Win $10,000 in USAID’s Mobiles for Development in Asia Award

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Do you have a mobile service, product, app, or add-on that is being used to address a development challenge in Asia? Do you want the opportunity to promote your mobile solution to a broader audience of development professionals? If so, apply for the Mobiles for Development in Asia Award!

The Mobiles for Development in Asia Award seeks to identify and highlight promising mobile services, apps, and other innovative uses of mobile technologies. Specifically, the purpose is to recognize Asia-based institutions and their M4D work that have the potential to impact development outcomes in climate change, food security, health, governance, biodiversity, and fisheries. While applications from any country in Asia are welcome emphasis will be placed on organizations and applications with deployments in Southeast Asia.

Key areas of focus are: climate change, food security, health, biodiversity, governance, and fisheries. Applications are due on November 14, 2014 and the complete rules and award criteria can be found here.

The strongest applicants will be invited to present their work at Mobiles for Development Forum Asia 2015 January 20-21, 2015 in Bangkok, Thailand. The Forum will be attended by USAID staff from across Asia, other donors, NGOs, technology companies, mobile network operators, and others.

Up to three finalists will receive a paid trip to Bangkok, including economy- class flights, up to three nights of lodging, and three days of per diem. One winner will receive $10,000 towards further learning and understanding in mobiles for development.

Can Mobile Technologies Solve Energy Poverty in India?

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Geetanjali is a 20-year-old Indian girl; she comes from a poor family; and her dream is to open her own designer shop when she graduates from college. Thanks tomobile enabled electricity, her dream may come true much sooner that she expected.

Energy Poverty in India

Geetanjali lives in a slum near Bangalore, one of India’s biggest cities; and, like 75 million people throughout the country, her family has had to struggle with energy poverty for years. Where they live, there are actually electric lines; but their house was built without a permit and they could not get connected to the grid.

And, even though they could have accessed it, they would probably have experienced 8-10 hours of electricity cuts every, as it is often the case in the poor neighborhoods. In India, experts say that under-electrification hits about 80 million people.

Geetanjali’s parents do not have much money, and up to last year they would use kerosene lanterns to address their lighting needs after dark, whether it was for cooking, studying, sewing, or simply for eating. However, kerosene light was inefficient, lasted no more than one hour and caused strong indoor pollution. For Geetanjali, it made it very hard to study long hours after dark and in the longer run it would have been a major hurdle to her success.

Of course, her parents could have purchased car batteries. Battery-powered light is often brighter, and it would have enabled them to charge small devices too. For them, it was not the right solution, though. As fuel price has constantly increased over the past decade, car batteries have a cost too, and to some households, it can account for 30 percent of their spending. Besides, they would have had to go regularly to the charging plant and leave the batteries there for two days, which they thought was not so convenient.

Geetanjali’s parents wanted to go solar, just like their neighbors did a few years before. But, however convinced they were about the benefits of solar home system, they had to wait until October 2013 before they could switch to a solar solution when this was made possible by an innovative energy company called Simpa.

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Selling Solar Home System Like Cell Phones

Simpa was started in 2011 by two dynamic American entrepreneurs who strived to expand the access to off-grid solar solutions to the base of the Indian economic pyramid. To achieve this ambitious objective, they came up with a simple idea, which was to replicate the success of India’s mobile revolution in the energy sector.

In India, there are 850 million cell phones throughout the country, and it took less than ten years to reach both the richest and the poorest. According to Michael Marcharg, Simpa’s co-founder, the key factors to this incredible success were the fall in handset prices but also the pay-as-you-go model, which has enabled the lowest-income people to adapt their consumption to their actual revenues.

For Marchag, many disadvantaged households actually have the money to pay for the ongoing costs of a solar home system; but often they cannot make the upfront investment. They need time to raise the required funds and as their revenues are highly variable, they need to be able to pay as they go. This is why Simpa worked on a software solution that allows both progressive payment and flexible pricing.

