Grant Awarded to Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

If you’ve never pondered the question of whether mobile phones can improve the quality and uptake of sexual and reproductive health services among teenagers, then you’re not alone. Fortunately, however, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine have considered the question and are using a grant from Indigo to test an SMS sexual health referral system for adolescents in Tanzania. Working in the Mwanza region, the system aims to improve communication between informal village drug stores and local health centres and dispensaries. When a young person turns up at a drug store seeking reproductive or sexual health services, an SMS will be sent to the local health centre or dispensary with details of the service to be provided. A unique passcode will then be sent automatically to the drug store owner for them to pass on to the client. When the client presents this referral code at the health centre or dispensary, they receive a confidential, fast-track service. A text message is then sent by the health centre or dispensary to the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). This SMS contains patient data (age, gender and medical condition), as well as information on the medical procedure or treatment provided. NIMR and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine can then use this data and compare it with data collected in a control community which doesn’t have the SMS referral system.

The SMS referral system is part of a much larger, four-year cluster randomised control intervention known as IntHEC. The study, which is taking place in Tanzania and Niger, and covers a total population of more than 700,000 aims to develop evidence-based strategies to increase equity, integration and effectiveness of reproductive health services for poor communities in sub-Saharan Africa. It brings together a multitude of partners, including:  the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les Dynamiques Sociales et le Developpement (Niger), the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (Tanzania), the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (Tanzania), the Ministry of Public Health (Niger) and UNFPA (Niger).

Indigo have provided a grant of £14,920 to Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to help them build, develop and deploy the SMS referral system. If successful, such a referral system could be deployed in other countries where appropriate. What is certain is that with the rigorous evaluative skills of all partners involved in the IntHEC consortium, this system will help build the evidence base for mhealth initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mobile phones offer significant advantages to organisations involved in the delivery of sexual health services to teenagers. Not only can they improve take up and use of services through SMS reminders, but they can also be used for education and as a tool to provide advice  remotely – an important consideration in environments where lack of formal services, stigma and social values may prevent or discourage people from seeking treatment. This Guardian article has more information on LSTM’s SMS referral system, as well as the growing popularity of mobile advice services in the UK.

News from the Field

One of my colleagues has been producing some general updates from the world of ICT in Africa and we thought it was a good idea to share them with you.

Major News

Open Government Brasilia 2012

On the 17th and 18th April, Brazil hosted the first annual conference on open government, bringing together more than 50 countries and organisations with a belief in the power of transparency.

Tim Davies has the following observations which arose from the OGP conference:

• The quality of Right to Information really matters
• Whistle blower protection is an important factor in the journey from openness to impact
• We’ve not yet cracked culture change and capacity building, or large scale public engagement
• There is a need to distinguish e-government, from open government
• We need both data infrastructures, and accessibility ecosystems, for open data
• We need to develop a deeper dialogue between technologists and issue activists
• Monitoring should ultimately be about change for citizens, not just commitments and process.

More can be found at Tim’s blog.

The Guardian has a collection of interesting articles on the OGP conference.

Grant Awarded to Africa Gathering

On Friday 15 June this year, Africa Gathering – a previous Indigo grantee – will be holding their annual London conference in Canary Wharf. The one-day event is aimed at developing and building relationships between funders, investors and businesses, as well as highlighting grassroots successes and emerging tech companies from across Africa. The conference will seek to reframe the debate around technology, innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa. It will provide a showcase for creative African cheetahs that are taking the lead in developing amazing technology solutions.

Having funded a number of technology hubs across Africa, we think that Africa Gathering will offer a unique chance to bring a number of hubs and start-ups together to allow them to learn from one another, exchange success stories and promote themselves to a wide audience of funders and investors. It’s for this reason that we have awarded a grant of £15,000 to Africa Gathering to cover the flight and accommodation costs of several innovation hubs from as far afield as Zambia and Madagascar.

If you are a funder, investor or have an interest in African technology start-ups, tickets are  now available to buy here.

Editing Wikipedia On-The-Go

Six months ago, we awarded the Wikimedia Foundation – the charitable organisation behind Wikipedia – a grant of £10,000 towards the costs of upgrading their mobile portal. Prior to the upgrade, the Wikimedia Foundation relied on a slow and fragile redirect that sent users with certain select smartphones to the portal, which served only high-end phones and was too bandwidth-intensive for low-end phones and connections. As a read-only mobile portal, moreover, it was only available for some Wikipedia languages. In autumn 2011, they introduced a new mobile portal that works well with all mobile devices, including the wide array of feature phones that, because of their low cost, are the dominant mobile device in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South.

