A city without hunger?

Today somebody sent me the link to an article called The City That Ended Hunger. The article tells the story of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. In 1993 the newly-elected mayor, Patrus Ananias, decided to make food a right of citizenship. His aim was to wipe out hunger in Belo Horizonte.

The new administration then set up a body to look at how to meet this right. The body included citizen representatives, as well as representatives from labour, business and the church. This agency went on to put in place a host of measures to ensure that no resident of the city would continue to go hungry.

They gave small-scale farmers spots to sell their produce, and set up ‘People’s Restaurants’ where people could get good, nutritious meals for next to nothing. They also helped set up community and school gardens and instituted nutrition classes.

The cost of all this was less than 2 percent of the city’s budget, and the results where phenomenal.  The measures helped 40% of the city’s population, and cut infant mortality and infant malnutrition by half.

The story struck me because in South Africa, our mayors and councils state that their mission is to create World Class Cities. What this usually translates to, is cities that are orientated to international business interests and foreign tourists. Often, in the quest for ‘World Class’ cities, most of the local residents get left behind.

I am still lost in a daydream of how our major cities might look and feel, if our mayors made it their mission to have cities in which nobody goes hungry. They might not be ‘World Class’, whatever that might mean, but they would surely be top class places to live for their own citizens.

Are private lives fair game for the media?

There has been quite a buzz in South Africa recently about issues of press freedom and ethics.

It started out with a newspaper article in one of the major papers, alleging that South African President Kgalema Motlanthe had a 24-year-old girlfriend, who was carrying his child. It later turned out there were serious questions about the accuracy of the article.

The whole issue has sparked a big debate about press freedom and ethics. Is it legitimate for the media to expose politicians’ private lives in this way? Arts and Culture minister Pallo Jordan wrote a long, outraged letter to the Mail & Guardian, condemning the reports. One of his arguments is that once politicians’ private lives are fair game, it will soon be the rest of us who find our privacy invaded. This week one of the newspaper’s reporters printed a rebuttal. The journalist, Sam Sole, argues that it is irrelevant that there were problems with the accuracy of this particular story – that presidents’ and politicans’ private lives are fair game for the media under certain conditions.

The issue raises many questions. To what standard of morality should we hold our leaders? Does that morality involve only issues of direct public import — such as whether they pay their taxes and are law abiding, or does it stretch to matters of love and family too? If so, by whose moral standards are we judging people?

Another concern is the motivation behind these stories. There are currently big struggles going on within the ANC. If a story suddenly appears, smearing one of the main contenders, we, and surely the journalists, ought to be asking ourselves why. Whose interests are being served by the story? That should cause us to reflect  before we simply react.

ANC leader Jacob Zuma presents an interesting case. He is a polygamist and has several wives. According to the laws of the country, that is perfectly permissible. Some have criticized him, saying his lifestyle does not reflect the values embodied in the constitution. See for example Colleen Lowe Morna’s article. Others will argue with that, saying cultural values are relative — Zuma is operating according to the traditional values of his culture, and it’s not fair to judge him based on another culture’s set of values. One version of this view is presented by Khadija Bradlow.

Compare concerns about politicians’ sex lives, to concerns about other issues. Over the past weekend, several South African newspapers published extensive reports about the ANC’s spokesman, Carl Niehaus — how he has spent huge amounts of money and not paid it back, had forged signatures of prominent people, hasn’t paid his rent for months and so on. I’m sure few would argue that these reports are unjustified. Niehaus is the public face of the ANC in the media, and if he is corrupt, that is of legitimate public interest.

But where do we draw the line?

The latest ’scandal’ to hit the news involves reports in a major Sunday newspaper, about a video allegedly showing a former rugby hero in a compromising situation with someone who’s not his wife — and snorting some white powder. The rugby player–turned-celebrity involved has denied it is him in the film. But the question remains — true or not, should the newspaper have published the report? The man is a celebrity yes, but he’s not an elected official. What right do they have to pry into his private life?

