Why MobiChange?

Even as the ubiquitous use of mobile phones bridges the digital divide between the developed and developed countries, another digital divide — digital divide 2.0 — is opening up between the haves and have-nots. Digital divide 2.0 is not about access to communications devices; it is about the ability to leverage the power of group-forming social technologies to collaborate with others, self-organize into grassroots communities and create crowd-sourced content that is relevant for these communities.

Most of the present mobile social networks are aimed at high-end users with feature-rich, location-aware smartphones and are inaccessible to most mobile users in emerging countries, in terms of both affordability and usability. A mobile social networking platform for emerging Asia and Africa needs to be designed to be accessed almost exclusively by $50 mobile phones via intuitive, lowest common denominator, multi-lingual voice and text message based menus.

MobiChange will be the first social networking experience for millions of mobile phone users who have limited ease with English and use a $50 mobile phone as their only computing device. It will allow them to do some of the things we take for granted on social networks — meeting new people with common interests, benefiting from new opportunities for learning and earning, even sharing their own knowledge and skills with others.

Its open-source code base will be developed on the basis of extensive ethnographic research amongst mobile phone users and non-profits in developing Asia and Africa to ensure that its multi-lingual voice and text message based user interface is intuitive even for first time mobile users and its functionality addresses real problems in their everyday lives.