Innovative uses of mobile phones in Africa

3 reports on new and innovative uses of mobiles phones in Africa.

From WOUGNET the use of use of SMS in information sharing and carying out SMS campaigns. One example was

The 16 Days of Activism
Against Gender Violence, an international SMS campaign from 25/Nov –
10Dec 2007, with over 170 participants drawn from 13 countries in
Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, was used as a strategy
to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women. A
Women’s Day campaign was carried out from 25/Feb – 14/Mar 2008 lead by
EASSI, a WOUGNET member organisation, with over 240 participants drawn
from 20 countries in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. The aim of the
campaign was to raise awareness of the plight of the girl-child in
Kenya during the post-election violence in the country.

For Africans living in rural areas, mobile banking services (m-banking) will potentially change the way money circulates in the continent. This report in the UK Guardian explains how this works.

Services have sprung up that let people transfer cash by text message
to other mobile phone users and give Africa's vast number of "unbanked"
their first access to financial products. Instead of using a bank
branch, these services rely on local retailers who already sell mobile
top-up cards....

Vodafone has moved a step closer to the dream of m-banking with its
M-Pesa service. Launched by Vodafone's Safaricom unit in Kenya last
year, M-Pesa has well over 2 million customers and adds more than
200,000 new ones every month. Like Orange Money, it uses the network of
thousands of local retailers who sell airtime top-up cards to act as a
branch network, but registered M-Pesa customers can send their
deposited cash to a mobile phone user on any network.

Finally in Cameroon's farmers have been using mobile calls to contact engineers. The farmers give a missed call and the engineers phone them back to answer questions.