project. It was launched in 2009 as a pilot initiative to explore whether teens in South Africa will read stories on their mobile phones. It turns out that they will, and based on the success of the pilot phase, I was given another Fellowship year.
Phase 2 of the project essentially involved i) offering more content (which our readers had asked for), ii) improving the user experience, iii) growing the user base, and iv) working towards sustainability.
The Praekelt Foundation was brought in to redevelop the content management system. The new system publishes to a mobisite, www.yoza.mobi, as well as onto MXit (before these were two separate systems), with additional features for interactivity such as easy commenting, voting and reviewing. I called the new offering Yoza Cellphone Stories, and assembled a freelance team to help me run it: top South African authors, an editor, graphic designer, moderators, and social media mavens.
Yoza was launched in August with fourteen stories. Today there are twenty-one stories — in English, Afrikaans and isiXhoza — and growing. Publication of new stories happens on the first of every month, with writing competitions happening all the time.
What worked
1. Publishing a broader range of content, such as soccer (Streetskillz), chick-lit (Sisterz) and teen issues (Confessions), in addition to the Kontax teen adventure series, was very well received. We also published five Shakespeare plays that are being studied by South African learners.
From 2009, our m-novels have collectively been read more than 60,000 times, our readers have posted more than 40,000 comments and submitted more than 10,000 competition entries!
Feedback from our readers is mostly positive: it is clear that we are educating as well as entertaining our readers.
“I must say: the story line it self is gripping, for somereasen everytime i read the kontax stories am kept at the erge of my sit. They are always grattifiying and i can hardly wait for another1. Thank you to the contax team cause for the 1st time in years i am reading again and i lov reading now, and am a guy so you i just dont lyk readin. So thank u again guyz you da best,” by Mphuthumi Busakwe, commenting on Kontax 5: The Sext Files.
“Gr8 story guyz.. I can’t wait 4 th nxt one 2 b published. I’m totally addicted! Love th fact tht Jayden nd Latoya r bck 2gethr. P.s Please give us more than one chapter a day,” by Ms. Makes, commenting on Sisterz 2: Hidden Danger.
“2 all soccer lovers,esp players,here r technical tips,grab them. Gud luck 2d team!” by Assah, commenting on Streetskillz 2: Silver’s Treasure.
It is also clear that there is an implicit conversation happening between the story — and sometimes the Yoza brand — and the readers. We create interesting and deliberately provocative scenarios in the stories to elicit reader opinion, and they usually respond in full force. An example is the comments on this Sisterz chapter (first read the WHAT DO YOU THINK comment prompt on that page).
2. The new interface is more user-friendly and easier to maintain. The actual CMS will be open-sourced.
3. Being on MXit in Kenya has given the project a greater profile.
4. Our stories have also been published on Young Africa Live on the Vodafone Live portal, as well as on MYMsta.mobi, loveLife’s mobile social network. Two high school teachers in the Western Cape have been in contact to say that they are using Yoza in the English classroom.
5. The READ Educational Trust runs an annual Readathon competition, and for the first time teens could enter the writing competition on Yoza via their mobile phones. We also ran writing competitions in conjunction with the Sunday Times and The Sowetan newspapers.
6. We have an open call for writers to contribute stories to Yoza. So far three have been published by authors from Lapa Publishers.
7. The m4Lit project received an Honourable Mention in the Stockholm Challenge award, and has received much media coverage, both locally and internationally, including from School Library Journal, Global Post, City Press, Argus, EP Herald, The Times, M&G Online, Rapport, West Cape News, ITWeb, Soulbeat, Drum Beat, Mashable, Puku, Idasa, GSMA Development Fund, Educational Technology Debate, 5fm, YFM, East Coast Radio and the Voice of the Cape.
Bottom line: Throughout the year I have said, and still say, that the cellphone is a powerful learning and communication tool. Instead of viewing it as a distraction and a hindrance to education, I believe it should be viewed as an essential part of the solution. It is the e-reader of Africa, a device onto which we can quickly and easily publish content to a wide audience, as well as through which young people are given a voice. The high-levels of engagement on Yoza has shown that participatory culture is alive and well in Africa, although here it is via MXit comments and not Youtube videos.
