Ken Banks, Sean Martin McDonald, and Florence Scialom

Mobile Technology and the Last Mile
“Reluctant Innovation” and FrontlineSMS

There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide, mak-
ing them the most ubiquitous communications platform in human history.
Communications technologies are unique among many other types of innovation
in that they fundamentally change how we interact with each other. As mobile
phones grow in sophistication and become smarter and smarter, many overlook
the one basic piece of functionality that has done the most to change how we share
information between one another: the text message. Text messages, or Short
Message Service (SMS) messages which weigh in at 160 characters or less, don’t, at
first blush, seem obvious as a powerfully transformative technology. Yet, it is their
simplicity, availability, and affordability that make them appealing to groups of
people who have little experience with technology. The impact of SMS can be seen
in almost every aspect of life, from teenagers’ fragmented attention spans, to pres-
idential campaigns, to the ways victims of natural disasters seek relief.

The use of mobile phones to improve systems and services, especially in under-
served contexts—dubbed “mobile for development” (m4d)—represents one of the
most rapidly growing frontiers in innovation, particularly in the developing world.
FrontlineSMS is an open-source SMS gateway that enables grassroots organiza-
tions to use text messages and mobile technologies effectively to serve their com-
munities. Over the last six years, FrontlineSMS has been downloaded more than

Ken Banks, the Founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, specializes in the applica-
tion of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the devel-
oping world. Ken has lived and worked in a number of African countries, where he was
involved in a number of conservation and development projects; he regularly presents
his work on the international conference circuit. He is a Pop!Tech Social Innovation
Fellow, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, a Laureate of the Tech Awards, E
an Ashoka Fellow.

Sean Martin McDonald
for
FrontlineSMS. Sean also leads the FrontlineSMS:Legal project, where he focuses on
the intersection of law, conflict resolution, international development, and technology.

the Director of Operations: Americas

Florence Scialom is Community Support Coordinator for FrontlineSMS. Florence’s
focus is supporting and monitoring the growing global community of those using
FrontlineSMS software for social change.

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Ken Banks, Sean Martin McDonald, and Florence Scialom

14,000 times and is being used in a wide variety of settings in over 70 countries.

