Knowledge Generation

Margaret McConnell of Harvard University and Mindy Hernandez of Mobiles4All (M4A) in the U.S. will generate rich datasets related to mobile phone use in Africa by providing mobile phones and incentives for users to share data. These datasets are of value to policymakers to promote the use of mobile money. They are collaborating with mobile network operator Vodacom Mozambique, behavioral scientists at Harvard University and developmental experts.

Lynne Thomson of TNS Global Research in the U.S. will use SMS to track digital and non-digital financial transactions in near real time to inform development agendas and boost uptake. Digital financial services help the poor lift themselves out of poverty, but measuring uptake is currently slow and expensive. SMS is widely used throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, and they will perform a proof-of-concept study in Kenya using SMS to send short surveys to a group of users to extract basic information on their recent financial transactions, such as type, date, and amount.

James Goulding from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom will address the knowledge gap in developing countries that is hampering development particularly of financial services by accessing real-time mobile phone call records and mobile financial transactions and using them to locate and model financial behavior across Tanzania. This approach could be faster, lower cost and more reliable than existing approaches that use small sample sizes or are based on crowd-sourcing.

Louiza Duncker of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa will evaluate the perception of labor by women smallholder farmers in South Africa and their need of labor-saving efforts, in order to guide the development of an effective labor-saving practice or device. Current labor-saving efforts are often driven by supply, without a full understanding of the needs of the users.