Indian people can therefore get Simpa’s solar home system for a $20-40 initial payment. To have electricity, the users have to purchase prepaid cards of 50, 100 and 500 rupees, on which there is a code. With this simple code, they are able to activate the whole system and generate as much power as they prepaid for.

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By purchasing these energy credits, Simpa’s customers do not pay for the light only; they also pay down the cost of the product itself. To most people, it takes them three to five years before they can reimburse the full purchase price; but once it is done, they own the solar home system and can enjoy free electricity for 10+ years.

For low-income households, this progressive payment model makes all the difference, and it is not surprising that Simpa expects to reach more than 60,000 Indian households by 2015. Taking the example of Geetanjali, her parents could indeed afford to pay outright for Simpa’s solar home system; and, for 100 rupees only, they can now get electricity for one or two weeks in a row.

For them, life is much easier. They can power their home with 25-50 watts lamps, but also charge a cell phone, a fan, a mixer or even a television.

As for Geetanjali, she can now practice painting and sewing until midnight, maximizing her chances to achieve her dream!

How SMS Text Messages Improve the Reading Outcomes in Papua New Guinea

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The aim of the SMS Story research project was to determine if daily mobile phone text message stories and lesson plans would improve children’s reading in Papua New Guinea (PNG) elementary schools. The research was a controlled trial in which half of the teachers received text messages for twenty weeks and half did not.

The stories and lesson plans were designed to introduce children to reading English and followed an underlying phonics and key word based methodology. Teachers in the trial received a cartoon poster explaining how to use the daily text messages and received a total of 100 text message stories and 100 related text message lessons for two academic terms. They did not receive any in-service training.

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Baseline Start Point

Research was conducted in rural elementary schools in two provinces, Madang and Simbu, and has involved a baseline reading assessment, mid-point lesson and classroom observations and an end-point reading assessment. At baseline, there was no statistically significant difference between the active and control groups, with respect to school characteristics and children’s reading assessment results.

The baseline results showed that many children had limited or no reading (for example, half of the children could not read any high frequency English words). At the time of enrollment, all participating schools had very few reading books, if any, available in the classroom.

Experiment Results

On average, across both sets of schools, children’s reading did improve over the two terms with children at SMS Story schools improving significantly more. Random visits to active schools during the intervention period showed that most teachers were actively engaging with the content sent to them as text messages. This demonstrated that the SMS technology (using FrontlineSMS delivered over the Digicel mobile network) was effective in reaching teachers.

There was a large change in the reported use of teaching strategies promoted by SMS Story lesson plans and poster (for example, 42 teachers in active schools (n=51) against 12 teachers in control schools (n=51) reported “reading stories to the children every day”).

At the end-point reading assessment, there was a statistically significant difference between the results of the control and active groups, with the active group performing better than the control group across four of the five reading skills tested. This improvement is seen in both grade 1 and grade 2 and with girls and boys.

Children who did not receive the SMS Story were approximately twice as likely to be unable to read a single word of three sub – tests (decodable words, sight words and oral reading). In other words the intervention almost halved the number of children who could not read anything compared with the control schools.

Therefore, the text messages to teachers improved students’ reading ability in decoding, fluency, reading familiar high frequency words and reading phonetically correct nonsense words. The research did not find a statistically significant improvement in reading comprehension and generally children showed low reading comprehension skills in both grades and little progression between grade 1 and 2.

Other Results

The trial also found a strong negative impact on students’ reading caused by the absence of the classroom teacher to attend provincial trainer-directed training. Unsurprisingly the students of these teachers performed poorly on the final reading assessment. Importantly SMS Story does not require a teacher to be absent from a class for training.

Recommendations

As a control led trial, this intervention has a rigorous research base. The results demonstrate that appropriate use of mobile phone technology can have a positive impact upon educational outcomes in resource-constrained settings.

In PNG, it is recommended that the methodology of sending daily text messages to teachers be pursued further. In other countries, it is recommended that trials be undertaken as controlled trials so that statistically significant data can be generated.

SMS Story was funded by the Australian Government, through a research grant from the Economic and Public Sector Program. The project was designed and managed by Voluntary Services Overseas, in partnership with the Department of Education.