Village Phone, Photo Presentation
At the Nokia Technology Media Briefing last November I touched on the Village Phone initiative between Grameen Foundation, my employer and local micro-finance organisations in Uganda. A short photo essay about the Village Phone co-authored with my colleague Indri Tulusan is now ready for download as Powerpoint or PDF [2MB].
To recap - the Village Phone extends regular base station cellular coverage from around 15 kilometers to around 30 kilometers through the use of a village phone kit - an antenna and ten meter cable (shown above) and a coupler (shown below) connected to a regular Nokia 1100 mobile phone plus of course, a micro-finance loan. The net result? In a number of cases it provides the first convenient, reliable and affordable connectivity to the outside world for many rural communities as well as providing a stable income for the local entrepreneur that takes out the loan.
In the spirit of Future Perfect lets start with a simple question: To what extent do villagers need access to mobile phone? Who is in more need of personal, convenient synchronous and asynchronous communication - someone in London who works 9 to 5, 5 days a week or someone in rural Uganda working 5 to 9, 7 days a week? IMHO the impact on quality of life is far greater in the rural context and the some of the innovations this enables are touched on in this longish essay on Shared Phone Use. One example of the benefits of connectivity? Sente - the transfer of money via mobile phone that essentially also extends regular banking services such as the remittance of cash to these communities.
As always, related research here and you can be signed up to receive notification of new downloads by emailing to info at janchipchase dot com with the word subscribe in the subject line.
And the gent featured on the cover of the presentation? A kiosk operator for a rural village phone in Uganda. Cheers to the extended Nokia team for letting us piggyback your work - Johanna, Jens & Suzanne.
Writing from Tokyo | January 19, 2007 | Permalink
Shared Phone Practices
What happens when people share an object that is inherently designed for personal use?
A Nokia Research team set out explore this topic during a July 2006 field study in Uganda with a brief to understand how people share mobile phones. The research builds on prior research from India, China, Nepal and Mongolia and Indonesia.
An longish essay on Shared Phone Use can be found here, and a presentation co-authored with colleague Indri Tulusan entitled Shared Phone Practices: Exploratory Field Research from Uganda and Beyond can be downloaded from research dot nokia dot com here [7MB, PowerPoint]. A full list of related research can be downloaded from here , and you can sign up to be notified of new downloads by email info @ janchipchase.com with the word subscribe in the subject line.
The research team identified 6 shared use practices: an informal service called Sente that essentially enables a mobile phone owner to function as an ATM machine; mediated communication that neatly side-steps issues of technological and textual literacy; the ever popular practice of making missed calls; the pooling of resources to buy the lowest denominations of pre-paid airtime and extend the access days for the phone that is topped up; the use of community address books to reduce errors and (supposedly) encourage phone kiosk customer loyalty; and finally Step Messaging - the delivery of text and spoken messages on foot.
Whilst the baseline benefits of sole ownership and use of a mobile phone are personal, convenient, synchronous and asynchronous communication, the personal and convenient aspects of mobile phone ownership are compromised by sharing. This support the notion that phone sharing (as it is defined at the beginning of the essay) is seen as more of a transition to sole ownership than a naturally stable state.
For many poorer consumers in emerging markets other people's perception that you are connected is the status symbol, a sign that you have arrived and in some senses are worth connecting to. When most of the members of a person's peer group , or society are connected the focus of status shifts to the brand and model of device. phone ownership is not the same as use - if there are cheaper ways to communicate these will be used.
We are increasingly coming across what have termed unlikely consumers, where feature rich and once premium devices in the hands of the very poor and the myriad of ways the devices get there we have dubbed sideways adoption. Today the front-line of telecommunications innovation is in connecting the unconnected, and its a matter of time before today's unlikely consumers become tomorrow's innovators.
Heading to Sikkim early tomorrow for altitude + fresh mountains air, will return in the new year. Oh, and whilst no-one got it totally correct there is a winner for the blinged nano - will be shipped in January.
Writing from Darjeeling | December 21, 2006 | Comments (1) | Permalink
Inherent Properties
The inherent properties of the matoke support carrying by bicycle, as shown here being displayed for sale (in Kyotera, above). Assistance required (Kansensero, below).
Writing from Tokyo | August 18, 2006 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Motivations for Customisation
Customisation of a fishing boat hulll in Kansensero Uganda and of stop signs on the back of auto-rickshaws in Delhi.