Well then, what about all the celebrities whose troubled personal lives we follow with such glee — Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and the like? Is this stuff really news?

My own view is that aside from the issue of media ethics, gossip-mongering about people’s sex lives seems to be taking over, and it’s unhealthy for us a society. We’re getting more and more sex scandals and less serious coverage of the issues that really affect our lives. We may debate the merits of individual cases, and politicians may be fairer game than most. But overall we need to ask whether such stories are really useful to society — or do they serve as a useful diversion, to distract us from the really important stuff? It’s the old pickpocket’s trick — distract the victim while you take all his or her money.

Are we all being duped? We may wake up one day to find that while we’ve been oohing and aahing over the sex scandals, that our countries have been impoverished, our rights sold away from under us.

Nervous laughter at our political jokes

There’s an old line that goes: “The problem with political jokes is that too many of them end up getting elected.” That line has been coming back to me in the last two weeks. With Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were lots of TV comedy clips looking back on the presidency of George W Bush and all the gaffes he made. What a contrast! Obama — clever and composed and never at a loss for words, is clearly a vast improvement on Bush, who just came across as a buffoon on so many occasions.

The trouble is, George Bush’s bumbling is not actually that funny. Yes we laugh and maybe feel sorry for the guy, but the comedy deceives us. The truth is that Bush was more dangerous than he seemed to be. As Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine commented recently, George W. Bush’s administration had a serious mission — to turn over as much money and power as possible to the rich, elite, business interests that supported it.

Lucky USA — Bush has gone and Obama seems to be wasting no time in trying to sort out the mess he left behind. Poor South Africa, it seems here the great ones of the Mandela era are long gone, while our political jokes wait in the wings. Our resident comics are Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema, president of the ANC and the ANC Youth League respectively. But as with Bush, I have no doubt that the buffoonery is the veneer on a much more serious mission — to secure control of state power for the benefit of those who’ve supported them.

Jacob Zuma is a laughing stock with his now famous comments about showering to get rid of HIV, and his constantly singing about his machine gun. But it’s Malema who has the headlines these days. His most recent utterance has everyone outraged. He suggested the woman who accused Jacob Zuma of rape actually had a good time with Zuma. This is apparently proved by the fact that she didn’t leave the house immediately after the incident in question. Like other women who enjoy sex, he said, Zuma’s accuser waited until morning and asked for taxi money. What planet is he on? What is a woman alone without transport supposed to do in the middle of the night in Johannesburg. Walk home? And to suggest that all women are just in search of a free meal and some pocket money is just beyond outrageous.

Malema’s comments have of course sparked fury and condemnation — but I wonder if the outrage will do any good. This joker seems to love the controversy — it keeps him on the front pages after all.  This political joke is not so much comedian as the villainous Joker of Batman fame. The Sunday Times last week hit the nail on the head — naming Malema their Mampara of the Week they said, “We’d laugh. But we’re too scared.”

Stories that make me shake my head

I’ve been in Zambia and Uganda over the past two weeks, and have had some experiences and encounters that really make me wonder about governments and their priorities.

In Zambia, I was in a minibus taxi, and one of the passengers was handing out photocopied letters, explaining that he had had to come to Lusaka, a long distance from his home village, to get medicines at the government hospital — only to find that the medicines were out of stock. This wasn’t the first time, either. Now he was asking for contributions from fellow passengers, to help pay his transport fares back home.

In Uganda, the New Vision newspaper of January 23rd contains a letter to the editor, by a father telling the tragic story of the death of his new-born son. He had taken his pregnant wife to a private hospital to be tested for malaria. The hospital supposedly tested her and gave her a clean bill of health. The next day, his wife’s waters broke and he rushed her back to the hospital where she gave birth two months prematurely. After he discovered the hospital had no incubator, and the nurses had left the baby for dead, he decided to take his wife and baby to the government hospital. The ambulance took over an hour to get going. When they eventually arrived at the government hospital, instead of rushing the child to emergency care, the receptionist berated them for first going to a private hospital. The child died that afternoon after receiving no treatment.

