Submitted by sokari on 7 October, 2008 - 12:25
Just in case you are not quite sure what the term "empowerment" means, Ken Banks who built Frontline SMS has useful examples which can be seen here.
To me, the empowered includes NGO fieldworkers in Afghanistan who receive daily security messages and alerts. During a recent Taliban attack FrontlineSMS was...
... essential for us getting the word out quickly. E-mail was down, voice was spotty but SMS still worked. We also had female staff at a school near the incident and were able to tell them to stay put till things quietened down. All my staff made it home safe today
It also includes patients and staff at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Malawi where, in the words of the staff at St. Gabriel's Hospital, FrontlineSMS has "adopted the new role of coordinating a far-reaching community health network serving 250,000 Malawians". And in Aceh, two FrontlineSMS-driven projects - one run by the UNDP - is successfully helping increase income-generating opportunities for smallholder coffee farmers and their families. Many more agriculture-based projects are on the way.
As Ken points out we the end users do not so much care about the technology or the theory behind it. Far more important is what the technology can do for you. If it makes your life easier, solves a problem, creates new ideas and new ways of doing things that you never even imagined. The success of any technology is based on how widely it can be applied, how easily it can be adapted to specific environments, situations, needs and how cheap it is to use.
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