July 23, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Working with an African telecommunications company, Google and the Grameen Foundation have created a text-messaging service to assist rural Ugandans, who often live far away from markets and health clinics.
Using the new service, farmers will be able to get weather forecasts, search a database of agricultural advice, and list their crops for buyers in the city. The service also provides sexual and reproductive health information and a tool to help people locate health-care providers and find out what services they offer.
Greater access to information can make an immediate difference in the lives of poor people in developing countries, says David B. Edelstein, director of ICT Innovation at the Grameen Foundation, in Washington.
When Mr. Edelstein was in Uganda this month, he met a farmer who had a full field of cabbage that was ready to be harvested. In the past, the man had no choice but to sell his crops at the price that the buyer who comes to his village was willing to pay. But this time, says Mr. Edelstein, the farmer was able to use the text-messaging service to find a new buyer offering nearly double the price the farmer’s past buyer had quoted.
The text services build upon the Grameen Foundation’s Village Phone Operators program, an effort that helps local entrepreneurs buy mobile phones and make the phone available to others in the village for a fee. Started in 2004, the network now has 10,000 phone operators across the country. People who don’t have their own mobile phones, don’t speak one of the national languages, or can’t read can still access the information through a nearby phone operator.
“The use of phones today is really just skimming the surface for what can be done with mobile devices, and I’m not talking about a fancy iPhone or anything like that,” he says. “With a $20 phone with 12 keys, which is the huge majority of the four billion phones around the world, you can do an incredible amount.”
For more information: Go to http://www.applab.org.
