Leveraging Internet with Radio
Feb 25, 2009 Africa, Case Study, Connectivity, Geekcorps, ICT, ICT4D, Mali
Within ICT4D practice, there seems to be little debate, at least when you look at implementation funding, that bringing Internet to rural areas in places like Africa that had been previously “cut off” is good idea and potentially transformative. Until recently more recently, “bringing the Internet” has meant usually plunking down a VSAT, setting up a small computer lab and hoping someday that one day it will become sustainable.
Despite being by and large, unsustainable, such projects are still difficult and are important from a symbolic standpoint and do serve as a temporary bridge in some ways for the digital divide. The problem that is even harder to address is accessibility. How many people actually get to access the Internet on the computers and when then they do are they using it in a way that’s socially beneficial?
Eventually low cost smart phones that are able to access the Internet in an acceptable way (think <$100 Chinese iPhone), will represent a paradigm shift in the way Africans connect to the Internet. Until then, a community radio is probably the best way to make the information on the Internet accessible to rural communities.
The following is a story about a project in I worked on during my time at Geekcorps Mali which helps illustrate this point.
A Weekly Connection to the Outside World
Aboubacrine Touré admits to having become somewhat of a local celebrity in Bourem Inaly, a remote community about 30 kilometers west of Tombouctou on the Niger river in northern Mali. While he is the director of the local community radio station, Radio Beeray (Respect), he is best known throughout the region as the host of Journal of Journals, a weekly radio news program that airs every Sunday night.
Using an IESC Geekcorps Desert PC equipped with an R-BGAN Satellite Modem, Aboubacrine connects to the Internet in search of local and regional news that would be of interest to his listening audience. Over the span of the week, he carefully summarizes the news which he presents in the local language Songhai during his hour-long broadcast.
Radio Beeray’s ability to connect to the Internet is a direct result of USAID Mali’s Communication for Development objective whose aim is “to make it easier for Malians to get access to information that will enable them to improve the quality of their lives.” In partnership with USAID Mali, IESC Geekcorps set out to develop an affordable solution for providing Internet access to its partner radio stations at sites across the remote desert region of northern Mali. Based on VIA components, Geekcorps designed the Desert PC to withstand the extreme heat and dust of a harsh desert environment. Additionally, its power draw is less then a 60W light bulb, which makes the PC ideal for an environment where solar is the primary source of energy. An R-GBAN system along with bandwidth limiting software can be paired with the Desert PC to provide an affordable medium for a community to connect to the outside world.
Since Aboubacrine started the program in early 2006, its reception from the local community has been very positive. He knows of many people who even bought radios for the first time so their families could tune into his program and be connected to the outside world through the news.
When a technical difficulty caused the radio station’s Internet connection to be down temporarily, he was amazed by the number of people who wrote in to complain.
Initially, Journal of Journals was met with a lot of skepticism. Since most people in his remote village had never heard of the Internet, he was often accused of, “making the news up!” Aboubacrine explains. This was especially the case earlier this year when Radio Beeray broke the news that Tuareg rebels had attacked the northern outpost of Kidal. Most people simply did not believe that such an attack was possible and were particularly doubtful since no one from neighboring Timbuktu could corroborate the report. The next day when the Malian national press picked up the story, Radio Beeray skeptics became dedicated listeners.
While he primarily uses the Internet to email and get current news (especially stories relating to tensions in the north and the Ivory Coast civil war), Aboubacrine often has requests to look up things like telephone country codes or weather forecasts. Additionally, the encyclopedia that came installed with the computer has been very popular with local students. Mr. Touré, who also works as a teacher at the local school, admits that access to the Internet has even had a positive effect on his lesson planning. While it will likely be years before the average Malian has access to the web, Radio Beeray shows the Internet remains a powerful tool for helping to bridge the information gap.
There are some key take aways from this project that are important to share. From a technical standpoint, it was a tremendous success. Using a lot of clever engineering, we were able to limit the radio’s bandwidth consumption to about 200K/day or $6 (1MB) a week, which the Radio Director was able to use to connect his community to the outside world - certainly a lot of “bang-for-the-byte”. Despite getting the total Internet cost down to about $30-40 a month (vs. $300+ for VSAT), an amount the Radio could probably sustain, Radio Beeray currently has no Internet. The reason, which is almost always the case, once funding ends payments stop to the satellite provider. We worked so hard to engineer a solution that was affordable that we overlooked the fact that once Geekcorps was gone they would have no way of paying. This is too often the case and in many cases it is unavoidable.
The good news is that increasingly you are able to pay for data via a prepaid scratch card, the same you use to fill up your cell. 2G/3G in Africa is coming and when it gets to Tomboctou, Radio Beeray will be able to stay online.