The increasing adoption of the mobile phone, and SMS specifically, is creating
something that never existed before for hundreds of millions of people: access to
informazione. The number of mobile connections is expected to rise to six billion
by 20121—explosive and unprecedented growth, considering that there were only
720,000 In 2000.2 SMS, in particular, is unique because it is a function of nearly all
of the world’s mobile phones, making it one of the few standard applications in an
increasingly fragmented market. IL
mobile phone industry has accomplished
such growth in part by recognizing the
potential in untapped, low-resource mar-
kets. Both device manufacturers and
service providers have driven global
adoption by designing and marketing
low-cost offerings. For example, Jan
Chipchase,
formerly chief usability
researcher at Nokia and now executive
creative director of Global Insights at
Frog Design, spent years living with and
researching remote communities in order
to determine what features would maxi-
mize value for phone users. This type of
research can be very powerful and result
in the development of phones such as the Nokia 1100, which costs under $20 and has sold over 700 million units worldwide. By recognizing the potential of under- served markets and gearing its offerings to them, the mobile industry has both profited from and, in many places, introduced the standards of locally appropriate technologies. The increasing adoption of the mobile phone, and SMS specifically, is creating something that never existed before for hundreds of millions of people: access to information. The m4d field is largely based on the same theory: that new communications technologies, where designed for and integrated into local systems, have great potential to improve, BENE, everything. It’s important to clarify that the idea of local appropriateness as it relates to m4d spans a range of factors, including obvious things like communications infrastructure, phone ownership, hardware compati- bility, and affordable services. The concept, Tuttavia, also includes a range of less considered but equally determinative factors, such as timing, textual and techno- logical literacy, power infrastructures, cultural context, genere, communications workflows, marketing, and local capacity. In many m4d projects, the technology itself is new but some of the mistakes are uncomfortably familiar struggles in inter- national development: top-down projects that lack understanding or appreciation of the end users. Mobile integration and m4d projects must prioritize the imple- mentation context in order to meet the needs of both the users of the technology and the people they seek to serve. Mobile communications technologies, and specifically SMS, implicitly reduce a number of barriers to communication. Perhaps most importantly, mobile 8 innovazioni / Data Democracy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/6/1/7/1626144/inov_a_00055.pdf by guest on 08 settembre 2023 Mobile Technology and the Last Mile Figure 1. Social Mobile’s Long Tail phones are comparatively affordable—both the phones themselves and their serv- ice packages. SMS, unlike the mobile web or downloadable applications, requires only a mobile signal, and because it is text based, it enables the creation of com- plex records and data entry anywhere you can take a mobile phone. This ability to bridge distance is a large benefit of structured SMS communications, especially in rural or underserved communities that have never had access to other people, let alone government or nonprofit services. In addition, because the information is digital, simple software programs such as FrontlineSMS can use SMS to structure inputs and automate responses and workflows. These programs often significant- ly reduce the human resource costs of communication by allowing one-to-many, automated, and asynchronous responses. Mobile communications tools have the potential to reduce the impact of many problems when they are sufficiently tailored, but they are rarely the only element of a wider solution. Many ambitious m4d projects fall apart because they fail to recognize that the people closest to a problem are the most likely to figure out the best solution. Given the many challenges in m4d projects, ranging from infrastruc- ture to education to organizational change, it is important that the tools involved be extremely flexible, lightweight, and approachable. A helpful conceptual tool that can be used to analyze the different approaches to m4d projects is the “long tail” of social and mobile innovation. The long-tail concept was first talked about by writer Chris Anderson in a Wired magazine arti- cle, where he used it to describe consumer demographics in business.3 When Ken Banks first applied it to the mobile space in January 2008, the resulting “social mobile long tail” was something quite distinct from the original concept, as you innovations / volume 6, number 1 9 Scaricato da http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/6/1/7/1626144/inov_a_00055.pdf by guest on 08 settembre 2023 Ken Banks, Sean Martin McDonald, and Florence Scialom can see in the image above. The long tail illustrates the tension between highly complex, expensive technologies and the likelihood that a broad range of organi- zations will be able to use them. The standard of replicability can be quite difficult to attain, especially when targeting grassroots organizations in under resourced or “last mile” environments. Yet, if we’re honest about who is best suited to solve a community’s problems, these are the people that are most likely to drive success- ful, sustainable solutions. Mobile communications tools have the potential to reduce the impact of many problems when they are sufficiently tailored, but they are rarely the only element of a wider solution. At the top of the image there are high-end, high-cost solutions running SMS services across national or international borders, with little chance of being repli- cated for average grassroots NGO. These are the tools that generally get the great- est amount of exposure for their technical sophistication. Then there are lower- cost, custom solutions, developed by individual (often mid-level) non-profits to solve a particular problem in a partic- ular country or region, or to run a spe- cific campaign. These have a better chance of being replicated for grassroots NGOs. These tools generally get a medi- um to high level of publicity. Finalmente, the long tail itself describes the simple, low-tech solutions whose simplicity and affordability increase the likelihood of replicability among grass- roots NGOs. These solutions are gener- ally designed to work on simple hard- ware and locally available infrastructure, in order to reduce costs. They are designed to have very approachable user interfaces and be highly customizable, while still offering sophisticated functional- ità. Long tail tools are designed to be available to the people who drive the long tail design philosophy, who have been called “reluctant innovators.”4 Reluctant innovators are people who set out to solve a single urgent problem in their own contexts, instead of setting out to drive systematic change through technology. Examples are healthcare workers who travel huge distances to connect their communities to clinics, or farmers who find new ways to make crops more resilient. Many people finding everyday solutions to everyday problems can be referred to as reluctant innovators; the term refers to regular people who find themselves faced with a challenge, and who decide not to turn their backs but to take it on. These are the people who most need tools that work. In fact, FrontlineSMS itself owes its existence to “reluctant” innovation. The original FrontlineSMS software was born out of conservation work in Bushbuckridge, in Kruger National Park, South Africa. While trying to identify a system that the South African National Parks could use to communicate with Bushbuckridge community members, workers discovered the need for a new solu- 10 innovazioni / Data Democracy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/6/1/7/1626144/inov_a_00055.pdf by guest on 08 settembre 2023 Mobile Technology and the Last Mile tion. The authorities wanted to re-engage people in the conservation effort, keep them updated on park matters, ask their opinions on important decisions, arrange meetings, and send wildlife alerts. After a considerable search for a solution, all that could be found were Web-based mass messaging tools. Back in 2004, it wasn’t pos- sible to just jump on the Internet while in Kruger National Park, so all of these solutions proved totally inappropriate. It was from this experience that the need emerged to create a system that could send, receive, and organize text messages through a mobile device and a laptop, thus removing the need for the Internet. After raising a small amount of money, buying some manuals and simple hardware, and spending five weeks over a kitchen table in Finland, Ken Banks wrote a prototype of FrontlineSMS during the summer of 2005. FrontlineSMS is a piece of software that uses widely available technol- ogy—a cheap laptop along with a mobile phone or GSM modem—to create a mass messaging system. Although FrontlineSMS was designed to solve a specific challenge in a particular context, it soon became appar- ent that this tool had great potential to be successfully replicated in many others. While mobile and Internet coverage continues to increase rapidly, the high costs of personal computers, infrastructure, and pricing plans suggest that affordable Internet access is still years away in many areas of the world. FrontlineSMS is designed to bring the benefits of simple digital communication to parts of the world with only a GSM signal, mainly, the poor remote regions where other tools don’t reach. The software was made available in October 2005, and has remained open source and freely available to download. Reluctant innovators are people who set out to solve a single urgent problem in their own contexts, instead of setting out to drive systematic change through technology. In 2008, a group of volunteers provided a great example of how FrontlineSMS was able to bridge communication gaps to significantly augment the work of com- munity healthcare workers in rural Malawi. With a population of approximately 14 million, Malawi has only 1.1 doctors and 56.4 nurses per 100,000 people, so medical services and resources are spread very thin. Recognizing these problems while volunteering at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, a network that serves more than 250,000 patients, this group brought cheap accessible phones, a laptop, and a modem. The volunteers gave 75 community health workers mobile phones to sup- port their work over an area 200 miles in diameter. These community health work- ers used the phones to send appointment reminders, status updates, and medical reports from the field. The efficiency savings demonstrated by this project were huge. Health reports were delivered by SMS rather than by hand, saving 900 hours of transportation time; net fuel savings on transport alone amounted to $2,750 In

