Originally posted on the GBI Portal – Page 9

Agriculture, Mobile, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Kenya’s Safaricom upgrading mobile money service

Kenya’s leading telecom provider Safaricom announced on Tuesday that it was upgrading its mobile money platform M-PESA to a newer version, hoping to make doing financial transactions wirelessly a bit easier.

Safaricom set to upgrade their M-PESA platform. (image: biztechafrica.com)

According to the company, the new system “will enable users to make instant payments for corporate services such as insurance.

“The migration, to be done in the next few years, will enable M-Pesa users to instantly pay electricity bills,” the company said.

Other mobile service providers in the country have called on Safaricom to allow them access to the platform, and have repeatedly said they would be willing to pay royalties to the company. Safaricom has thus far refused.

“It will also save customers inconveniences such as disconnections that occur as the current platform reconciles the transactions,” the company continued, adding that the new service will reduce the time it takes to make payments on bills.

“It takes 48 hours for payments made to Kenya Power, for instance, to reflect on the electricity distributor’s systems, while those to the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) take 76 hours,” the company added.

The new service will also provide users the ability to use the mobile money platform to pay for items online instantly, with a balance being reduced with every purchase, instead of having to be forced to wait until payment clears.

Safaricom also added that in order to reduce costs, part of the M-Pesa servers in Germany will be relocated to Kenya in order to improve “the reliability of the mobile money platform and cut down on overheads”.

Joseph Mayton

March 21, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Can Video Instruction Improve Education Quality in Low-Resource Schools? 7 Important Lessons from India

Photo Credit: www.popsci.com

If education quality is largely dependent on the teaching capacity of educators, wouldn’t integrating video instruction from expert teachers into low-resource schools’ curricula seem like a good idea?

Digital StudyHall (DSH), a program that has pioneered Facilitated Video Instruction for primary school education in low-resource settings since 2005, might seem revolutionary to the improvement of education quality in theory. However, a team of researchers from the University of Washington and the StudyHall Educational Foundation recently completed a two-year study in government primary schools in Northern India which concluded that might not be the case.

The Facilitated Video Instruction in Low Resource Schools report detailing the study and research results was presented at the International conference on information and communication technologies and development (ICT4D2012) last Tuesday in Atlanta, and offers valuable insight into the core challenges that prevent the project’s scalability and sustainability, as well as a few lessons that the whole ICT4E sector could benefit from.

Over the course of two years, researchers observed and compared the use of DSH in eleven schools on the outskirts of a large city in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, one of the most populated and least developed provinces in India. With the approval of the Indian government and while adhering to the national curriculum, the team introduced video recordings of high-performing teachers into low-performing classrooms and conducted quantitative and qualitative studies to measure the impact of this educational intervention. The team also held technical training seminars for participating teachers and helped establish electrical connections to support the TVs and DVD players.

Setting out, the researchers expected to see positive quantitative results in student competencies and noticeable improvements in the participating teachers’ teaching skills. However, within this cultural context, a number of variables such as student test scores heavily influenced by cheating and a large number of student and teacher absences during harvest seasons, prevented the researchers from collecting reliable quantitative data.

Though the researchers saw positive improvements in some of the participating teachers’ pedagogy during DSH and throughout the rest of their teaching — based primarily on their ability to use the interactive teaching methods displayed by the model teachers in the videos — other teacher’s were not receptive to working with DSH staff and two schools had to drop from the program due to theft of equipment.

So while the report ultimately concludes that the project is not sustainable in this particular context, at least not without substantial support from outside organizations, here’s a few lessons we can take away from this project:

Teacher buy-in is essential. The major contributor to successful programs in the study was having at least one motivated staff member who was passionate about teaching, as well as having support from strong school leadership.

It is critical that all of the participants — teachers, principals, students — view the educational intervention as valuable relative to available options. This should help to ensure sustainability and reduce incidents of equipment theft.

Photo Credit: Teach for India

The main obstacle to scalability is the educator’s view of their profession and personal teaching capacity, as well as their commitment to education. Teachers must value their role as an educator in order to have incentive to continue to grow professionally and use effective teaching strategies.