The same newspaper has another letter, complaining that MPs were apparently each given a large sum of money to buy ‘pot-hole proof’ cars. After reading this letter, I was taken on a very bumpy ride by a friend of a friend who is a motor mechanic. He told me he always has plenty of work, since cars and taxis in Kampala regularly need new shock absorbers and related parts, because of the terrible state of the roads. I asked him why the government doesn’t invest in Kampala’s roads. He tried to explain the politics to me, and then shocked me by saying that if ordinary citizens even try to fix their own patches of road in their neighbourhoods they face arrest!

All of these stories are shocking. They tell a story of neglect and abdication of authority by those we trust to provide us with protection and essential services. According to international undertakings they have signed, all governments are supposed to have a list of essential medicines, that are supposed to be available at all times in government health facilities. But research (as well as personal stories – such as the one I came across) shows that these drugs are frequently out of stock.

When governments fail to fulfill their most basic obligations, people turn to privatised solutions. If they can afford to, they go to private hospitals (which it seems are also often failing to do their job!), and they buy expensive 4×4 cars to cope with the awful roads. Nobody tallies up the cost of this, as it is borne by private individuals. But how much money would be saved, and how much wider the benefits would be spread, if people could rely on public hospitals, and could depend on the government to keep the roads in good order!

If the state health facilities were good, rich folk would go there too, and since they could afford to pay, their money could be ploughed back into the facilities so that poorer people could benefit from them too.

I found the stories in Uganda particularly disturbing. If MPs really are getting pot-hold proof cars, that is outrageous. Instead of voting money to improve the roads so the entire economy could benefit, they are siphoning off funds so that they alone don’t suffer the ill-effects of their own neglect. This kind of politician, we just don’t need.

And to punish citizens when they show enough public spirit to take matters into their own hands and repair what roads they can, is just perverse. If you don’t want to help build your society (despite being elected to a position where you’re expected to do just this), then at least stand aside when others voluntarily step in to fill the gap. Do do otherwise is to damage the very social fabric we all depend upon.

2009 shaping up to be an interesting year

Poor politicians — they never have a break. While the rest of the country is closing up shop and heading for the beaches, South Africa’s politicians are hard at work. Yesterday, both the ANC and the new splinter party, COPE, held rallies in Bloemfontein, where the leaders of both parties claimed their group represented the true spirit of South Africa’s liberation and transformation.

The COPE rally came at the end of the party’s inaugural congress, where delegates hammered out a constitution for the party and elected its leaders. Former Defence Minister, Mosiuoa Lekota was elected president of the new party with former premier of Gauteng Province, Mbhazima Shilowa, his deputy.

COPE stands for Congress of the People. It’s a strange choice of name — the full name is understandable as it reflects democratic sentiments and connects the party to the Congress of the People organised by the ANC in Kliptown in 1955, where the Freedom Charter was drawn up. But the abbreviation is unfortunate. It’s COPE, as the party wanted to avoid being called COP — since the police are not universally popular in SA. But you can already see the cartoons and mocking headlines: ‘New party not COPEing’, ‘Can Lekota COPE’, and so on. Didn’t they consider this?

Nevertheless, the launch of the new party is exciting. I don’t know if I’ll vote for them — I am still suspicious that the party is simply a collection of one-time Mbeki allies who are disgruntled at being shunted aside. These are the people who stood by silently while Mbeki and his health minister completely mismanaged the HIV/Aids crisis after all. And aside from the old Mbeki crowd there are all sorts of dodgy characters coming out of the woodwork to join up — such as Pieter Marais, a former Premier of the Western Cape, who is nothing more than a bumbling, posturing fool.

But at least they are stirring things up. The ANC at present is too strong and needs to be challenged, to be made to feel insecure, so that they become less arrogant and pay attention to what the voters really want.

