Fighting poverty in Kenya with Google, Nokia, Opera and Safaricom
Posted on May 22, 2010 by by valerirojas
The following story is something you don’t hear much about, how a man with very little money is helping Nuru International fight poverty in Kenya by using a $40 Nokia 1680 phone,Opera, Google Apps and Safaricom which is a Kenyan mobile phone provider.
David Carreon works for Nuru International as the Healthcare Program Manager. Nuru is an NGO that fights extreme poverty holistically by training local leaders and acting like a general contractor of other organizations; running 5 programs and with 60-some employees trying to serve and monitor 5000 people in rural Kenya.
After using pencils and paper for many years to run their programs David was given $5000 and three months of time off from the Healthcare program to address their old school data issues. “I’d heard about people doing this with Droids, Palms, iPhones and laptops. But I had never seen a robust data system with cheap phones, and that’s the budget I had. I had a laptop taste on a cell phone budget.”
After doing some research and looking for the cheapest applications out there David decided to go with Google.
“Google Forms did what I needed it to do: it could send data to the cloud, easily and cheaply. And plus, with Google Apps, it had a secure login. And mail. And docs. And sites. And, I mean after all, it’s Google! And, another added benefit, it’s free for NGO’s. Yup. Free. And thanks to Safaricom, the local cell provider, there was GPRS internet just about everywhere, even very rural Kuria.”
“I looked around for the cheapest possible phone that had a decent web browser (i.e. came with/could install Opera Mini) and found the Nokia 1680: GPRS, VGA camera, Java, and a whopping 9MB of onboard memory. And best of all, it undercut smart phones by about an order of magnitude (coming in at just under $40, after some wheeling and dealing in Nairobi). But after spending the moolah, I discovered the Great Tragedy. The data cable is unsupported by Nokia. I could not clone them; I would have to configure them manually. And so I entered the horse-latitudes of my project. I sat in my room, typing in URLs and email login info into phone after phone after phone.”
David also had to train farmers and people who have not even heard of computers on how to use mobile phones and online applications.
For the complete story visit the post:Â Farmers Fighting Poverty with Nokia Google Opera and Safaricom
