Notes from the World Bank eDevelopment Thematic Group workshop on “Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation - From Pilots to Scaled-up Implementation“ on 16 September in Washington DC.

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Session 1: Overview of Mobile Innovations Space and Enabling Environment

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Chair Introduction: Deepak Bhatia, Lead e-Government Specialist, GICT

There are a lot of mobile projects in place, but what does it take in terms of scaling up mobile solutions and really creating impact

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Oleg Petrov - Social networking and the webcast

Twitter, blog coverage by ICT4D.at - hashtag for Twitter is mobile09

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Opening Remarks: Philippe Dongier, Sector Manager, GICT
The Opportunity for Mobile Services in Developing World

There are many impressive stories how mobiles are used

The World Bank believes that mobile technology is the way forward

But there has been no major impact, the potential of ICTs has not yet been realized so far

Mobile technology may change this in the near future - it’s quite transformational, every sector has to be creative to find solutions to also transform the own sector and realize the opportunities

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Brooke Partridge, CEO, Vital Wave Consulting

M-Pesa: example for the incredible potential of formally addressing basic needs

It’s not the technology itself, but what it can do what is exciting

Subscriber market gets saturated very quick, 64% of users are in the developing world

Pressure for mobile operators: offering more mServices in developing countries

There are about 3.5 billion individual subscribers in the world

Development of m-Services because new subscriber market is saturated and people desire for basic services

mServices to meet basic human needs and for social services, especially in developing countries

A lot of mServices can be provided by simple technology such as SMS

• there are a lot of examples in BRIC countries which are already in use and successful
• but a lot of them are pilots and have not been scaled

Benefits of scaling services:

• increased revenue of provider -> increasing incentives to create services
• reaching larger populations
• reduced unit costs
• more efficiency by investing in improved technology

Examples of projects that are reaching some scale:

• mFinance: M-Pesa - sms based mobile account & money transfer; very successful but very unique and faces its own challenges
• mCommerce: Souktel Jobmatch - mobile job marketplace, 8000 total users

Value chain for mServices - very complex in terms of organizations involved, problematic for scaling

The technology for mServices is there, what needed is innovations in business

Opportunities and best practices for scaling:

• stay in national borders
• transfer pilot programs to more formal organizations
• rigorous ROI analysis
• keep it simple
• development of government regulations

Challenges to scale:

• legal concerns, interoperability & regulations
• priorities & risks
• infrastructure & leadership
• ecosystem

Opportunities for World Bank impact - investments to enable scale in the private sector, funding & oversight of mServices business case

• research, analysis & evaluation - national policies, user behaviour, impact
• mServices Solution Development Toolkit

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Commentary: Yong Huyn Kwon, Sr. Information Officer, GICT

several themes we have to think about

governments play big role in the early stages, but private sector comes in later

several questions that are hard to answer

• are private and public sector doing their job well?
• are all sectors cooperating with each other?
• are there mediators or enablers who take the leading role in communication between the sectors?

it’s difficult for the private sector to play the role the public one should play

when we think about people in developing countries - are they only costumers or owners of their own industry?

industry regulation is a big issue

several problems are hard to solve for the private sector alone - cooperation with the public sector is essential

Rajendra Singh, Sr. Regulatory Specialist, GICT

A lot of changes are taking place in the mobile industry

• Nokia considers itself no more as the absolute leader
• iPhone has changed the market

World Bank is involved in most sectors in developing and also aware of mobile technology

Unique possibility to make development projects more efficient

Big challenge for policy makers & regulators - the whole market is changing

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Q & A

relation between income & mobile footprint - how was that calculated?

mGovernment applications in Africa - isn’t the tipping point between SMS and mobile web coming closer? what are you suggestions concerning that?