Until recently I was fairly impressed with President Kgalema Mothlante, and like many South Africans was thinking that if somehow, if only, Jacob Zuma could be persuaded to let Motlanthe stay in power after the elections next year, things might start looking up. But Mothlante has disappointed terribly in the past few weeks, as he refused to reinstate the director of prosecutions, who was suspended by Mbeki, but cleared by a commission of enquiry into his fitness to hold his post. Motlanthe seems to be trying to protect Zuma and prevent a full enquiry into the government’s controversy-plagued 1999 arms acquisition deal.

So, like many of the people I talk to, I’m presently on the sidelines, watching the political antics, and reserving my judgement until it things become a little clearer. Who knows, I may choose not to vote next year, for the first time ever. Or I may swallow my distaste and vote for a lesser party I don’t like, just to send the two major players a message of protest.

Only one thing’s for certain — before it’s even started, 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting year.

Universal Human Rights

So today is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was adopted by the United Nations’ General Assembly on this day in 1948. The vote was 48 countries in favour, 0 against, and 8 abstentions. The countries which abstained were Soviet bloc states (Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, The USSR and Yugoslavia), Saudi Arabia, and, I’m deeply ashamed to say, South Africa.

This morning I turned on the TV and in between the riots in Greece and the cholera in Zimbabwe, there was Eleanor Roosevelt,  former US First Lady, presenting the Declaration back in 1948.

That footage really made an impression on me. And it made me suddenly see the Universal Declaration in a new light. You see, it is most often human rights activists these days, who refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in support of their demands. These are usually people outside of the official establishment, and outside the the corridors of official power. Sometimes they are seen as radicals, sometimes as trouble-makers.

But here was this middle aged, respectable-looking American woman, with a posh accent, announcing the adoption of the Declaration. And it somehow suddenly came home to me, in a way it hasn’t before, that this Declaration isn’t anything outrageous, isn’t radical, isn’t something only associated with ‘trouble-making activists’. Eleanor Roosevelt, former US first lady, was the chair of the committee which drafted it. You can’t get closer to the official establishment than that. The Declaration isn’t anything new and alien — it was adopted way back in 1948.

I realised, watching TV this morning, that I’ve always had a subconscious feeling that the idea of universal rights needs to be justified, needs to be explained — isn’t quite part of the mainstream. Maybe that’s because I grew up as a white child in racist South Africa, surrounded by adults who expressed hostility to the UN and to the idea of equality. Maybe it’s because still today, when activists point to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a way of justifying demands for equality, for freedom of association and freedom of speech, for access to adequate health care, protection of children, for free elementary education, for social security, they are often looked on as trouble-makers, as rebels, as extremists.

But really, why do we have to still keep justifying these demands, keep pointing to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as we call for development and changes in the law? This declaration is binding on all UN members and forms part of customary international law. Come on already, what’s the argument about. We need to be saying to our governments, “There’s the Declaration. You’ve signed it. No arguments — the only discussion should be on how best to make it happen.

(By the way, Eleanor Roosevelt was something else. You think Hillary Clinton is the first former First Lady to be a formiddable political force in her own right? Think again. Eleanor Roosevelt was First Lady from 1933 to 1945, the year her husband died. She fought for equal rights for women, and openly supported the African-American civil rights movement. She also worked to promote the formation of the United Nations. In 1945 President Harry S Truman appointed her as a delegate to the UN, a position she held until 1952. During this time she oversaw the drafting and adoption of the Declaration.)

We need better roads

This year I’ve been travelling a lot, throughout East and Southern Africa. In some cases, I’ve visited countries that I haven’t been back to in several years. In all cases, the growth and progress that’s taken place since my previous visits has been visible and obvious.

But one thing that has really bothered me, is that no matter how well economies may be doing, no matter how much cities have grown and developed, the roads almost always seem to have been neglected.

