A new report by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) on mobile applications in East Africa examines the mobile landscape and applications offered – from health to finance and governance – the barriers to delivery, and approaches to successfully scaling-up applications beyond the pilot stage.

The report have identified more than 120 innovative and useful mobile applications developed in the region. Most implementations are still in their infancy in the region. A few successful cases, namely mobile money transaction systems (i.e. M-Pesa) and various health related solutions (including Text To Change) are being used at scale, but the fact remains that the number of scaled-up mobile services are still few and/or limited geographically.

What is needed? First the cost of communication must go down – SMS is very overpriced and so is voice and data traffic. Secondly, many applications and services never reach out to the masses due to poor marketing and the non-existing meta data about the available applications. There is a huge need for marketing (of the product) and education (for the end user) in order to make mobile applications sustainable. Thirdly, many interventions are not designed with scale in mind. Few implementers are familiar with all the costs involved and seen from a technological point of view, the requirements on networks and different requirements on handsets and end-users that mobile applications have must be understood better.

The Innovative Use of Mobile Applications in East Africa was written by Johan Hellström (johan@upgraid.org) for Sida (www.sida.se) and released in June 2010.
Download report here: www.texttochange.org/sites/default/files/sr2010-12_sida_hellstrom.pdf