International Development, Kenya, Technology »

Ken Banks, the one-man team behind kiwanja.net, is a powerhouse. His output of interviews, blog posts, Twitter updates and other social media tricks speaks to his determination to contribute to the emerging realm of information and communication technology for development or ICT4D.

Inspired by over a decade of work in Africa, Banks launched kiwanja.net in 2003. The website is a space where “technology meets anthropology, conservation and development.” Attentive to the need for easy communication between NGOs and their rural partners, the website also serves as a launching point for Banks’ creations.

In 2005, Banks rolled out of the organization’s first big coup, an open source software called Frontline SMS. Five weeks, a summer in Finland, and a crash course in programming produced a mobile phone tool now widely acclaimed by both IT experts and grassroots users.

Let’s talk about inspiration. What pushed you to launch Kiwanja.net and Frontline SMS?

kiwanja.net started in late 2003. The first contract I had happened to be dealing with mobiles. It became very clear to me that the knowledge and information I was building up with this charity was clearly of wider value. There were lots of organizations who were also thinking about mobile technology and thinking about how they might apply it. They were also struggling.

Through kiwanja.net, I decided to really focus on trying to help organizations understand what mobile technology can do for them … Frontline SMS came out of a need for there to be a solution to get on the [ICT] ladder, the first rung in many cases. It’s all very well to read about mobile phones [and their use in development] in the popular press, but the first thing NGOs ask is, ‘What can we do?’ ‘What can we use to do that?’ In 2005, when I wrote Frontline SMS, there didn’t seem to be any tools that were specifically written to work in the kinds of environments that these NGOs found themselves in.

So, when they were asking the question, ‘What can we use to start delivering mobile services?,’ the answer was, well, unless you have the internet and a bunch of money and a certain degree of technical skills, there isn’t actually very much. That seemed crazy. So, Frontline SMS was developed out of that need. I felt that there was a big gap in the market, so to speak, of mainly grassroots non-profits with little money, no internet and very, very, very low technical skills to actually start to deliver SMS services.

What does “Kiwanja” mean? How does it represent your vision?

In 2003, when I started it off, there was a lot of “tech365″ style names. It was all very high tech. And for me, it wasn’t really about the technology. It never really was about the technology. It’s about how people interact with technology. It’s about building things that work for people. And technology is the thing you consider right at the end when you are looking to trying to solve a problem. So, I wanted a name which didn’t convey anything technology-based, didn’t sound like technology was the main thrust. Kiwanja can mean a lot of different things in [Kiswahili], but I think “a place to meet” is my favorite one.

Can you explain the basic function of Frontline SMS?

You basically turn a laptop or desktop computer with a mobile phone into a two-way group messaging hub. So, you download the software onto the computer, you plug in a phone, you enter the cell numbers of your farmers, health care workers, and then you can send messages to those people and they can respond. Basically, you coordinate two-way messaging through a lap top. There is no need for the internet since it runs off the mobile phone network.

How is Frontline SMS being used?

I think the most surprising thing for me was that within a week of launching the software in the fall of 2005, the activist community jumped straight onto it. The first user was in Zimbabwe. Within a week, they had started using it to send and receive messages to and from rural communities that were being badly treated by Mugabe and his regime. Since then, it has become a lot more solid in other areas. It has been used in a lot of election monitoring projects … We [also] have a lot of activity in health [and] agriculture.

[Frontline SMS] is moving into other areas which I did not actually anticipate. But, I think the beauty of the software is that it does not try to solve any specific problem in any specific place. I really wanted to avoid doing that – although the idea came from a specific place and a specific problem – I didn’t build in anything that would restrict it in any way.

Does empowerment play a key role in Frontline SMS?

The logo of Frontline SMS is those arms stretched up in the air. So, we have decided that empowerment is a key message. I think that [empowerment] is a word that is overused a lot in this space, there’s a lot of different ways of defining empowerment. I think for me the purest form is that you [give people the tools] that they need to do their job better and then you let them decide whether or not they want [it]. Then you provide the tool and you don’t try to be controlling in any way. You say, ‘Hey, if you want to use it, the software is free, we’ll support you for free, we’ll connect you with other users, we’ll do all we can. But, at the end of the day, it’s your project and you do it your way.’ And if it works, please tell us.

