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FIRST Response Radio - Life Saving Information in Disaster

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FIRST Response Radio - Life Saving Information in Disaster

A big thank you to Mike Adams, the INTL Coordinator, for sharing his experiences with FrontlineSMS and further schooling us on how radio can facilitate in saving lives!  In times of disaster radio not only saves lives, it can also bring hope and critical information to the affected community. When the 2004 tsunami struck Banda Aceh, Indonesia, all the radio and TV stations went off air. Similarly, during the 2005 South Asian earthquake, the only radio station near the epicentre lost its tower and went off air. In times like these, people are in desperate need of news and information on how to get to safety and how to survive. However, the unfortunate trend seen recently is that when radio is so important, many times it goes off the air and does not come back until well after the emergency is over.

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UPDATED: Using SMS to mobilize the community clean-up of Ciliwung River, Indonesia: One piece of garbage at a time.

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UPDATED: Using SMS to mobilize the community clean-up of Ciliwung River, Indonesia: One piece of garbage at a time.

UPDATE: 18 June 2013 According to the Mobilisation Lab, this is now a World Record-breaking garbage clean-up! Congratulations everyone! FrontlineSMS has had a strong connection with environmental issues since our Founder had the initial spark of an idea while working on an anti-poaching project in South Africa. We're delighted to be able to host Een Irawan Putra of KPC Bogor and the Indonesia Nature Film Society to our blog, to share how he used FrontlineSMS in Indonesia to invite he community to help clean up the garbage clogging the Ciliwung River.

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The Umpteenth Blog on using SMS Feedback in Projects…Now with Support!

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The Umpteenth Blog on using SMS Feedback in Projects…Now with Support!

With shiny apps hogging the mobile spotlight these days, one could be forgiven for forgetting about SMS (“Short Message Service” or text messaging).  But although apps often disguise themselves as universally useful, their data and hardware requirements preclude their widespread use in poor countries.  Amongst the world’s poor, SMS is still king.  Given the World Bank’s mandate to serve the exactly that population, and in response to demand from staff, I recently attended a 2-day Frontline SMS training here in DC.

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Health Information for Remote & Rural Eastern Indonesia

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Health Information for Remote & Rural Eastern Indonesia

The landscape of NTT is largely rugged and infertile with a short and intense wet season. In this environment subsistence farming, the predominant livelihood, is marginal with many communities experiencing periods of hunger through the dry season. The provision of services to the rural population is difficult because there the few roads are generally of poor quality and frequently impassible in the wet season due to flooding or landslides. For many accessing health services requires walking long distances and the use of public transport where available. It is not uncommon for people in need of emergency care to be carried by a group of villagers to a point where road transport is available.

A project with teeth: improving dental health outcomes in the Gambia using FrontlineSMS

A project with teeth: improving dental health outcomes in the Gambia using FrontlineSMS

'As part of our Masters program at Drexel University School of Public Health, we were afforded the opportunity to work on addressing public health concerns in the Gambia for six weeks in summer 2012. We would be working on a community-based masters thesis. Our project focuses on advancing mobile health concerns by improving dental health practices using SMS messaging, as well as enhancingvaccine inventory control at village trekking sites. Health workers could manage referrals, follow-up treatment, and reminders to patients using SMS.

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Can Citizen Journalism Move Beyond Crisis Reporting in Traditional Newsrooms?

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Can Citizen Journalism Move Beyond Crisis Reporting in Traditional Newsrooms?

Citizen reporters broke much of the news, though they still needed broadcast media to help spread it. In some cases, citizens were able to capture iconic photos of events. Others were able to tell compelling stories about how the emergency affected their lives, including obeying the "stay in place" request by government officials during the manhunt. It has been widely reported how quickly social communities also got information wrong, including falsely accusing suspects. But I've seen a nearly equal number of reports showing how quickly these communities were able to self-correct their own misinformation.

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Lowering barriers to adoption isn't just one approach - it's critical to real 'scale'

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Lowering barriers to adoption isn't just one approach - it's critical to real 'scale'

FrontlineSMS is no different. We're trying to make it easier to use simple text messages to do complex things. For FrontlineSMS to really work for an organization, we recognize that we have to see not one, but two changes take place.