Educational context matters. The content and format of the lessons should reflect the cultural context in which they are used. In other words, is it appropriate for the target audience considering what teaching methods they are already familiar with? In a context like India’s where the teaching profession is respected in the community but is divided between credentialed teachers and paraeducators, what are the impacts of introducing a teaching aid that might undermine the efficacy of a teacher’s previous training and teaching skills?

The improvement of the participating teacher’s pedagogy is essential and progress should be continually monitored. Teachers should show progress in using student-centered teaching methodologies to be considered effective. For example, do they ask questions and initiate discussion? Do they check for student understanding?

Programs of this kind should supplement a teacher’s instruction, not replace it. A teacher can learn just as much as the students can from educational videos — especially if they have not received the proper training for teaching their assigned subject — but without improving the teacher’s teaching strategies, the project’s overall goal cannot be achieved.

Photo Credit: www.mtestsite.com

Socio-economic issues can indirectly be addressed within video content. The report notes that the students in the videos were all girls and came from poor, urban backgrounds. The participating students responded well to their video peers, sometimes interacting with them, like clapping for their video peers who answered a question correctly, small details that can have positive lasting effects. (A recent blog entitled What Sesame Street Can Teach the World Bank by Michael Trucano, offers additional lessons in developing this kind of valuable video content)

The DHS researchers anticipate that as the ICT4D field matures, there will be increasing emphasis on larger evaluation studies. Until then, facilitated video instruction programs need more program refinement and teacher buy-in to be considered a worthwhile investment.

March 16, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Environment, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Reefs at Risk, Mapping Coral

Last month WRI (World Resources Institute) released its report on threats to coral reefs, Reefs at Risk Revisited, a three-year study that resulted in the greatest-detailed global maps to date. The maps were produced in partnership with the Google Earth Outreach Development Grant and are meant to protect critical areas through mapping. Besides the report, maps, and data set, WRI created an awareness video that provides a tour of all of the world’s major coral reefs.

Interesting facts from the video include:

there are 6 coral regions of the world: Caribbean, Red Sea/Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, Australia/Great Barrier Reef, and the Pacific
a quarter of life forms in the ocean live in coral reefs, which are less than 1000th of the ocean’s total area
more than 250 million people live near coral reefs
coral reefs are at risk because of unmanaged coastal development, deforestation, soil erosion, nutrient and fertilizer runoff, overfishing, and rising water temperatures
human actions have put 60% of coral reefs at risk

Image courtesy of WRI

March 16, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

The Intersection of mHealth and mFinance: A mHealth Alliance Report

Photo Credit: mHealth Alliance

The mHealth Alliance recently released their second white paper on the interconnection between mobile health and mobile finance services. Entitled “Advancing the Dialogue on Mobile Finance and Mobile Health: Country Case Studies” and co-authored by Menekse Gencer, Founder of mPay Connect, and Jody Ranck, the report focused on four separate countries with varying degrees of intersection between mHealth and mFinance – Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, and the Philippines.

The report was commissioned in order to further explore how business models in the mHealth sector have leveraged mobile financial services (MFS) to improve the access and reach of health care in developing countries. The objectives included identifying new use cases that have shown promise at strengthening health systems, showing the characteristics in markets that have allowed MFS to improve the health care system, and recognizing the trends and challenges in how MFS can be implemented into mHealth projects. The goal is to continue to open the eyes of health providers, NGOs, MNOs, and government health agencies in developing countries to the ways that MFS can increase the care provided to the poor.

Benefits of Using MFS in Health Care

The authors make the argument in the report that mHealth can be assisted by MFS along the entire continuum of care (pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, birth, and postnatal) at multiple levels – patient, provider and administrative. Its uses at the patient level include all aspects of formal financial services (savings, insurance, and credit) to help smooth consumption as well as mobile money transfers to pay for medical services or transportation via cash. For providers, MFS allows for quicker remote payments to occur for health services and products along the supply chain and settlement of patient vouchers. Finally, at the administrative level, mobile payments allow remote and unbanked health workers to receive their salaries and reimbursements as well as for families to receive conditional cash transfers.

