Empowering the Poor

Over the past decade, the mobile phone has become a powerful tool for providing poor people with access to information and services that can improve their lives and their livelihoods.  Since 2002, Grameen Foundation has focused on expanding telecommunications services to poor people in remote areas and creating business opportunities for micro-entrepreneurs.  Today, we are also developing new ways to use mobile phones and other technology to benefit the world’s poor.

Village Phone
For millions living on less than $2 per day, affordable and reliable access to telecommunications services STILL does not exist. In these rural communities, people are often forced to travel great distances to make a phone call.  Launched in 2003 in Uganda, Grameen Foundation’s Village Phone  program builds on the pioneering work of Grameen Telecom  in Bangladesh, which has created new economic opportunities for more than 362,000 Village Phone Operators to date.  Since our program’s inception, we have worked with technology and development stakeholders around the globe to expand Village Phone services in multiple countries. We have partnered with local microfinance institutions and non-governmental organization; technology companies such as Qualcomm and Nokia; and telecommunications providers such as MTN in Uganda, Rwanda, and Cameroon and Bakrie Telecom in Indonesia. To date, we have helped to create more than 25,000 Village Phone micro-franchises in Africa and Asia, through direct technical assistance, partnerships, and advisory services.

We have also identified ways in which Village Phone Operators can expand their role, offering key services to community members. We are currently piloting tailored business models for the VPOs that enable them to offer additional products and services, increasing both their economic activity and the value they can bring to their communities. We have also recently begun integrating the Progress out of Poverty Index™ (PPI™) into our Village Phone work in order to better assess how the living conditions of Village Phone Operators are changing.

We are also launching a Mobile Money initiative to explore how microfinance institutions could conduct transactions with clients via mobile phones, while also enabling poor and unbanked populations to use the service to send money to relatives and receive payments for goods and services.
 

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Innovation
Today, there are more than four billion mobile phone subscribers globally, with two-thirds of them living in the developing world. Our ICT Innovation Program builds on our Village Phone program by developing, testing and expanding products and services that can improve health care, increase agricultural yields and income, facilitate transactions and provide a range of other benefits. We work with local, regional, and global content and technology partners to develop innovative technology solutions and sustainable business models to provide locally-relevant information services.  There are currently initiatives in Uganda, Indonesia and Ghana.

Our Application Laboratory (AppLab) focuses on identifying and building mobile phone applications that make it easier to disseminate information to poor people and collect it from them.  We launched our first suite of mobile applications in Uganda in June 2009 following a two-year collaboration with Google, MTN Uganda, and local organizations.  In April 2009, we expanded our work to Indonesia, where Grameen Foundation is already implementing a Village Phone program, and are currently exploring possible applications in collaboration with Qualcomm.

The Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) initiative, which is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explores how locally-based individuals equipped with mobile phones can serve as “trusted intermediaries” for small-holder farmers in Uganda.   Working in collaboration with a variety of local partners, Grameen Foundation is developing information services using locally-created content that allow CKWs to access a wide range of information for farmers upon request. 

We launched the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) initiative in November 2008 to determine how mobile phones could be used to improve care for pregnant mothers and newborns in rural Ghana.  Funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this is a collaborative initiative between Grameen Foundation, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, the Ghana Health Service, and the Dodowa Health Research Center.