Back in 2005, all Ken Banks wanted was a simple way to use his cellphone to reach the community around South Africa's Kruger National Park. Little did he know that his brainchild would help monitor nation-wide elections in Nigeria, provide market price information to fisherman in Indonesia, and just last week, become a finalist in theBuckminster Fuller Challenge for socially responsible projects and initiatives.
Of the estimated 5 billion cell phone users, most of them live in low and middle income countries, and many will never have access to a laptop. But they text – a lotIn the six years since the UK native first developed Frontline SMS, an open source software that turns a laptop into an internet-free communication hub, it has been used in more than 50 countries by thousands of organizations.
For remote parts of the developing world that have a mobile signal but hardly anything else, the simplicity of Frontline SMS is what makes it so useful. All it takes is a computer, a cell phone, and at least one bar of phone coverage. The setup allows such minimally equipped sort of ad hoc bulletin board created by virtue of simple texts.
No internet? No problem.
Here's how it works: After downloading and installing the Frontline SMS software to a computer (it works on Windows, Mac or Linux), you use a USB cable to attach a cell phone or GSM modem with a SIM card. With Frontline SMS open and running, you can then create groups of contacts and send them messages. Any text they send back will appear on screen and be added to a database of messages.
"We wanted to take advantage of the explosive growth of mobile phones," said grants manager Ryan Jones, who was in New York for the Challenge. "To take that potential, and deliver it to the NGOs and non-profits facing infrastructural challenges."
Of the estimated 5 billion cell phone users, most of them live in low and middle income countries, and many will never have access to a laptop. But they text – a lot. According to theInternational Telecommunications Union, the number of SMS messages tripled globally from 2007 to 2010, reaching a grand total of 6.1 trillion texts – or a blistering 200,000 a second.
Frontline SMS basically takes that already working system, and helps organizations use it to communicate with large groups of people in developing countries. For most of the beneficiaries of the software, nothing really changes.
"As far as they're concerned, they're just sending and receiving individual text messages," Jones said. The real data aggregation happens at the central hub level of the non-profit organization, which "means virtually zero disruption to the lives and habits of the community that you're trying to reach."
In El Salvador, it's used to broadcast weather reports and market prices to farmers. In Uganda, famers share advice on everything from soil erosion to crop pests.Little disruption, but some important benefits. For the 2007 Nigerian elections, a network of human rights organizations used Frontline SMS to enable people to text in if there was trouble at the polling booth. During this year's election they went even further, partnering up withcrowd-sourced mapping platform Ushahidi to turn SMS messages, emails and phone reports into rich visualizations.
It's also been useful in the agricultural sector. In El Salvador, Frontline SMS is being used to broadcast weather reports and market prices to farmers. CELAC, an organization in Uganda, is using it to send farmer-to-farmer advice about everything from how to avoid soil erosion to what to do about crop pests.
But the community health context is where Frontline SMS has really taken off. What initially began as a tool to support health care delivery and communication in rural Malawi eventually spun off into its own organization, Medic Mobile. Its just one example of how mobile technology is revolutionizing patient care in poor countries, the topic of Africa's firstmobile health summit last week.
While the software has been downloaded over 18,000 times, Jones admits that it's a challenge to track users. One of the major tasks of the Frontline SMS eight-person team is following up with as many people as possible, providing technical support or connecting them with others in the community of users.
And while Frontline SMS didn't win the Buckminster Fuller $100,000 prize, it's got many plans ahead. Frontline SMS:Credit would integrate SMS messaging with mobile payment systems, cutting transaction costs for small micro lenders and borrowers. Frontline SMS:Learn would serve as a tool for educational and training initiatives. Version 2.0, still in the development stages, would expand features like MMS messaging for photos, and allow for better collection and analysis of structured data.
"If we didn't do another thing, there'd still be hundreds of organizations that could use Frontline SMS and benefit from it," said Jones. "But as long as our little free piece of software can help, we want to make sure we're doing as much as we can."