Countries

The countries selected have a diverse infrastructure in the MFS market and drivers from the private or public sectors, but the authors discovered three trends in each country:

1. A significant health concern that needed to be met

2. MFS had already launched in the markets

3. Either the business model, the quality of the services, or the accessibility of critical healthcare services was suboptimal without the use of MFS.

In Ghana, insurance has been pushed by the government. In a partnership with two MNOs (MTN and Tigo), Microensure has provided customers on the networks with life insurance. The drivers for this service included the need for assistance in covering funeral costs, the lack of a public option for life insurance, and consumer demand of insurance products which was caused by the government’s push to educate its citizens on health.

In Haiti, the driver of MFS in mHealth was the effect of the earthquake in 2010. After grants were provided to MNOs to develop mobile money services after the earthquake, the MNOs saw an opportunity to expand their services into mHealth with the cholera outbreak. This includes utilizing MFS to dispense medical supplies to stop the spread of the disease across the country.

The Philippines is the first country to heavily adopt MFS, and now they are leveraging the large adoption rate to provide health services. The government is now supporting the use of mHealth to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality rates through the well-developed MFS infrastructure. This includes payment for health products and vouchers for health services.

Finally, Kenya has utilized M-Pesa to pay for medical services and transportation at the patient level, payments for remote diagnostics at the provider level, and dispensing of conditional cash transfers and salary payments at the administrative level. M-Pesa was the driver along with Universal Health Care (UHC) in Kenya.

Key Challenges and Future Trends

The authors noted that there were multiple challenges discovered in their research and included brief look into the future of MFS and mHealth. The challenges included the MNOs desire for exclusive partnerships, scaling of services that need greater customer information, risks of cross-sector initiatives in markets with low mobile money adoption rates, shared phones which make it difficult to implement ID management systems, and exorbitant setup costs because of lack of interoperability between mobile money providers. As for the future, the authors see that these challenges will decrease with increased adoption rates of MFS and the decrease of the costs of utilizing MFS in the mHealth sector. Finally, the authors see a greater need for quality data to be accessible by both healthcare and financial service providers. The idea is that more quality data about a patient’s health and finances will allow for micro-insurance to be provided. It would allow for re-insurance to be provided to private or public insurance schemes to provide greater protection to those providing the insurance. The authors see a lack of movement in this space because of this lack of data. They see technology as a tool that would provide this information and expand the reach of insurance to the poor.

March 16, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Demystifying ICT4E Terminology: 10 Acronyms and Names You Should Know

Last week, amidst reading the various blogs and tweets for Open Education Week, I came across several acronyms that were unfamiliar. Terms like Edupunk and Aakash are just a few of the terms that you simply have to “be in the know” in order to know.

Anyone new to the field of information and communication technology for education (ICT4E) might be a little overwhelmed at first by the plethora of acronyms, terminology, and program and developer names that pervades internet searches and tweets. Whether you’re an education professional looking for new opportunities to use technology in a development project, or a seasoned ICT4D veteran exploring the new advances being made in open education, there’s usually a new term that pops up, sometimes coined at a recent conference, that might be unfamiliar.

And to complicate things further, common ICT4E terms are also used among the wider national education community, as well as those focused on content more than devices, devices more than quality, quality more than technology, and a small community of professionals that have enough experience to be able to see the overall picture.

So to offer some clarification, here are some ICT4E terms you should know:

ICT4E: Information and Communication Technology for Education

Self-explanatory acronym though, within the Twittering world, it has taken on several other forms such as ICT4Ed, ICT4Edu, Edtech and Edutech. A recent blog from ICTWorks set out to clarify what is the most appropriate hashtag and it seems a consensus has been reached for ICT4E — at least for now.

mLearning

mLearning is the use of mobile technology for education — both formal and informal. Though eLearning — using technology for in-class or distance learning purposes — could technically encompass mobile technology, mLearning has been gaining more ground and becoming increasingly popular with the rise of mobile phone saturation throughout the world — estimated at over 5.3 billion mobile subscribers during the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week — that it has created its own category and is the subject of many ICT4E debates.

