Technology and the SDGs -The Mobile Telephony Revolution

The mobile revolution is an ongoing phenomenon that has brought with it innovative and exciting ideas. Having leapfrogged landline telephones, several African countries today have almost universal smartphone penetration rates. Globally, mobile phones have become the primary device with which people connect stay connected and retrieve information because of their portability and how they facilitate data delivery on-demand.

In education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are delivered via Internet to mobile phones anywhere in the connected world. This means that students in a village in Benin can receive quality education based on content provided by a school in a suburban area in Virginia. Quality education means that high-quality content should be made available to students wherever they are. Several online learning hubs have accumulated millions of users who use these platforms to prepare for exams in school or even learn skills to advance their careers.

Besides the portability it provides, the mobile phone also houses a collection of sensors allowing for a myriad of applications to be built off the device. In a sense, the camera of a phone is the phone’s eyes. In health for example, a community worker can use the phone to send pictures that could be used for physical diagnosis of patients in remote rural areas to more advanced health centers in the urban areas. The key is that public health and IT experts need to bounce ideas off each other. If for example, it is possible to reduce the number of symptoms for an ailment to a set of physical characteristics, could these characteristics be checked for using mobile devices? I once read of a start-up that developed a mobile app which trained volunteers could use to run eye-tests in remote areas. The results would be sent back to the more advanced health center for analysis. There are also free web services through which one can run an eye-test and submit the reports to a professional optometrist. These technologies help bridge the gap between those who live in remote areas and are often unable to visit hospitals in urban centers for advanced care.

Another feature mobile phones have is the ability to make use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) technology in pin-pointing the location of the device. This has been broadly used in transportation services to efficiently direct traffic thereby reducing gross emissions. It also has potential uses in public health for time-critical incidents. An example is cardiac arrest, a condition which depends on the timeliness of health care. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) has been shown to increase chances of survival of victims of cardiac arrest. However, ambulance services do not always get to patients on time. An app that was developed by an IT expert and a public health expert, Goodsam, allows CPR-certified volunteers to sign up to the platform, receiving notifications if there are any cardiac arrests in their vicinities. The critical role of GPS in this set-up is to help volunteers navigate their way to people in need of immediate attention. With a growing network of volunteers all over Europe, the quality of public health will dramatically increase. The impact of mobile telephony on health could be exponentially increased if appropriate applications are developed with these tools in mind.

Another interesting application of mobile telephony has been the access to financial services it provides for unrepresented groups. A good example is M-Pesa, a mobile payments system that started in Kenya. Backed by the central bank authorities and the nation’s largest telecommunications service provider, mobile phone users can integrate banking services on the handsets with extreme ease. For a country where masses didn’t have bank accounts, the adoption of this technology took off with ease. For the first time, one could instantly transfer money from the capital, Nairobi, to their parents in the rural areas. The externalities associated with this system are numerous. Women could now save money to provide their children with education. A huge amount of jobs was generated in the form of sales people and transfer agents among others. The costs of transferring cash through strangers was eliminated. Now, all one needed was a pin-code. Most importantly, however, anyone that had a mobile phone could have a bank account.

Because of its ubiquity, mobile phones have been used for activism too. In Hong Kong, the mobile phone powered the 2014 Umbrella revolution via the Firechat app. Backed by mesh networking, the app was designed to allow for messaging even in the absence of the Internet. Still on citizen partnership, mobile telephony has increased options for government to receive feedback from citizens.

Notes

CDC, “Cardiac Arrest: An Important Public Health Issue,” 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.cdc.gov/dhdsp/docs/cardiac-arrest-infographic.pdf. [Accessed: 12-May-2017].

Goodsam, “GoodSAM,” 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.goodsamapp.org/. [Accessed: 19-Dec-2017].

S.-C. Hoeller, “FireChat app lets you text without Wi-Fi or data - INSIDER,” 2016. [Online].

W. Jack and T. Suri, “Mobile Money : The Economics of M ‐ PESA 1,” Group, pp. 1–30, 2011.