Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Today Jonathan, Edison and I met with Nick Sullivan, the author of the book,"You Can Hear Me Now" on Grameenphone's story.

Some of his insights include:
1. Leverage existing structures
e.g. merchants/self-employed workers for content building; phone credit top-up outlets for marketing; M-Pesa for transactions

2. Focus
- identify target group (e.g. merchants? students?), roll out with the most preferred category to test market then expand into other categories

3. User experience
- Nick prefers directed search (asking users questions "What car brand are you looking for" and "What phone model are you looking for?" ) to searching by keywords because users may not be familiar with the concept of searching and "hand-holding" might help to reduce negative initial experiences. The likelihood of relevant search results might be higher too.

Coming up next...
- testing of prototype among African student community (Guy and Edison)
- analyzing findings of preliminary survey and developing closed-end one (Akani)
- translating surveys into Swahilli (Brian)
- doing research on Cellbazaar and M-Pesa (SuiLin)