Photo Credit: www.gadgetslane.com

OLPC: One Laptop Per Child

Commonly referenced and debated in the ICT4E sector, this controversial project has received a lot of praise and criticism for it’s device-based initiative which has introduced over 2.5 million laptops to schools throughout the developing world.

Aakash

The new competitor to OLPC (though that too could be debated since OLPC has expressed support for this new project), this name tends to stir up some excitement among ICT4E advocates. Aakash is a new tablet computer recently priced at around $35 and already being used in public schools in India.

BYOD: Bring Your Own Device

Bring Your Own Device is simply that — students using their own digital devices in the classroom. With many digital devices to choose from such as eReaders, tablets, and mobile phones, computers are no longer considered the only or best option. BYOD is a concept being explored more in connection to mLearning though there are few examples of it already being applied in a development context.

OER: Open Educational Resources

OERs are course and learning materials which can easily be accessed for learning, teaching and research purposes via the internet. Covered under open licenses, these resources can be modified and updated by multiple users creating “living” resources — those that have the ability to grow and adapt with new innovations, historical events, new perspectives, etc.

OCW: Open CourseWare

OCWs are a type of OER. Simply put, they are the learning materials or collection of OERs organized to serve as course content. These, like OERs, are openly licensed and can be reused and reshaped so that they can be introduced in various educational settings.

FOSS: Free and Open Source Software

Software that is both free and open source; an important tool for developing OERs.

MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

Similar to OCWs except that their pedagogical theories and student base differ. A relatively recent innovation in online course development, MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and facilitate learning through teacher led discussions and presentations and developing peer-to-peer networks between students.

Badges

A digital representation equivalent to a certificate or diploma, badges certify the specific skills a student has attained and the quality of the instruction that they received from a specific educational institution.

Image from www.cooltownstudios.com

Crowdsourcing

A distributed problem-solving and production process that involves outsourcing tasks to a network of people, usually many and undefined, and a great strategy for collaborating with other teachers and educational professionals.

And in the spirit of open education and crowdsourcing, feel free to share any other essential, humorous, or baffling ICT4E terminology you’ve come across.

March 13, 2012/by actualize

Mobile Money, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile Money Interoperability: A Solution or Just Expensive?

Photo Credit: Szymon Slupik

In a report released in February, GSMA examined the value generated to both consumers and mobile operators by developing interoperable mobile money systems. Entitled “The case for interoperability: Assessing the value that the interconnection of mobile money services would create for customers and operators” and co-authored by Neil Davidson and Paul Leishman, it was released through the Mobile Money for the Unbanked unit of GSMA.

The report focused on the idea that increasing the interoperability between mobile network operators (MNO) would be better for customers as it would allow greater ability to send money from a phone on one network to a phone on another network. With the understanding that a network’s value to a consumer depends on how many other people they can connect to, there is an obvious benefit to operators creating interoperability between each other. But the article finds that developing interoperability will not create the necessary value to customers in order for MNOs to profit off the investment. The authors came to this conclusion by examining it from both the consumer side and the producer side.

Value to Consumers

By researching the competitiveness of mobile money services, the authors found that there were only three markets in the world that could be labeled as competitive. Although 25 countries have multiple operators providing mobile money services, only three had adoption rates from multiple MNOs that would dictate a need for interoperability. They next turned their attention to discovering the specific problem that interoperability would solve. In viewing the habits of consumers in markets with mobile money, the research showed that they had figured out a workaround to transferring money between mobile networks. Since there is a low cost to purchase a SIM card from another MNO, consumers can “multi-SIM.” This means that depending on which operator the receiver is using, the sender can switch their SIM card in order to send the transfer. With the advent of dual-SIM phones (two ports for SIM cards), multi-SIMing is made easy with no need to switch out the cards manually. In Uganda, a survey from June 2010 showed that 43% of mobile money users multi-SIM. Along with the hardware workaround already available, the mobile operators have allowed unregistered accounts to send and receive money. Registered customers have the ability to send money to unregistered customers. Since all that is needed in order to collect the transfer is a secret code, an unregistered user can give the code to an agent and withdraw the cash. This is called an off-net transfer. The opposite transaction can occur as well as with an unregistered user sending a transfer to a registered customer. This is called an over-the-counter (OTC) transfer. While this does not completely kill the consumer value to interoperability, customers have already discovered and are using workarounds at no further cost to them or the mobile operators.