innovazioni / volume 6, number 1

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Ken Banks, Sean Martin McDonald, and Florence Scialom

just six months.5 The team that ran this pilot has been so successful in using
FrontlineSMS that they formed their own organization, FrontlineSMS:Medic (now
Medic Mobile), and they use mobile tools to improve health outcomes in more
di 10 countries.

Other reluctant innovators have used FrontlineSMS to tackle challenges in a
broad range of contexts across the world. In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, FrontlineSMS
powers a fish-marketing system that allows fishermen to make informed decisions
about where to sell their catch, regularizing fish prices and producer incomes
across the project area. In Nigeria, Burundi, and the Philippines, the software has
been used to help monitor national elections. In Uganda, it is used in a nationwide
agricultural extension and knowledge-sharing system. The software has been used
extensively as an information service for human rights organizations, such as the
Zimbabwean civil society organization Kubatana.net. In Egypt, an organization
called HarassMap has used FrontlineSMS to collect reports of harassment via SMS,
recording them via the crowd-sourced mapping system Ushahidi. These are just a
few examples that demonstrate the sheer variety of ways FrontlineSMS is being
implemented to help empower people across the world.

FrontlineSMS continues to develop and adapt mobile technology solutions to
an increasingly complex array of development contexts. We have developed five
distinct projects to address the unique challenges that underserved populations
face in accessing medicine, banking, legal services, formazione scolastica, and local media. Nostro
aim and focus continue to be small organizations that meet the challenges of their
underserved communities. We at FrontlineSMS not only admit, but celebrate, Quello
it is this incredible group of people who continue to drive both the development
and innovation around m4d. We are honored to have the privilege of supporting
them. And we’re not at all reluctant about that.

1. Gosh Gillet, “Global mobile connections surpass 5 billion milestone: Industry

adds 1 billion connections in 18 months; on track to reach 6 billion in H1
2012,” Wireless Intelligence, Luglio 8, 2010. Available at https://www.wirelessintelli-
gence.com/print/snapshot/100708.pdf.

2. Kojo Boakye, Nigel Scott, and Claire Smyth, Mobiles for Development UNICEF,
2010. Available at http://www.kiwanja.net/database/document/report_mobiles-
development-UNICEF.pdf.

3. Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, 12.10, ottobre 2004. Available at

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

4. Ken Banks, “The rise of the reluctant innovator,” kiwanja.net, 2010. Available at

http://www.kiwanja.net/blog/2011/02/the-rise-of-the-reluctant-innovator/.

5. Nadim Mahmud, Joce Rodriguez, and Josh Nesbit, “A text message-based inter-
vention to bridge the healthcare communication gap in the rural developing
mondo,” Technology and Health Care 18, NO. 2 (2010): 137–144. Available at
http://iospress.metapress.com/content/7052u77p130087l8/.

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