I first visited Mozambique in the early 1990s, and have visited fairly regularly since then. My first visit was shortly after the end of the civil war, and Maputo was in very poor shape. The road from the South African border to Maputo was also horrible — full of potholes. On each visit, I’ve noticed improvements and development in Maputo. More and better shops, more hotels, and so forth. The road from the SA border is now much, much better, and the main road from Maputo up north is excellent. But within Maputo city, the roads are horrendous and if you’re driving you have to be constantly aware of obstacles and sometimes huge potholes.

Kampala was very village-like when I first visited in late 1993. On my last trip there, a couple of months ago, the city seemed way bigger, and the amount of traffic had increased several-fold. But the roads seem not to have been touched. One of the reason the traffic’s so bad is that the main roads are still narrow — not tailored to a city of its present size. And then within the city, again, there are huge potholes on major routes (sometimes seemingly big enough for a car to fall into and get lost for days!).

In my home city, Cape Town, I’ve noticed the deterioration of many roads in the city — from the heavy traffic, but also as a result of rain and weather damage. There are regular repairs and upgrades but they don’t seem to keep pace with the damage.

Now I know roads are incredibly expensive to build and maintain, and bigger, wider roads are not the answer to traffic woes (the wider the roads, the more cars there will be – what’s needed is better public transport). But roads are still crucial for all of our economies, and you’d think that with the evident economic growth in the redion, and the billions of dollars in aid that have been spent, at least some of it should have been used to ensure our roads are in tip-top shape.

An article I read this week has confirmed my views. It’s from the development news agency, IRIN, and is titled, “Better roads lead to more money”. It reports that there is a strong link between good roads, and food security. The article reports on how small-scale farmers in Malawi struggle to get their food to markets, because of the bad roads.

According to the article, money is readily spent on building or rehabilitating new major roads, while maintenance of existing roads, and especially of secondary and subsidiary roads, is neglected. Spending is also skewed to focus on roads in wealthier areas of the country, at the expense of poorer ones (where the population the faces extra barriers to earning a small income).

The article focuses on Malawi, but I bet the situation in many other countries in the region is similar. The good new roads I was talking about in Mozambique probably reflect the same trend — they’re big roads, benefitting tourists and major transporters, while the rural roads and city routes used by ordinary people every day, are left to crumble. In South Africa, I’ve been on some secondary national roads, where there is a visible line as you cross from a rich province to a poorer one — you can see the road change in quality before your eyes.

It’s not only rural farmers that are affected. Electoral commissions face problems getting ballots to and from areas where there are poor roads. Health care is also a problem when medical personnel cannot reach patients, or residents can’t get to clinics. And the list goes on.

It’s not glamorous, or headline-grabbing, but it’s time we invested in good road infrastructure. The benefits will be many, and long-lasting.

To the top from nowhere

There is a lot of big, important stuff happening in South Africa and the world at the moment: Barack Obama’s transition plans, the ongoing global economic down-turn, climate change (we’ve been having some crazy weather in Cape Town lately), and the breakaway party from the ANC here in South Africa.

But this week, it was a fairly short interview on the radio that made the biggest impression on me. It was an interview with Sibusiso Vilane, about his book, called To the Top from Nowhere.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Sibusiso Vilane, but if you haven’t you should have. In fact, he should be a household name across the length and breadth of our continent, as far as I’m concerned. Vilane is the first black African to have climbed Mount Everest. And he did it not once, but twice. But he didn’t stop there. He has gone on to become a member of one of the most elite clubs in the world. It’s called the Seven Summits club, and there are only 198 members of this club in the whole world (six of them are South African).

Members of the Seven Summits club have successfully climbed the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. Vilane gained membership to the club in June of this year, when he ascended Mt Denali (McKinley), in Alaska.

Vilane was a game ranger in Swaziland, when he met the man who introduced him to climbing, and who became his benefactor, helping him find the funding for his Everest expedition. He began climbing in 1996, and first summitted Everest in May 2003.