Value to MNOs

The author’s argument for why MNOs would invest into developing interoperable systems is a simple one – because it will create greater revenue. Mobile money is provided as a value-added service to create greater loyalty in the customer base as well as having them increase the amount of money they spend. But creating a system that works with other mobile operators is not free – nor cheap. The investments would include human resources and infrastructure. But the main question is how would this investment make more money, if at all? Value-added services are used for two reasons – keeping existing customers and enticing new customers. And one or both will have to pay for this service. But since it has already been shown that current customers are already willing to use a workaround to transfer between separate mobile providers, it is not clear that interconnecting systems will create greater loyalty or attract new customers.

Along with the unclear pain from customers about the need for interoperability, the authors made the argument that the investment in it could take away from other investments that could increase loyalty or simply pass the cost of directly onto customers. Unless a clear business reason is discovered, it seems like interoperability will not occur in the near future. But that does not mean it will never occur; just that it is too early for it now.

March 13, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Environment, Land Management, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

What is REDD+?

Photo Credit: redd-net.org

The conservation blogosphere is covered in REDD+, but what is it? REDD+ is simply an acronym for Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. It aims to foster conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhance forest carbon stocks through local incentives by creating a financial value for carbon stored in trees. Once this carbon is assessed and quantified, developed countries pay developing countries carbon offsets for their standing forests. By doing so, green house gas emissions can be lowered in a cost-effective way. REDD+ is different from traditional methods because “unlike afforestation and reforestation activities, which generally cause small annual changes in carbon stocks over long periods of time, stemming deforestation causes large changes in carbon stocks over a short period of time.” It also has the benefits of addressing water resource management, soil erosion, flooding reduction, biodiversity, and other issues.

Where is it used? USAID provides a database of current projects. REDD is also being proposed after a recent publication in Nature Climate Change released a study that tropical rainforests store 229 billion tons of carbon in their vegetation. This study, through The Woods Hole Research Center, used new satellite-based assessment, including cloud-penetrating LiDAR (less degree of error). The findings are available in a free downloadable carbon density map here.

Biomass Map, Photo Credit: WHRC

March 13, 2012/by actualize

GBI Highlights, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

GBI kicks off USF assistance in Ukraine, Moldova

Workshops held for over 60 officials

March 10, 2012/by actualize

GBI Highlights, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

GBI, Kenya to expand broadband and universal service

Mr. Francis Wangusi, Director General, CCK (Right) and Ms. Erna Kerst, Mission Director USAID Kenya during the signing of an MoU at CCK Centre, Nairobi

According to an agreement signed today between the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the US Government shall assist CCK in developing strategies to stimulate universal access to ICT services in underserved and un-served areas of the country.
The technical assistance covers the development of a national broadband strategy to underpin the deployment of modern broadband infrastructure to meet the needs of businesses, government and the entire economy. The assistance, which shall be provided through the USAID’s Global Broadband and Innovations (GBI) initiative, will also assist CCK in developing capacity in universal service Fund management, and universal service.

Addressing the media during the signing of the agreement at the CCK Centre, USAID’s Mission Director, Ms. Erna Kerst, said the US Government was happy to partner with Kenya in facilitating enhanced access to ICT services.

She said Kenya was ahead of many sub-Saharan African countries in the level of development of ICTs, particularly in the area of mobile applications.

“Kenya is leading the way in ICT innovations and in the development of applications that are changing the lives of people in Kenya and elsewhere in the World,” she said.

In his address, Ag. CCK Director-General Mr. Francis W. Wangusi said the development of universal access and broadband strategies would invigorate the growth of the ICT sector and thus accelerate the development of other sectors of the economy, including provision of e- and m- government services.

