ICTworks by Inveneo

The Mobile Monday Fourth Annual Mobile Africa Research Report, produced by MobileMonday and released at the annual Innovation Africa Digital Summit, addresses the growing strength of mobile innovation practices in Africa. The material is drawn from interviews with over two-dozen digital media experts as well as extensive research from news and market reports.

The focus of the Mobile Africa report this time is on the overall innovation ecosystem, which includes a range of stakeholders: industry, entrepreneurs, government, academia, civil society, donors and multilateral organisations. The report also addresses the crucial role of innovator networks and incubators.

Sustainability of the innovation ecosystem requires the right blend of bottom up entrepreneurial energy and top-down facilitation of investment policies and infrastructure. These roles are played by global+local networks of mobile startups and professionals, such as MobileMonday. They are also augmented by industry-government-academic incubator networks such as the infoDev m:Labs.

The Mobile Monday Fourth Annual Mobile Africa Research Report identifies best practices and emerging directions for mobile innovation in Africa, and highlights the increasing profile of award winners from Africa in mobile excellence competitions in the region and globally. Overall shifts in the mobile industry are tracked in areas ranging from connectivity options and apps to operator dynamics and political impacts. The report ends with in-depth analysis of the emerging opportunities, challenges and recommendations for ensuring the growth of the mobile industry in Africa in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

The questionnaire and analysis used in this report is based on the author’s “8 Cs” framework of digital media, ie. the components of a digital ecosystem include connectivity, content, community, capacity, culture, cooperation, commerce and capital. In other words, holistic analysis of digital ecosystems should address not just connectivity devices and operator tariffs, but also localised content and services, payment options, knowledge-sharing culture, multi-stakeholder alliances, Role models and human resource capacity in technology and socioeconomic development.

This report, along with earlier annual Mobile Africa reports, will be useful and informative for innovators, incubators, policymakers, analysts and all those interested in the broader development processes and impacts of new media. The report also serves as a call to action and collaboration for other researchers interested in publishing regular insightful snapshots of mobile innovation dynamics in Africa.

With all the talk of mEducation, USAID's Grand Challenge, and the upcoming mEducation Alliance conference, there is something huge that is missing. It's fair to talk about devices, software, and pilot initiatives. But none of that matters if broadband Internet connectivity isn't available!

mEducation is operating in the dark – and needs more insight from the broadband industry and the analyst community about pricing, speed, reliability, and forecasting. Without this knowledge, it’s impossible to see where mEducation is headed. It’s all guesswork.

I am James Teicher and I have found that mobile broadband isn't fast enough, reliable enough, or cheap enough in Senegal (and many other countries). What's more, I don't know when it will be. At CyberSmart Africa, we can't reliably use mobile broadband during class time because images take too long to paint on the screen. Video Skype simply isn't possible. Sure, Internet pricing has come down as a whole; but the pricing for broadband Internet at schools is still way too high - completely unaffordable.

I am glad there are Technology Salons on broadband - the right people are talking. I also urge the Broadband Commission to boost its efforts so that education figures more prominently on the international policy agenda. But what is the timeline for all the essential ingredients for wireless broadband to merge so as to make it more viable for scale?

The only thing we have now that is reliable and cheap is SMS. Yet SMS alone does not make for mLearning as a whole.

I am Ann Jimerson, a behavior change specialist for Alive & Thrive at FHI 360. While working on a U.S.-based project on obesity, I’d had a gratifying experience with concept testing. It confirmed what I’d thought for a long time – that concept testing, or trying a variety of concepts or message approaches with real audience members, can help you hone in on messages that really resonate.

I wanted to share my excitement and convince others that concept testing could work for them, too. So, I put together a PowerPoint for practitioners like myself, in the business of behavior change.

Despite a warm reception from my colleagues at a lunchtime presentation, a couple of eager 20-somethings were having trouble keeping their eyes open for the full 40 minutes. I tried again in one of our field offices overseas, but it didn’t really make sense to them because the whole project, focusing on obesity, was so very American. And even with a select, receptive audience (okay, I guess people closer to my demographic could sit through it…), my beautifully animated PowerPoint didn’t work without me there to deliver the story. I had a product, but I had to work pretty hard to sell it.

