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Ratio Blog: Digital Access, Doing Good, and Business Models

Monday, 13 July 2009

If access to information is a good thing, should taxes pay for it? Or donations? By Andrea Bohnstedt.

Digital access is a big buzzword for the development community, with the (very simplified) argument running that there is a lot of useful information easily accessible in digital format, and that is, of course, A Good Thing, so people should be helped to it.

Mobile phones and text messages play a big role in this scenario: Mobile access is far more widespread that access to computers, and in many developing markets, the mobile phone is often taking over the functions that a computer has in industrialized markets: money transfers, entertainment, dating, and also the provision of information.

In Uganda, Appfrica and the Grameen Foundation’s AppLab are doing a pilot for Question Box, a phone-based information service that is basically an off-line google.com. Users can call in with their question and the phone operator will do the search and read the caller the answer over the phone. As the user can speak to the operator, the service is also available to illiterate users or those who do not own a phone and have to borrow one. Ken Banks wrote about this for PC World in his article ‘Searching Where Google Can’t’.

There were two things I found interesting in Banks’ article:

One is the little note about the internet café in Calabar: that people were, in fact, not predominantly busy looking up health information and doing homework, but that they were emailing, looking for competitions to win something, dating, and looking at (presumably) adult content. That does not exactly surprises me – I use my internet connection for work a lot, but of course also spend a silly amount of time reading celebrity gossip and worse.

It just highlights the fact that ‘the poor’ are probably not much different in that they are not using digital access to information purely for worthy matters. This is an issue that I also wondered about in regard to the Digital Villages project under the guidance of the ICT Board here in Kenya, and other digital access projects financed by public funds: Is it really the best use of tax payers’ money to provide facilities for people to date digitally, look at adult content, and download music?

But back to Question Box: Since the pilot was done in the context of agriculture and health projects, these were most frequent questions, but Banks noted that the pilot also resulted in a variety of unexpected, interesting questions about what bugs people, and where they need information. From this, Banks concludes at the end of the article: ‘All of this leads us to a wider, more fundamental issue. Often when we plan and build mobile solutions for developing (or emerging) markets, we forget, neglect or are just plain unsure how to ask the users what it is that they want.’

Is that really a problem? Or is that mostly a problem for the NGO types? I suspect any commercial organisation like Safaricom or Zain would sit down and do very careful research what their clients want, and are willing to pay for.

Also on this angle, I emailed the people from Question Box to find out what the business model behind Question Box is. At the moment, the caller pays the regular phone charges for the duration of the phone call, all of which goes to the mobile network operator. The pilot in India seems to provide the phone connection for free. Are there any plans to charge e.g. premium rates – possibly the easiest way of earning some revenues with this kind of service? Charging for text messages or other mobile services is nothing new and East Africa has a growing industry of value-added service providers – Google East Africa invested in Kenya’s Mobile Planet, and MTechComm from Nigeria have set up operations in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, for example. Users pay a premium rate to download ringtones, music, pictures, to receive daily bible verses, news, to meet dates on sms. There is a well-established commercial model.

In an email, Rose Shuman, the founder of Question Box, remained guarded, merely stating that they aim for sustainability, and that several models were currently under review. It appears that a revenue model was not immediately under consideration when the venture was mapped out.

Does it really matter whether Question Box remains a donations-based non-profit or not? In the larger scheme of things, not really. It’s entirely up to the founders what they want to do with this idea.

So why poke around in their project at all? Unless the provider can at least cover the costs of the service, it will be difficult to expand it to a scale where it makes a tangible difference. Donations will enable some growth, but eventually also put a ceiling on expansion. There are a great many ideas built around a rapidly improving ICT infrastructure, and I wish more of them would go commercial to have some real scale and impact. This region has an odd non-profit ecosystem of donors, NGOs, charities, foundations and the like that often blurs the lines to what can be done commercially – and should be done so: to provide a reality check (aren’t you more likely to press for a better service if you pay for it?), to grow companies, and to nurture entrepreneurial thinking. Vodafone took a (limited) development grant for MPESA and Safaricom ran with it. But isn’t that the exception rather than the rule?

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