Citing the ICT Access Gaps Study undertaken by CCK last year, Mr. Wangusi said close to 1,120 sub-locations out of the total of 7,149 in the country had no access to basic communication services. This situation, he added, called for urgent regulatory interventions to facilitate the transition of a sizeable number of Kenyans to the digital age.

The Director-General decried the prevailing low penetration of data/internet services in Kenya, saying the country had only 5.2 million Internet subscribers, of which 2.33% were broadband. He said the strategies to be developed through USAID’s technical assistance would play a key role in improving access to communications services in all parts of the country.

March 10, 2012/by actualize

Agriculture, Education, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Creating a Digital Classroom in the Developing World: Open Education

Photo Credit: OCW Consortium

This week, the online global education community is kicking off the first ever Open Education Week, an event initiated by the OpenCourseWare Consortium to raise awareness to the increasing number of possibilities within this field. This growing movement is poised to change the way that education is viewed, both in the developed and developing world. It has the potential to revolutionize the field of international education development with the increase of connectivity in regions that, until only recently, were limited to outdated and ineffective learning resources and teaching methods.

However, some of these new exciting opportunities and tools that are being developed are set amidst unfamiliar computer programming lingo, an increasing number of acronyms, and a community of open education advocates with various ideologies. So to demystify some of these, let’s imagine for a moment that we want to create a digital classroom for distance learning, targeted to students in a remote area of a developing country. First, we’ll need to develop our course materials and the body of information that we plan to teach:

OER: Open Educational Resources

Photo credit: UNESCO, Author: Jonathasmello

OERs are the various course and learning materials that are being made available in the digital classroom which can easily be accessed for learning, teaching and research purposes. Covered under open licenses, these resources can be modified and updated by multiple users creating “living” resources — those that have the ability to grow and adapt with new innovations, historical events, new perspectives, etc.

OERs make up what some have termed a “universal virtual library”, and where best to start developing the resources for our digital classroom than there. A great example of this is Wikieducator, an international online community project that facilitates collaboration between educators.

So once we’ve chosen and developed what we’ll teach, how will that content be represented and organized as a course or curriculum? That’s where OCWs come in.

OCW: Open CourseWare

And that’s great for us since we want input from other teachers, education professionals, and the students themselves so that, ideally, they will have the most current information taught through the most effective teaching methods. Some OCW programs such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the Khan Academy have already taken great strides in perfecting this model. However, OERs by themselves cannot monitor the learning process or offer accreditation to students. We need to develop something that shows that our students have fulfilled the learning requirements and have acquired new skills.

Badges:

Photo Credit: Mozilla Open Badges website

Badges are the big new thing in Open Education and are still in the early stages of development. An idea that was explored during the 2010 Mozilla Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, the badges would certify the specific skills a student had attained and the quality of the instruction that they received. According to a recent New York Times article, a few major companies like Microsoft are already using a badge system to certify that their employees have received technical training.

Once we’ve developed our own badge system, perfected our curriculum, and established ourselves as a credible source for quality education, it’s time to think bigger.

MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

MOOCs are similiar to OCWs except that their pedagogical theories and student base differ. A relatively recent innovation in online course development, MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and facilitate learning through teacher led discussions and presentations and developing peer-to-peer networks between students. The potential class size for these courses can be staggering. Several well-known examples at Stanford have exceeded 100,000 registered students, though only a fraction of them actually completed the courses.

Even though some MOOCs and badges are being monetized, we will of course try to keep our lessons free, though there is some argument for charging small fees to motivate students to complete the course. But many questions remain: How will these new materials with the outsourcing — or crowdsourcing — of teachers affect the local education system? Are the skills and information being taught that of which this particular population actually need and culturally relevant? How will it prepare students for jobs already available in this cultural context? A lot of these new innovations still have yet to be developed to suit the needs of the developing world but, with the right amount of cultural sensitivity, research and collaboration, there are many exciting potential advantages to come.

March 9, 2012/by actualize

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