What I needed was a product that pretty much sells itself.

I needed a new case study on concept testing: one that featured an experience outside the U.S., and one that people could use and navigate on their own time and at their own pace. I turned to a 20-something on our project, one who had been teaching herself the basics of video editing, is not intimidated by online mechanics, has a great sense of design, and “gets it” when it comes to behavior change.

Fortunately, our staff in Bangladesh liked the idea of concept testing, and with a little coaching by e-mail, had tried a version of it themselves. They were sold on concept testing as a way to focus their messaging before they dove into script writing for TV spots. Now we had a non-U.S.-based story to share.

"How To" videos to the rescue

To get ourselves out of our public health rut, the 20-something staff member and I shut the office door and surfed YouTube. We had a sweeping story that we wanted to tell succinctly. We typed in “movie trailers.” Voila: Gone with the Wind trailer, the whole epic story summed up in 2½ minutes. We knocked ourselves out with a funny “how to” video on making a poster, and a complex lecture by Dan Pink, amusingly illustrated with text and cartoons, drawn as we watched.

Inspired, we started writing scripts for our own short “how to” videos and cobbled together some mock-ups, using the visuals and software we had at hand.

With no budget beyond our labor, we built a prototype web site with 3 short videos and took it out for a road test. We sat with a few colleagues and asked them to open the Beta version. One reviewer reminded us that a popular book on Web design is titled “Don’t make me think.” We reworked the page to make its purpose clear. We learned a lot about how to make our content shorter – and even shorter.

We watched as people puzzled over what the site offered them – then taught ourselves to write explicit, brief text to tell them how they could put the tools to use. We learned that busy practitioners would delight in a sample script or research instrument. They told us they would download it and tuck it away for a training or technical assistance opportunity.

"How To" video delivers results

We launched in late March 2012. Already we’ve seen an uptick in visits to Alive & Thrive’s Web site. During the 3 weeks after launch, the rate of people visiting the A&T site was almost double the rate of visitors in several recent months. We’ve gotten practitioners’ attention. One official cited the case study kit as the reason she thought to invite our Bangladesh country director to present at a regional conference.

Right now we’re deep into scripting our second kit: this one on engaging fathers in infant and young child feeding. And building on what we’ve learned, this time the videos will be 2 to 3 minutes, not 4 to 5.

Technology makes glitz easy. But it takes more than glitz. Thinking like a marketer has taken us a bit closer to building a product that “pretty much sells itself.”

I am Nicki Dell, a PhD student at the University of Washington in Seattle. I’d like to tell you about a project that I did recently during an internship at Microsoft Research India with the Technology for Emerging Markets lab.

Those of us working in ICTD frequently work with groups of people that differ significantly from ourselves. However, little attention has been paid to the effects these differences have on the evaluation of technological systems. In this project, we investigated the effects of participant response bias in field studies in developing countries. Via 450 interviews in Bangalore, India, we measure participant response bias due to interviewer demand characteristics and the role of social and demographic factors in influencing that bias.

In our research, we find that respondents are about 2.5x more likely to prefer a technological artifact they believe to be developed by the interviewer, even when the alternative is identical. When the interviewer is a foreign researcher requiring a translator, the bias towards the interviewer's artifact increases to 5x. In fact, the interviewer's artifact is preferred even when it is degraded to be obviously inferior to the alternative.

In light of these findings, we recommend that researchers and practitioners pay more attention to the types of response bias that might result from working with any participant population and actively take steps to minimize this bias. This could be done by:

1. Dissociate yourself as much as possible from any particular design or solution. If participants are aware of your personal stake in the outcome of the study, the results are more likely to be affected by demand characteristics.
2. Collecting and reporting subjective information from participants as a primary method of evaluation is problematic and should be avoided. We found that even though participant comments might be detailed and convincing, they do not necessarily reflect the merit of the solutions at hand.
3. As far as possible, the focus of participant interviews and feedback should be on obtaining factual, rather than subjective, information. Using triangulation to validate the data collected could further increase confidence in the results of the study.
4. Minimizing the differences between the interviewer and the participants could help minimize the response bias resulting from interviewer demand characteristics.
5. Take time to understand the complications and errors that may result from the influence of researchers working in communities that are vastly different from their own.