• Brook; it’s not time yet due to infrastructure and devices
• Phillipe: depending in the field we want to work there is potential - e.g. equipping health workers with modern devices and targetting them specifically

technical question concerning the real number of mobile subscribers (3.5 bill) - what was your methodology? I think it’s too high

• taking numbers from the ITU of subscriptions, 90% of total are the addressable market in a population, everything above that was considered to be duplicate

Moldova: mobile carriers get 40% of revenue, value added services should be offered; quasi monopolistic situation, we need regulations

• World Bank already does research on real impact and regulations - that’s what the support of the World Bank should look like

is scale the only possibility to achieve profit or are private-public partnerships also an option?

if we are concerned about scale - what about the interoperability of mobile devices; how do we really pick up every user of mobile devices when there are so large gaps in the user groups;

We are proud to annouce another workshop organized by our fellows from the e-Development Thematic Group at the World Bank. We continue supporting eTG by covering events and workshops live in social media, namely twitter, facebook, linkedin, xing and flickr - plus through our blog ict4d.at/blog - We are constantly evolving and refactoring our lessons learned to strenghten and bundle this new communication channel and provide a good experience and interaction for the participants of such events and thereby integrating the user base of social and mobile media.

On twitter we are using the hashtag #mobile09

Here the official eTG announcement for the event:

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You are invited to participate via live webcast/social media in this e-Development Thematic Group Workshop:

“Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation. From Pilots to Scaled-up Implementation”
Time: September 16, 2009, 9:00 am - 5:15 p.m (All times Washington DC)

Event Web page: http://go.worldbank.org/7ZD6MGXWF0

You can watch live and recorded webcast at: www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live
Click here to register for live webcast: http://go.worldbank.org/BGZ8XU3KF0

Are you very welcome to send this invitation to your colleagues.

Description:

‘Explosive’ is the only way to describe mobile phone growth. Over half of the world’s 6.5 billion people now use a mobile and over 60 percent of mobile phone users live in developing countries. Mobile-based innovations are quickly emerging as the new frontier in transforming government, health, banking, education and many other sectors due to fast growing penetration of mobile phones even in the poorest and remotest areas of the globe. Many services can be now made available on a 24×7x365 basis at any place in the world covered by mobile networks, which today means almost everywhere. Through mobiles, for the first time ever, many public and private services have now reached poor households and communities. The demand for mobile applications is fast picking up developing countries. The multitude of highly innovative applications have been developed for mobile banking and payments, phone based information services for farmers and fishermen, locations based medical services and monitoring and data collection in the health sector, to name a few. However, the enormous potential of mobile devices for transforming delivery of public and financial services is still largely untapped.

This workshop aims to raise awareness of World Bank Group staff of the transformational role mobile technologies can play in improving service delivery, efficiency and transparency by show-casing mobile-enabled innovations in a number of sectors and identifying emerging lessons learned and ways to scale up for achieving operational efficiencies and development impact.

Agenda:

9:00 -10:15 am Overview of Mobile Innovations Space and Enabling Environment
10:15 -10:30 am Coffee Break
10:30 -11:45 am Mobile Innovations in Financial Services
11:45 - 1:00 pm Mobile Innovations in Health
1:00 - 2:30 pm Working Lunch & Session: Mobile Innovations in Education
2:30 - 3:45 pm Mobile Applications in Agriculture and Rural Development
3:45 - 4:00 pm Coffee Break
4:00 - 5:15 pm Mobile Innovations in Governance

Suame Magazine is an artisanal engineering cluster on an area of over 50 km² in the city of Kumasi, Ghana. It emerged in the 1930s and constantly increased in size in the following years - being one of the largest industrial areas in Africa by now. Over 200 000 people live there and approximately 12 000 businesses are located at Suame magazine mostly gathered around the automotive sector - doing car repairs and sale of spare parts amongst other things. Most of the businesses are very small and specialised - part of the private informal sector.

SMIDO is the Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organization which was founded in 2006 as a development institution for Suame Magazine. It is an umbrella organization for the associations in Suame Magazine and serves as an interface for the public and private sector. After focusing primarily on advocacy in the beginning, it now also offers ICT trainings for the craftsmen in the area and tries to foster business development.

