Building the African web for mobile
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The document discusses the impact of mobile technology on Africa, highlighting that mobile phones have become essential for internet access and health care delivery. It outlines various mobile health projects across different countries and emphasizes the emerging trend of mobile app development to address real-life problems, including health monitoring and agricultural information dissemination. The future of mobile apps is seen as collaborative, leveraging open-source tools, with a potential surge in mobile-based money transfers.
Building the African web for mobile
- 2. • Building the African Web for mobile means developing relevant mobile solutions (Apps) that will solve real life problems . At the Connect Africa Summit in 2007, Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, said: “In 10 short years, what was once an object of luxury and privilege, the mobile phone, has become a basic necessity in Africa.” • Mobile phones are the main way most Africans connect to the internet. Now there are definite figures to back that claim. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has reported that use of mobile internet surpassed fixed internet in the last quarter of 2009 – and has extended its lead to 300,000 users in Q1 2010.
- 3. • Health practitioners have often been at the forefront of using mobile phones as a development tool in Africa, with a variety of mobile health (m-health) projectson the continent. These projects range in variety and scope, from monitoring measles outbreaks in the Zambia, to supporting diagnosis and treatment by health workers in Mozambique, to sending health education messages in Benin, Malawi, and Uganda. In Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa, mobile phones are being used to send several reminders a day to HIV-positive patients about their anti-retroviral therapy schedule, as well as allow community health workers to send information about HIV patients’ status. Mobile phones are also extending the reach of medical workers and medical services. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, mothers can call a hotline to ask questions about their child’s health status. Mobile phones have been used in the collection, measurement, and monitoring of health data, such as monitoring and tracking epidemics. For example, low-cost medical imaging systems have used mobile phone technology to transmit data and images to a central processor (Granot, Ivorra, and Rubinsky, 2008).
- 4. Percentage of mobile Web users who never or 80% infrequently use the desktop Web 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Nigeria Kenya Ghana South Africa Egypt Source: On Device Research (www.mobithinking.com)
- 5. • An emerging trend is the development of mobile phone- based services and products that go beyond basic voice calls and text messaging. While these services have often focused on entertainment applications (“apps”) in wealthier countries, these applications are providing opportunities for Disseminating agricultural price information, monitoring health care, and transferring .Money to less developed countries. • The future of building mobile apps will be collaborative building of mobile apps by developers using open source tools like Github that is available for free.
- 6. • Developers should work with pure Software development and Object Oriented principles • Remittance/transfers by mobile is growing much faster than m- banking (driven by developing nations) • Berg Insight predicts international money transfers will increasingly be done by mobile. By 2015 3–15 percent of transfers handled by agent networks today will be carried out by mobile handset. • American developers build mobile web apps to solve their problems so we should tap into the system and build mobile web solutions that would make our work easier. • It is estimated that transactions within Europe is 60% whereas transaction within Africa is 10%. • E-commerce – Building an e-commerce mobile app that will transcend the whole of African using a common currency via a mobile web app.
- 7. Small teams = Big Impact Solve Real life African Problems