Mobile Enterprise

As Americans, we think mobile phones are cool and can make our lives more convenient. But for people in the developing world? They're nothing short of revolutionary.

Just a few short years ago, for example, people in Kenya had to walk miles to the nearest phone to check if an office was open. Now, mobile phones let people get information we take for granted in an instant, freeing up hours of time and human energy for more creative pursuits.

Mobile phones also are seeding a surge in small business start-ups. "What mobile means on the micro level is that people can now be entrepreneurs on their own," says Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of Global Voices, speaking recently on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show about how mobile phones are changing Africa. "In Abuja [Nigeria], for example, people are beginning to write the services they can provide for a wage on urban walls -- such as 'electrician' -- alongside their mobile numbers."

Mobile gives entrepreneurs both a front office and a toolbox. And in some cases, it makes established enterprises smarter: in India recently, fishermen saw more of an income when they began using cellphones to call in to shore to find out which ports were most in need of what they had to sell -- rather than rely on guesswork, as before.

But even more revolutionary, Zuckerman and others say, is the use of mobile phones now to boost everything from public health to the creation of on-demand banking. In Ghana, for example, there is Mpedigree, a nonprofit that lets people send a coded text message to a designated number to find out if the drugs they're about to buy are counterfeit -- and ineffectual.

In Kenya, an alternative banking system called M-Pesa enables people to bypass traditional banks and transfer money from one phone to another. M-Pesa's 7 million users use the system to pay for everything from school fees to taxis. Roughly $2 million is transferred through the system daily; the average amount transferred is $20. And now? M-Pesa has just partnered up with PayPal, enabling people who don't have credit cards to, say, buy something from Amazon.com or any other Web site. It's another step forward in the push to integrate Africans into the much larger global economy.

There are an estimated 4 billion mobile phones globally, with two-thirds of them in developing countries.

For 2010, here are some newer mobile social enterprises to watch. Some are well-known and some are just emerging:

* Ushahidi: The word means "testimony" in Swahili; the mobile anti-violence project was created as a real-time way to crowdsource information about the atrocities and human rights violations that erupted after the 2008 Kenyan presidential election -- and to keep innocent bystanders safe and out of harm's way via up-to-the-second information that mapped the movements of angry mobs. Since then, Ushahidi -- a free, open source Web and mobile-based platform -- has also been used to help others monitor elections and fight violence.

Projects in the field include Vote Report India, a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 general election in India; Swineflu.Ushahidi.com, a site to track the Swine Flu reports coming in from official and unofficial sources, and War on Gaza, an Al Jazeera project covering violence and crowd movements in Gaza. Says Ushahidi cofounder Ory Okolloh, a blogger and Harvard-trained lawyer: "We're hoping to facilitate wider coverage from the ground much earlier so that people can have a better sense of what is going on and a much better sense of where help is needed if it is a crisis situation."

* Frontline SMS: Medic: Having pioneered the use of mobile phones for healthcare in a remote region of Malawi, former Stanford pre-med student Josh Nesbit co-founded FrontlineSMS:Medic to bring these innovations to the rest of the world. The model features a central clinic laptop running FrontlineSMS software, enabling community health workers to use mobile phones to coordinate patient care over long geographical distances. The model also pushes the technology to enable better patient management, the advent of electronic medical records via mobile phone, inexpensive mobile diagnostics on the spot, and the mapping of health services. "Text messages can help save lives," says Nesbit.

* Project Masiluleke: South Africa has more HIV positive citizens than any country in the world; in some provinces, more than 40% of the population is infected, yet only 2% of South Africans have ever been tested for HIV. Project Masiluleke, which means "help" and "warm counsel" in Zulu, is working to harness the mobile phone as a high-impact, low-cost tool to mobilize hundreds of thousands of South Africans to get tested and connected to care, via text-message blasts, and to raise awareness, remind patients of scheduled clinic visits, and offer HIV self-testing with counseling support via mobile health worker units. The project also targets tuberculosis and works similarly to battle that epidemic, as well.

* Migrante, a Philippines-based migrant rights group, initiated an "emergency text" program to alert authorities to cases of physical abuse of domestic workers by their employers and other mistreatment. The program lets Filipino migrants communicate with other Filipino groups locally and abroad about problems in their respective countries. More than 2,000 migrant Filipinos leave the Philippines each day and about one-third of them are unskilled workers now living and working in 182 countries worldwide.

Of course, not all mobile-for-change startups are in the nonprofit sector. Check out these recent for-profit social enterprises:

*Quiet Riots British Entrepreneur Simon Darling's start-up, now in beta, crowd-sources consumer complaints against companies, and offers both disgruntled consumers and companies a way to mend fences. The site asks, "What are you Quiet Rioting about today?" and invites people to share their experiences with everything from rude staff to bank charges to useless automatic hand dryers. The site also gives companies, for a fee, a way to monitor complaints and to reach those consumers to either make amends or to customize a solution. Darling says he thought of the site initially as a way to assemble passenger complaints against airlines but the effort quickly evolved into a general purpose complaint site. Companies that have joined up so far include Ryanair, London Underground, Barclays, and the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families.

* Ground Crew: Founder Joe Edelman, a former community organizer, was looking for a new way to use location-awareness apps to enable people to connect and interact with the world from their pockets in ways previously unimaginable. Edelman's startup hopes to make community organizing easier, if not more immediate. Using a mobile phone, Ground Crew -- now in beta -- links you to a real-time "squad" of people within hours to drum up volunteer coordinators and community organizers. It uses text messaging and GPS to help you see who in your network is available at any given time, whether for 20 minutes or an entire afternoon.


Want to start your own mobile enterprise? Check out Ashoka's new SMS "Quick Start Guide" and also its "Changemaking with Mobile Phones Group" -- as well as mobileactive.org. And to give another shout-out to Movirtu, mentioned earlier on this blog, check out this recent video about the power of mobile at the "base of the pyramid."

Want to share the name of a mobile startup-for-good not mentioned here? Please send it to us and we'll add them to our list of mobile social enterprises to watch in 2010.