The people who take the courses at SMIDO are mostly highly specialised workers with long experience in their field - repairing cars, producing custom-made parts, … - but who have not used ICTs before. The benefits the workers gain from learning ICTs are twofold:

Business benefits: As the shops mostly employ few workers and have a manageable stock of customers, keeping books on the computer, printing and communication via internet can help them save time, money and create networks with other colleagues - exchanging knowledge and even creating supply chains. SMIDO provides these trainings and for completing a training, the workers get certificates which are highly valuable when dealing with company customers.

Continuing education: As new cars are almost exclusively managed by microchips and generally cars have become more and more high-tech, the mechanics need training in dealing with these new kinds of car-repair-techniques. SMIDO is therefore searching for large companies in the automotive sector or companies with large stocks of cars to partner with - working together on providing specialised trainings. This would create a win-win situation by providing the companies with capable mechanics for their cars and the workers with increased income and possibilities for continuing education.

When SMIDO started providing trainings, there were only 2% of the workers at Suame Magazine using ICTs, now SMIDO has already trained 100 people and they are looking for possibilities to scale up. With a business plan at hand and a large number of skilled personnel this is an organization which I would love to invest in - if I would be an investor, or an automotive company. On the other hand, such a commitment would benefit the population at Suame Magazine, increasing the safety level at work (also an objective of SMIDO) and providing better income possibilities.

So, maybe there’s somebody interested out there. There’s large potential so I’m curious what will happen.

The Ghana Connect initiative is an effort by a group of stakeholders in the Telecommunications industry to develop a National Broadband Strategy. According to organizers, it is a platform for stakeholders in the ICT industry with the aim of ensuring broadband growth by means of public seminars, workshop and implementation of mechanisms to ensure accessibility and affordability of broadband connection for all. GhanaConnect seeks to help with policy and strategy development and implementation.

The current effort is to help develop a Broadband Strategy based on the Telecom and ICT Policies, geared towards making broadband accessible and affordable.

Several dignitaries and stakeholders including the Deputy Minister of Information, Hon Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, some Members of Parliament and industry giants including MTN, Vodafone, tiGO, KNET, NCBC, Internet Ghana, Netafrique, Omatek Computers and several other firms and organizations were present to contribute to the strategy development and implementation. The workshop was chaired by the Hon. Twumasi Appiah, MP and Chairman for the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications.

During his speech, the Hon. Twumasi Appiah underscored the relevance of broadband in facilitating the economic development of any country. He said “broadband can help facilitate e-citizenship and e-governance and enhance relations between citizens and government and strengthen our democracy. Broadband has enormous potential for strengthening community voice in public debate and decision making and in maintaining transparency and accountability by government”. At the end of his presentation, the Honorable MP enumerated certain action items he feels should be core elements in the Strategy. They include assessing competition regulation in the market, granting more infrastructure licenses, investing in nationwide fibre and developing a national master plan amongst others.

The Deputy Minister of Information also launched the workshop on behalf of the Vice President by stating the importance of broadband in general to economic development and conveyed the government’s commitment to ensuring broadband uptake.

There were four sessions on International fibre, national fibre, last mile access and PC and CPE costs and industry stakeholders took turns to give thought provoking presentations and ideas on how to increase broadband uptake. One highlight of the workshop was when Dr. Nii Narku Quaynor of NCS questioned the feasibility of the Strategies objective of increasing broadband uptake by 50% by 2015 but the general consensus was that it is important to increase broadband uptake.

The importance of local content came to light. Participants agreed that it was important to develop local content and to encourage localized traffic.

At the end of the first day, it came to light that recommendations should be made to government through parliament of the outcomes and recommendations of Ghana Connect initiative. The final day of the workshop will seek to incorporate all these inputs into the draft strategy

Source: GhanaConnect