Wikipedia’s new mobile site displays all 282 languages that Wikipedia is in. Mobile
users who go to any page there can hit the “W” at the top left-hand corner and change the language, and this language option quickly became the site’s most requested feature. Monthly mobile page views in languages spoken in Africa have increased dramatically since our mobile upgrade. Shona, for example, has gone from 3,600 to 16,000, Wolof from 500 to 13,000, Zulu from 353 to 6,000, Igbo from 109,000 to 245,000, Somali from 12,000 to 46,000, Amharic from 15,000 to 75,000, Swahili from 48,000 to 210,000, and Arabic from 3.5 million to 9.2 million. While the mobile portal is fully operational, the Wikipedia team continue to make technical upgrades — patches and tweaks that ensure the portal is meeting the demands of its ever growing mobile readership. In November and December, for example, they improved the mobile site by adding type-ahead search suggestions, term-by-term search building, a larger input box, and full-screen displays of search terms. Mobile readership is now 10 percent of total readership. Overall, mobile page views have gone from 1.1 billion (in October of 2011) to 1.7 billion (February of 2012).

With Wikipedia’s mobile readership rapidly expanding, deals in the pipeline to provide free data to access the site and a growing team of non-English language editors, the world’s favourite encyclopaedia is in a good position to enhance access to information across the world. We’re very excited to have partnered with Wikimedia and look forward to seeing continued growth of their mobile market.

With thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation for part of the text of this blog post.

UK Cap on Charity Tax Relief

Indigo Founder and Director Fran Perrin was a co-signatory to this letter in the Sunday Telegraph on the issue of tax relief for charities. For more information on the issue please take a look at the Give It Back, George website.

News from mySociety

Our friends over at mySociety – the brains behind some of Britain’s best known transparency and democracy websites, like TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem and the excellent FixMyTransport – seem to have been incredibly busy recently, so here’s a quick update on their latest developments:

• They’ve just hosted AlaveteliCon, a conference dedicated to users of Alaveteli, a piece of specialist software designed to make freedom of information requests easier for citizens. Requests and their responses are logged online for all to see. This was the first time that Alaveteli users came together to share experiences and exchange ideas. To date, more than 100,000 requests in five different jurisdictions have been made.
• The mySociety team have now developed guides for non-technical audiences on both Alaveteli and the software behind FixMyStreet, which allows citizens to report problems in their local communities, which are then automatically forwarded to the body responsible for fixing them. The production of these easy-to-read guides is a great way of encouraging the technology, transparency and service delivery communities to work together to achieve long-term, sustainable change. The guide for Alaveteli can be found here, while the FixMyStreet guide can be found here.
• Be sure to keep your eye on DIY.mySociety.org, as they’ll be publishing a steady stream of interesting articles over the next few weeks for non-technical audiences. The DIY mySociety project offers support and guidance to organisations wishing to set up their own versions of mySociety sites such as FixMyStreet or WhatDoTheyKnow.

If you’d like to know more about our work with mySociety or if you’re thinking of implementing similar projects somewhere in Africa, then we’d be very keen to hear from you. Visit our Contact Page for details of how to get in touch.

Boosting Social Technology Entrepreneurs in Nigeria

Lagos, Nigeria – April 11, 2012 – The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), an institution dedicated to the promotion and celebration of excellence in business leadership and entrepreneurship across Africa, is partnering with Co-Creation Hub Nigeria (CcHub), Nigeria’s first open living lab and pre-incubation space dedicated to catalysing creative social technology ventures, in an effort to encourage innovative ideas that could help transform the social technology space in Nigeria.

Through the partnership, TEF will contribute to the growth and development of Nigeria’s emerging tech industry from the “Silicon Lagoon” by providing managed seed funding to 20 technological ideas/ventures targeted at typical social challenges faced by the average Nigerian. The fund will support the novel use of technology in several key areas of the economy including healthcare, education, agriculture, governance, inclusive technology, small business development, and finance. By focusing on the early stages of high-impact, results-oriented ideas/ventures, the seed funding will support experimentation and prototype development in order to accelerate the adoption of the solutions.  Each technology venture will then have the potential to become a self-sustaining profitable social enterprise.