Finally, our work focuses on the ways in which social and demographic factors may affect participant response bias. The study was done within a particular culture and city, and with two specific participant populations. The effects are likely to vary with different cultures and populations, and with factors like age, gender, ethnicity etc. Further research is required to understand how these individual factors might separately affect participant responses.

Here’s a quiz for you. Let’s say you are in the middle of a rural below-poverty-line area in a developing country. Let’s say you have 30 mobile phones, or 30 tablets, or 30 laptops. They are all loaded with good quality educational software. You have a class of 30 teenagers or adults. Or even extremely old people.

So the question is – how many of your devices do you hand out to the students? Do you give them one each? Er, no. At least, not in my experience.

One Device Per Multiple Learners

I am Victor Lyons, the author of Tara Akshar, a Hindi adult literacy program that runs on laptops (and tablets and phones, but we like to use laptops because the screen is bigger.) We developed this with our partners, Development Alternatives, an Indian NGO.

We started doing 1:1 – one instructor to one student. We managed to get the students to learn to read and write in a week – yes, really - but it was not viable, because the cost of the instructor makes it prohibitive. So we gradually built up – 2 students per laptop. Then we tried 4 students per laptop. Then we tried having 8 students in a class with one computer, and we ran 3 classes a day. So effectively, one instructor had 24 students at any one time.

This 8 to 1 ratio has proved to be by far the most effective. It’s easy to see why. Our students live in villages with little social activity. Their daily classes are the highlight of their social lives. They arrive in family groups, often with babies, sisters and mother-in-laws in toe. If they spent the whole 100 minute lesson on their own interacting with a laptop or a mobile or a tablet without talking to another human, they wouldn’t like it at all, and wouldn’t turn up for class.

Instead, we have extremely high attendance rates and extremely high pass rates. 60,000 students have graduated so far. So we have found, by trial and error, that 8:1 is the ideal ratio for adult rural literacy learners.

Study Partners Matter

But does this apply to, say, literate people doing vocational training? Probably not. But we still wouldn’t hand out one device to one student. In our lengthy experience, the best way to get people to learn, with or without technological devices, is by getting them to learn in pairs, or in foursomes, or best of all, both pairs and foursomes.

There is a reason for this. Let’s say you have to learn to speak Hindi or Ukrainian, or whatever, a language you know nothing about. Are you going to learn it better sitting on your own fighting your way through “Teach Yourself Hindi”, offline or online? Or are you going to learn it better working with your student twin, and taking it in turns to test each other, and having practice conversations? Of course, two is better, and sometimes four of you would be better still. This doesn’t just apply to languages – Geography or History will benefit from this approach.

Focus on Study Techniques

But let me give a word of caution. Just putting content on a device and getting the students to twin up, or work in foursomes still won’t work very well. They still need to learn how to study – how to use memory techniques, how to use mind maps, and how to use their multiple intelligences.

I once ran a pilot in a Delhi school. I asked the Principal to give me the worst class and the worst subject for a term. She gave me one of the classes of 15 year olds studying history. I told the students I wasn’t going to teach them any history. Instead, I taught them a dozen study techniques for a few days, and then paired them up. I told them they had to teach each other. By taking responsibility for each other, they learned much better. A teacher teaching a new subject learns it much better than a student studying a new subject.

There will of course be a small minority at the far end of the introvert scale who still prefer to study on their own, but mostly productivity will be best with groups of 2 or 4.

Interactive Process is Essential

I have recently been approached by a senior OLPC executive who told me his vision of educating the whole of India by simply putting all the necessary educational content on a tablet computer and handing out devices to everyone. I tried to disabuse him of this idea. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a student absorb information just because it happens to be on a tablet. The interactive process is essential, and all the better for being student-to-student interactive instead of teacher-to-student.

So please, restrain yourself with the devices, and try pairs and foursomes instead.