What still needs work
1) Yoza is not producing enough content to feed the mobile monster. Our readers want more and they want it now. They don’t like waiting for the first of the next month to get their next story fix.
2) There is a novelty factor to m-novels. The Yoza stories have not had as many reads and competition entries as the first Kontax stories. Although more comments are made on Yoza stories than before. This novelty-factor has forced us to continually try to improve the user experience and offer targeted content.
3) Sustainability is still not resolved. At this stage, m4Lit has not secured any revenue other than the Shuttleworth Foundation funding, although a number of positive conversations are currently underway for sponsorship.
Future plans
A clear business opportunity has emerged. Our readers are crying out for content about issues, e.g. teen pregnancy or how to handle money. Below is a word cloud of what our readers told us they want to read about. As you can see, it covers the full range of “issues”.
Non-profit organisations, governments and corporates want to communicate their messages to young people, e.g. healthy sexual behaviour or financial literacy. Yoza is the bridge between these groups.
We now have a platform to run Yoza, a team that can offer full-service mobile content campaigns, and a MXit footprint in South Africa and Kenya, with plans to grow into other countries. We are well-placed to transition from Yoza the “cellphone stories library” to Yoza the “mobile social marketing service”. A major milestone is to secure a big first sponsor.
We want young people across Africa to use their phones for reading, writing and learning – and believe that this can ultimately be a positive influence on their lives. In short: more content, more users, more participation, and greater impact.
Living out loud
As Fellows we are required to “live out loud”. On the topic of mlearning, I am a regular event speaker and panelist. I have presented on m4Lit at TEDx Soweto (watch video) and Tech4Africa, eLearning Africa in Zambia, and twice at the World Bank in Washington. I recently gave a thematic keynote at the Open Innovation Africa Summit in Kenya, and at the International Seminar on Mobile Technologies for Learning and Development in Barcelona.
I have been Interviewed by BBC’s Digital Planet as well as PRI’s The World, which is broadcast on National Public Radio in the USA. I regularly write for the M&G’s The Teacher. I am an advisor to the Department of Basic Education on its Guidelines on e-Safety in Schools.
Overall it has been an exciting year and I feel that the project has made a significant contribution to mlearning in Africa. I would like to thank the Shuttleworth Foundation. My three-year fellowship provided a wonderful opportunity to develop innovative projects and live out loud in the mlearning space. I look forward to seeing the work that was begun during my fellowship continue to grow.
On Monday I gave a keynote presentation at the Nokia Open Innovation Africa Summit in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya. The presentation looks at the Education for All goals and how mobile phones can support their achievement. Questions were asked in order to get the delegates into problem solving mode!
MoLeNET, a multi-year project in the UK to explore the role of mobile technologies on learners, teachers and institutions, has found the following benefits of mlearning:
According to the second MoLeNET report Modernising education and training: Mobilising technology for learning by Jill Attewell, Carol Savill-Smith, Rebecca Douch and Guy Parker: “handheld technologies proved to be very useful for work-based and vocational learners … and also helped to engage reluctant learners and those who have not previously thrived in educational environments.”
One manager at a college involved in the project had this to say: “It has been almost like having a new baby! The most wonderful, exciting journey and, at times, most tiring and frustrating. The afterglow is that we have created something that will continue to grow and become more stable and more embedded within our culture of delivery.”
Beyond the printed word is an article I wrote for the M&G’s The Teacher about digital reading resources … especially relevant during the month of September, which is literacy month in South Africa.
On the 22nd of August Yoza Cellphone Stories launched. Yoza is the flagship project of m4Lit, which I lead.
Here is the press release, the short description of the project, and some very last-minute guerilla user testing done the day before launch.
One week later we have 37,000 subscribers and 3,600 user comments have been posted. Not bad at all!
Book-Poor, but Mobile Phone-Rich? Look to M-Novels is a guest blog post that I wrote for the World Bank’s Educational Technology Debate. It is part of a broader debate around The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nick Carr, but seen within a developing country context. The m4Lit project is discussed.
Steven Vosloo 