In January 2008, Vilane and Alex Harris became the first South Africans to walk to the South Pole completely unassisted.

In 2006, President Thabo Mbeki bestowed the Order of Ikhamanga (Bronze) on Vilane, in recognition of his efforts.  The Order of Ikhamanga is given to South Africans who have excelled in the fields of arts, culture, literature, music and sports.

What impressed me, listening to Vilane, was his quiet confidence and modesty. He has achieved extraordinary things, but has no overblown sense of his own importance. He simply sets his goals, and then goes about achieving them.

A week after Barack Obama was elected President of the US, here I was, listening to another man of African descent who has gone from very humble beginnings to the very highest achievements (in this case, literally the highest!).

Vilane’s picture did appear on the front page of the newspapers when he first climbed Everest, but other than that, media coverage of him has not been spectacular. It just got me wondering about the many, many Africans there are who are quietly achieving great things, in every corner of the globe. We don’t hear enough about them, and we don’t listen enough to them, to hear their stories and learn from their experiences.

What a day!

I need to write this while it’s all fresh. What a day! This morning I woke up and turned on the TV, to see John McCain giving his speech conceding defeat on the US presidentlal election. I must say, what a gracious speech it was. If nothing else, McCain is a good loser.

Then about 20 minutes later, I watched Barack Obama’s victory speech. By that stage I was in an airport departure lounge, and there were quite a few of us gathered around the TV. I don’t think of myself as particularly sentimental, but I couldn’t stop a few tears from rolling down my cheeks. His speech was so fitting, the occasion so momentous, I couldn’t help but be moved.

The faces of the people in the crowd in Chicago reflected not just happiness but idealism, and hope. Goodness knows we need some ideals in today’s world, we need some heroes. Obama is now the focus of that need. Even as I savoured the moment, a part of my mind was already sceptical. Obama now carries the ideals and hopes not only of Americans but of many around the world. Will he live up to the heavy expectations that have been placed on him?

Please, please let us not be disappointed, as we so often are by our leaders. I recall, for instance, the scenes of jubilation in Kenya when Mwai Kibaki was elected president. Four years later, that jubilation had turned to bitter cynicism. In South Africa the hopes placed on the ANC have in many cases also faded all too soon. Let’s not have that again.

In a sense it doesn’t really matter. This moment, this day, will have a lasting positive impact, no matter what follows. As an American friend of mine has put it — African American men today see themselves re-imagined. The proliferation of negative images of black men in America, as prisoners, as drug dealers and so on, now have an extremely powerful counter-image. In a sense, the image of Africa, too, is changed. What impact is this having on youngsters, who now can imagine a world of possibilities they never before thought possible? Obama has broken the glass  ceiling for black Americans in the most powerful way.

Today, the USA, too, is being powerfully re-imagined by the rest of the world. Suddenly, the nation associated with George Bush, with war, with aggression and mindless conservatism, has transformed itself in this one act. Will our jubilation be justified, or will the strictures of office, the demands of the military-industrial complex force Obama into the mould of so many predecessors. Let us hope and pray not.

But again, I am hopeful, because this is not about one man. Obama’s campaign succeeded because it transformed the nature of electoral politics in America. It relied on an extensive network of grassroots-based organisations and individuals. It build on a model of citizen involvement and activism. The youth have been energised and re-engaged in politics by this election.

As Obama’s speech indicated, this is just the beginning. There are huge crises to tackle — a faltering global economy, two wars that the US is involved in, new forms of international instability. It will not be easy by any means. Obama can’t do it on his own. Individuals naturally have weaknesses and failings, but one of the huge strengths of the president-elect is his strength as an organiser, his realisation that he needs a strong team. In this case there is  a network, a movement that’s been established. In this sense, change has already happened.

Mobile activism, Part 2

Unfortunately I missed most of Jonathan Donner’s presentation at the workshop this morning on Innovations in Social Marketing, at the MobileActive08 conference. I did catch the last couple of minutes though, when he spoke of the use of missed calls in India, as a means of disseminating information. Eg: a number is offered, for people to beep, or give a missed call. They then get called back, and offered the information they need.