Writing from Tokyo | July 7, 2006 | Comments (0) | Permalink
Weapons of Choice
Writing from Kansensero | July 2, 2006 | Permalink
Contexts of Consumption
As media such as movies and TV increasingly shifts to mobile devices the range of contexts where media is consumed changes compared to what has gone before. The user experience of watching a movie in a multiplex or independent cinema (video club in the village of Kansensero in the photo, above) is very different compared to being curled up in bed at home or during snatches of down time in cigarette breaks at work. To what extent does context of use effect the perceived value of media? To what extent is it possible to charge differently according to the context of consumption?
A long time ago I had the pleasure of watching an Argentinean movie at Egypt's International Alexandria film festival. The film was billed as having the first legal kiss in Egyptian public cinema, and all the seats in the venue were filled
with robed punters. I recall looking around that there were two women in the whole audience - one of which was sitting with me. Being a subtitlted film the audience didn't need to concentrate on the sound track and they chatted the whole way through, until the moment of that kiss when the place went silent, which was soon followed by cheering. The memories of the experience as a whole remain vivid despite it being 10 years ago. Why do we pay for (media) experiences at the time of consumption, rather than at the time of reflection?
Writing from Kansensero | June 30, 2006 | Permalink
Double Grip, Speed of Use
The bike rider grips the handlebars and Kalashnikov in one hand as he cycles, the weapon's strap is wrapped around the other bar to complete the balancing act. But why not slung around his shoulder?
"I keep the strap loose in case I need to use it in a hurry"
Writing from Kansensero | June 28, 2006 | Permalink
Rural Connectivity
Drive due south out of Kampala and in 70 kilometers or so you'll arrive at the town of Kyotera, our research base for the next few days. Continue straight on from there and you'll soon hit the Uganda - Tanzania border, head east and you're in rural backwaters, head west and you'll need a boat to take you across Lake Victoria. Kyotera is in a good location to research, well, whatever it is that we're here researching and the bonus is that our hotel can offer cold beer despite frequent power cuts.
This morning the research team rose sufficiently early to drive onto Kansensero - a fishing village on the edge of Lake Victoria. We time our departure to arrive with the boats ashore and the last of the catches being weighed and sold. The journey was pretty uneventful save for a herd of long horned bulls (yes they do have exceptionally long horns) and a quick stop at a village phone operator. Grameen Foundation USA is working in partnership with local micro-finance organisations, the regional carrier MTN and my employer to provide Village Phone kits - essentially an adapted mobile phone, an antenna with a long cable and a car battery to keep it charged. (Car batteries are a common source of power in rural Uganda). Through micro-finance lending the village phone operator can borrow enough money to buy the operator kit and for many it becomes a profitable business.
Driving along the back country roads of Rakai district there are two obvious ways to tell that Village Phone operator is offering connectivity: from a distance you can spot the antenna topped pole rising up to 4 times the height of other structures in the village (glimpsed through the tree foliage in the photo above); and on entering a village the yellow MTN sign advertising call rates looms into view. The affect of easier access to affordable connectivity on the prosperity of the village inhabitants is an worthy topic of research, but requires more time than we have today.
Kansensero has irregular GSM coverage and no mains electricity - power comes in the form of a generator or more commonly car batteries. It's interesting to understand the strategies residents adopt to make the most of what is available, but I'm also aware there are broader issues at play such as access to water (mostly it is delivered on bicycle in jerry cans) and basic healthcare. In many respects the frontier of the future perfect is not what's possible in Tokyo, Paris or London but in villages such as this - in providing access to base necessities. Time and again interview subjects bring up the topic of calling hosptials, midwives and sick relatives, or to report the death of a family member.
Despite the availability of fresh fish our local guide advises us to avoid the local menu - cholera is a factor and he can't vouch for the cooking conditions. So we pile in the car and drive up to a loading bay on the Kagera River and munch our way through a packet of digestives and segments of processed cheese. Our driver requests a photo of himself to show his family he has indeed been here on Uganda's southern border, and as I snap away one of our team conducts an ad-hoc interview. The interviewee, a policeman is chatty and his positive demeanour is set off by some pristine white rubber boots - more commonly found on the feet of local fishermen than on the police. He stands on a pile of wood, Kalashnikov in hand overseeing the unloading of a consignment of coffee beans from Tanzania and as the interview progresses we watch labourers lugging 60kg sacks to a nearby truck. This isn't an official border crossing and if tax is normally charged it's not being levied here.
Its hard to turn away from a border without crossing, but that's a journey for another day.
Writing from Kansensero, road to | | Permalink
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