Rapid Android (RapidSMS) Launched on Android!
Feb 12, 2009 ICT, Mobile, News, SMS, Travel
Today UNICEF’s Innovation Group in partnership with Dimagi has just announced the launch of Rapid Android a mobile data collection and SMS messaging system, for the Android platform. RapidSMS has gotten a lot of well deserved, positive attention for being the technology behind Columbia University’s and UNICEF’s amazing Child Malnutrition and Surveillance and Famine Response project which recently won the USAID Innovation Challenge.
Rapid Android is so exciting because it represents the first time (at least that I know of) where a phone can now be used not only as a data entry tool but a data aggregation platform. A hybrid - bot SMS Gateway server AND client; traditional technical lines are beginning to blur as our the types of applications we can hosting on a phone.
Rapid Android should make deploying field based SMS data collections systems both easier and more affordable. Previously, deploying RapidSMS required a computer with Linux, a compatible phone or GPRS modem and someone with the technical chops to be able to install RapidSMS and its many dependencies.
Some advantages of Rapid Android include:
- price - available on any android phone ($400) and only getting cheaper. Android on netbooks makes this even more exciting.
- power - a phone requires requires much less power, can be charged from 12V, has a built in UPS (battery)
- portability - having a battery makes it portable, you don’t need a physical location (just a person) where to host it. Rapid Android phones can be easily shipped for deployment minimizing the need for a technical person on the deployment side
- data entry - ideal data entry device with touch screen, keyboard and form based error correction
Rapid Android includes many of the original features of RapidSMS including::
- ability to bulk send and receive sms to groups of people
- data collection via SMS forms which are editable on the phone
- local data entry using standard SDK Android forms
- view and aggregate data from incoming SMS messages
- plot data in graphs and export via excel over a wifi link
RapidAndroid is not a web server and currently can’t be used to host forms which could be accessed from a remote computer yet. This is a very powerful feature that hopefully we’ll see later.
Rapid Android is a result of a collaboration between UNICEF and Dimagi an initiative that came out of the Open Mobile Consortium. Rapid Android was developed primarily by Daniel Myung and Cory Zue at Dimagi with support from the UNICEF Innovation team. Rapid Android is free and open source and now available at: http:www.rapidandroid.org.
For more info on RapidSMS, a review I wrote for MobileActive is available here.
Finally some screen shots!
RapidSMS Android Form
Edit a field
Incoming messages
Aggregated data summary
Plot Line Charts
and bar charts!
What its all about... the data
Finally, be sure to checkout the just launched website of UNICEF’s Innovation group:
http://unicefinnovations.org/
Update: Cause Global just posted an excellent interview with the UNICEF Innovations team about RapidSMS use in the field
Offline Wikipedias
Offline wikipedias represent an important source for information for places that have no/unreliable/expensive or censored Internet. I would like to highlight two projects that I have experience with.
SOS School Wikipedia
SOS Children’s Villages recently released an updated SOS 2008/2009 version of its kid safe, “hand checked” English Wikipedia version aimed at school children with selections based around the UK National Curriculum. This version is 3.5GB big and contains 5,500 articles which is about the size of a 20 volume encyclopedia consisting of about 20 million words and 34,000 images (big selling point for kids). The earlier version was distributed widely by the Shuttleworth foundation in South Africa and the through SOS’s large network of schools worldwide (192 schools & 91,000 students).
The SOS version comes in the form of static html so it can be easily run off a DVD or USB key on any computer. Content is organized by subject and with a handy title word index that does a good job replacing search functionality.
The SOS School Wikipedia 2008/2009 version can be downloaded for free here as a torrent.
Moulin Wiki
Moulin Wiki was a project that came out of the Geekcorps Mali program during my time there, the brain child of Renaud Gaudin and Frederic Renet. At that time, we weren’t able to find a suitable offline wikipedia version so we saught to create it.
Moulin Wiki is a desktop application based on Mozilla’s XULRunner and can run on windows, osx and linux. Unlike a selected version, our goal was make available the entire Wikipedia text, indexed and searchable. We were unable, however, to include images due to both licensing and size constraints.
Since our target market were people living in Mali, we released a French 550MB CDROM version containing 500K+ articles which we distributed across the country through our partners and Peace Corps Volunteers. Internews then sponsored the creation of a Farsi version which they distributed over 2,000 copies to journalists, universities and individuals in Iran.
Moulin is currently available in French, Arabic, Farsi and Vietnamese with an English version still in the works.
Zipedia
Zipedia is a Firefox extension that is able to read a Wikipedia dump to provide offline access. I really like the concept of being able to update your content by downloading new dumps (in any language). One of problems with this approach, however, is since there is no indexing is the user experience is not very zippy.
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