“Instead of searching for information themselves, people in two rural agricultural communities in Uganda can turn to 40 Question Box workers who have cellphones.

The workers dial into the call center and ask questions on behalf of the locals, or they put the call on speakerphone so the locals can ask for themselves. The operators then look up the requested information in a database and convey it to the workers, who pass it along to the villagers. The workers are compensated with cellphone airtime.”

This reminded me a lot of what I saw, when I visited Grameen Phone in Bangladesh this spring. Even though Grameen Phone is a profit(able) company they focus on creating a sustainable local infrastructure through participation on local small-scale innovations – I think I should get back to some of these thoughts on the Bottom of the Pyramid (Inclusive Capitalism) business strategy in a later post…

I’ll just finish off with a quote from the owner of a cellphone-based business in Kenya (cited from the article):

“We can’t sit in our offices in America and decide what is useful to people and what is meaningful in their lives. (…) The services only add value if they are open-ended.”

I find this to be very true and intimately linked with the foundation of the participatory research paradigm, which we have been sniffing at…