How is the growing buzz around social media and ICT influencing your work?

… I still think there is a general misunderstanding or lack of knowledge over how empowering technology can be. When I speak at conferences about what Frontline SMS is doing, and mobiles are doing in general, people generally say “Wow!”. Even operators and technical people working in the industry. So, I think the fact that [now] there’s a lot of focus now on Twitter’s use in Iran and social media and Ushahidi, a lot of people are really [getting] quite onto this. I think what I do tends to fit quite neatly into that bucket … When Frontline SMS first started in 2005, there wasn’t anything else like it, and no one was really building tools like that in developing countries for users. Now there’s a lot more activitiy, I guess it gives it a home. When you speak to people, they can see it in the wider picture of ICT4D.

I think some of the challenges are that you get to the point where there are too many tools and people are reinventing wheels too often and people aren’t really building things that people can use, [instead] they are building ’sexy’ stuff. I think donors are always looking to fund the next big thing, but quite often the next big thing isn’t going to be of use to a rural farmer in Uganda because it will be using a technology that isn’t available to them. So, I think we have a slight tension now in ICT4D. It’s become a very serious discipline, people are trying to build smart sexy things that actually don’t work in the environments they think they should work in.

What can you say about the rise of ICT innovators in developing countries?

… We’re finding an increasing number of programmers emerging in developing countries who are finally getting access to the world through the Internet and are being taught relevant skills at university. This has come at the exact same time as the open source [movement]. It’s perfect timing. You can imagine ten years ago if African developers had all of this [training] and yet couldn’t get their hands on any open source code to do any of the work. Finally, we have people in the country where [ICT] tools are useful and who have the ability and skills to take these projects and adapt them. Ushahidi coming out of the election crisis is a fabulous example of Kenyans reacting to a particular problem.

Part of the challenge now, once these services are developed, is how they are rolled out and marketed. There’s a guy in Kenya who built a car tracking system by SMS, he wrote it all himself, but he couldn’t get any funding to develop it as a product. So, innovating is one thing. If you’re then stuck with nothing to do with that product, that’s another problem that hasn’t quite been solved yet.

Where are you planning on taking Kiwanja.net?

I think for me it’s about continually pushing the boundaries, continually trying to lower the barrier as much as possible so that grassroots NGOs can use my technology. So how low can we go? Frontline SMS is a great example of lowering it to a point where NGOs can do things. But, if you think about what it requires, a PC, that’s a barrier. So, can we build a version that runs off a USB stick? You could go to an internet café and plug it in and do a bunch of messaging and leave. We are currently working on that at the moment and it could be very exciting.

Also, hopefully within the next three months, we’re going to launch a picture messaging version, Frontline Multimedia Messaging Service or MMS. That will allow NGOs working in areas where there is actually web access through the cell network to transmit audio, video, pictures and sound to and from handsets and to and from the internet. That’s potentially quite interesting: farmers could take a picture of a pest on their crop and send it to an agricultural expert to get advice or a health care worker could take a picture of something on a patient and get advice on what to do. Once again, let’s see how far we can lower the barrier of entry to that.

I am also thinking about how we can allow NGOs to get cheaper messaging using internet related services. So, I’m looking to build a sort of SMS gateway on the internet which non-profits can gather around and get cheap messaging through. We can build a database of users, leverage all the value of all messages being sent and get the best price. People, right now, are buying a hundred messages here and ten there and twenty there and they’re paying the highest rate. So, if all those people are buying a million a week, let’s buy a million a week together and all get the cheapest price.

Ken’s work – and the work of the many other tech developers out there in this field – is incredibly inspiring. If you happen to be one of them, please give us a shout – we’d love to hear more. If the above was a bunch of garble to you (or interesting!), check out kiwanja.net and keep track of Ken’s blog.