Erik Hersman, has recently created a site called Africa Signals. And it is not just a site: it is a wiki site. The site aims to collect and share mobile phone and Internet rates across Africa. (I have found about this site here)
Now. In my experience, one of the many reasons that makes poor a poor farmer is coping with a non-functioning market (I said it two posts ago). So I can just imagine how helpful would be to have a tool to make market work better.
Creating a wiki page to collect and share the price of one particular agricultural product in one particular time in one particular place would be great. But succeeding in integrating such a site with the mobile phone network would be even better. How to do this? The government of Rwanda is moving in the very same direction without creating a wiki site. (It is difficult to imagine a government managing wikis). But bureaucracy is not something we usually associate with the words efficiency and effectiveness, especially in poor countries. And in any case we do not really need a government to make a site like this work.
Just think about a wiki site collecting and sharing data through sms. Actually Twitter, without the wiki interface, is doing it right now. So, think about a farmer receiving a message with updated price information the night before market day and, on this information, taking his/her decisions. And think about a farmer sending via sms the price information to the wiki site after leaving the market.
We can imagine the farmer to pay for the sms he or she receives and, on the contrary, we can imagine sending sms back to the site to be completely free. And we can imagine some volunteers to be the administrators of the site (just like Wikipedia).
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
In a report published today, Oxfam predicts that by 2015 the average number of people affected by climate-related disasters every year will increase by 54%. The projection is based on a forecasting model that uses data, collected by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, going back to 1900. Oxfam’s researchers have noticed that climate-related disasters have been increasing in frequency and severity during the last years so they expect that by 2015 375 million people (or 132 million more than in 2007) will be affected. Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam International’s Executive Director, said that
The humanitarian system works as if it’s a global card game dealing out aid randomly, not based on people’s needs. The response is often fickle – too little, too late and not good enough. The world barely copes with the current level of disasters. A big increase in the numbers of people affected will overwhelm it unless there is fundamental reform of the system that puts those in need at its centre.
And this supposedly happens while NGOs are downsizing their budgets because of the crisis. According to Le Monde, many organizations have seen a significant decrease in private donation during 2009. More deadly predictions on the way?
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
The idea to use mobile phones (here and here) to help economic development in the most remote corners of the world is fascinating and definitely smart. For one thing, mobile phones have already reached the Bottom Billion. In 2007 there were 45 subscribers per 100 inhabitants in the developing countries. That means that we can now expect to have one mobile in every family. Everywhere. As well in communities where services like water, electricity, hospitals, schools or transportation are still far away.
What poor people mostly need are functioning institutions. And market is one of these. If market is not working, farmers will pay higher prices for what they buy and got less money for what they sell. Moreover they could buy or sell at the wrong time and possibly in the wrong place. In the words of the government of Rwanda,
the success of these farmers has been greatly affected by lack of access to pricing information. Many times, farmers speculate what crops to grow and what prices to charge at harvest. Some farmers depend on middlemen to dictate the prices and in most cases the latter exploit the former. For any farmer to earn a decent living from agriculture, easy access to information on market prices is of paramount importance.
Making information flows on mobile phones could
empower farmers to enable them make more informed market pricing decisions and ultimately more successful farming.
The idea of mobile banking goes in the same direction: making a service so critical for development accessible to almost everyone. That will not end poverty, but will probably make the task easier.
Thursday, 16 April 2009
r-bloggers.com Simply Statistics Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Email: Francesco.Bailo@uts.edu.au
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