Cell Bytes

Delivering aid in Niger is anything but easy. A guest post on MobileActive.org by Amanda McClelland of Concern Worldwide, in Niger for an emergency program to respond to the emerging food crisis.

Most of the women we are targeting are illiterate and have no numeracy skills, have little access to electricity, and to complicate matters even more, mobile signal coverage is sporadic. But we decided that if we could make the mobile phone cash transfer program work here, we could make it work anywhere.

We started by tackling the biggest issues. We purchased phones for each beneficiary, sourcing new, very low-cost models now on the market. We produced picture-based teaching tools and mobilized community education teams to over a hundred villages. These teams taught women to recognize the letters and numbers on the phones, to send and receive a text message, and to redeem codes they will receive via text message for cash at mobile dispensing stations. Concern also gave groups of the women solar-powered chargers for the phones, and offered them training to use the chargers to generate supplementary income.

But the biggest challenge was still on the horizon. We learned that each beneficiary would need a photo ID to sign a mobile phone contract. A couple of quick calls confirmed that the women we were targeting had no form of ID whatsoever.

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