Gustav Praekelt and Robin Miller of the Praekelt Foundation then presented their project called Socialtxt. This makes use of the ‘please call me’ message that cellphone users frequently send. This message arrives as an SMS on recipients phones, while the sender gets a confirmation message. It is possible to attach marketing messages to these SMSs, and this is done frequently for commercial purposes. With Socialtxt, based on an open-source platform, instead of commercial messages, social marketing messages are used.

In South Africa, around 30 million ‘please call me’ messages are sent every day — this has the potential for enormous reach, at low cost.

In one of their case studies, the project implementers set out to answer the question:  “Can we get people to call in to the national hIV/Aids helpline?” The project operated for 5 weeks and they sent out 1 million messages a day. The result was a total of 20 million branded messages sent out, reaching 4 million unique people (it’s possible for each individual to send up to 7 please call messages a day). As a result, 45 000 people responded by calling the national HIV/AIDS helpline (and a by-product of this was that the project also ended up with a database of 45 000 telephone numbers).

This represented a 136% increase in call volumes for the HIV/Aids helpline — 1500 additional calls a day. Even after the messages stopped, people would keep them on their phones and refer to them. 98% of all callers were referred by Socialtxt.

One of the lessons learnt was the need to be prepared — organisations looking to replicate this need to ensure they can handle the huge call volumes. Also, if one operates a toll-free call centre, one’s costs double if call volumes double.

There are many ongoing questions: Howto  deal with capacity constraints?
How best to utilise these channels? What’s the business model? (can one combine social marketing with commercial business models to make it sustainable?).

Aside from the Socialtxt model there are many cellphone based social marketing options that one can consider, depending on options such as cost, penetration, and level of interactivity. Examples are bulk SMS, ringtones with messages, answer tones, WAP applications, wallpapers, and so on.

Some other things that came out of the session:

There is hIgh and increasing penetration of cell phones in the developing world. Eg SA: 48 million people, 37 milion have cell phones.

When considering campaigns and options one needs research:

* what’s the reach of the platform: real penetration numbers?
*  cost to the user?
*  ease of use
*  how many handsets support the technology?
*  is it standards based?
*  cost to reach audience?
* relevance to audience

There was some discussion of the value of using incentives to get people to call or take specific action — eg the possibility of winning some airtime. In commercial campaigns incentives dramatically increase response levels — but are they appropriate in social marketing? For example, would you get hoax callers dialing the HIV/AIDS helpline, just to win the prize?

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Brenda Burrell’s mini talk on Mobile and Radio for Independent Media presented a project called Freedom Fone. This is a project in Zimbabwe, run by the Kubatana Trust.

It involves providing radio-like audio content via interactive menu response by use of phones. Users can call up the service, and choose from a menu, to access audio items they with to listen to: news headlines, a feature, music and inspirational messages and so on.

The idea came from the use of interactive phone menus by commercial companies.
When she learnt about how interactive menus are used, Burrell thought, “Why don’t we get more creative with how we use that kind of interface?” She coined the phrase, ‘dialup-radio.’  “It’s not really radio she says — its how you put information together and make use of it.”

The idea seemed suited to Zimbabwe, where there is a lack of independent media, and broadcast media in particular — but where there is a large mobile phone user base.

There are two sides to the project, says Burrell:  building compelling audio materials, and making it accessible. WIth a large grant from the Knight Foundation, Kubatana will be working on both over the next 2 years. They also want to assist other organisations to learn to do this. They would also be interested in helping roll out the model to other countries.

One of the issues is cost to the user. This can be resolved by providing toll free numbers, or ‘tickle’ numbers — where you dial a number, hang up, and you get a call back.

The system operates with a telephony server and a couple of other pieces of equipment that is all very portable — it all fits into a medium size tote bag.

For more information email info@freedomfone.org