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Keeping it Simple with SMS

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Keeping it Simple with SMS

UN Special Envoy to the Western Sahara Christopher Ross landed in Morocco last Wednesday. While the international community anxiously waits to see where his next round of negotiations go, here's a peek into the lives of those affected most by the outcome - Sahrawi refugees. For once, a little hope for the future coming from the Sahara...

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MfarmerSMS service links farmers to better markets in Nakaseke- Uganda

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MfarmerSMS service links farmers to better markets in Nakaseke- Uganda

The MFarmer SMS service, a project of the Nakaseke Community Telecentre in Uganda, helps farmers in rural areas to connect with better markets. It encourages two-way feedback with farmers, buyers and agro-processors, and other service providers. The project is designed to help farmers access agricultural market price information and weather information through their mobile phones.

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A Day Well Spent at FrontlineSMS

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A Day Well Spent at FrontlineSMS

Given the incredible growth in mobile usage in the last decade, it comes as no surprise that many organisations are embracing the use of mobile technology to expand their reach and engage with communities. This has come with its fair share of challenges, given some of the limitations of technology such as poor mobile connectivity in some areas, SMS has become the more reliable and inexpensive option.

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Kenya: From the ‘phone booth’ to widespread mobile adoption in Silicon Savannah

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Kenya: From the ‘phone booth’ to widespread mobile adoption in Silicon Savannah

I had my first mobile phone in 1999, a metallic blue Motorola M3888. Its street name was “phone booth” because it was the cheapest mobile phone available, even though it was a luxury. It cost 14,000KES ($160) – a gift from my father bought during a Safaricom Valentine’s Day special. I could make calls - for 40KES (50 cents) per minute, and send SMS, and that was it; I loved that phone!

How radio can be a conversation (not a lecture) and a jukebox (not a playlist)

How radio can be a conversation (not a lecture) and a jukebox (not a playlist)

Airtime is an awesome piece of software, built by Sourcefabric, which lets radio stations take control of programming via the web. It includes a simple scheduling calendar, smart playlists and automated playout. To mark World Radio Day 2013, FrontlineSMS:Radio's Amy O'Donnell wrote a post for Sourcefabric's blog on how this scheduling tool can be complemented by channels including SMS to help to make radio interactive. A snippet of the post is republished below, or you can read the original post in full here.

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Our brand of ‘agile’

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Our brand of ‘agile’

“Our dev team does SCRUM, with user-centric, test-driven development”. We’re proud of that statement, but also very aware of how unsubstantiated that claim can sound. We’ve all heard the stories of the tech companies with 6-month-long ‘iterations’ and 3000-page specification documents that nonetheless brand themselves Agile. These horror stories could push some to follow their agile approach of choice to the letter, for fear of being swept downstream into the dreaded waterfall, but at FrontlineSMS we feel we’ve adapted much of the industry’s best practices and most trusted tools to create a process that gives us confidence in our code, and the ability to create an ever-improving product for our users.

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The Data Divide

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The Data Divide

Do you remember when grocery stores didn’t know you were pregnant before your parents? Or when newspapers couldn’t find naked pictures of you by looking through your phone? Boy, those were the days (When did I get this old?). Still, there’s no escaping it. Things are digitizing. Everywhere. Whether you’re registering to vote in Washington State using Facebook or banking on your mobile phone in Kenya, there are, all of a sudden, a bunch of third-party organizations involved in the most intimate parts of your life that weren’t there before. And, for the most part, that’s a good thing. Services are delivered more quickly, collective action is easier to organize, and you can do, well, almost everything, better.

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ChatSalud Aims to Empower Rural Nicaraguans to Advocate for their Sexual and Reproductive Health.

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ChatSalud Aims to Empower Rural Nicaraguans to Advocate for their Sexual and Reproductive Health.

In Nicaragua, sex is embarrassing.  Yet in a country where approximately 50 percent of the population is below the age of 18, and where 1 in 3 adolescent girls will become pregnant before they reach the age of 18, it’s clear that people are having sex—they’re just not talking about it due to pena—a wonderfully ambiguous word located somewhere between shame, embarrassment, and awkwardness.