Title: Palawan tribes go cyber to keep out nickel miner
Author: Melody Kemp
Source: Asia Times Online
Date (published): 09/12/2011
Date (accessed): 14/12/2011
Type of information: article
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
"PALAWAN - When big global mining companies set their sights on the Philippine island of Palawan, one of the world's remaining ecological hotspots and home to many traditional tribes, little did they suspect their China-backed, billion-dollar extraction plans would be met by social media-fueled resistance.

Indigenous people in Palawan have organized globally to raise awareness about their plight and to save their ancestral lands from planned large-scale mining. One activist group, the Ancestral Land and Domain Watch (ALDAW), has made use of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to transform what was originally a local movement into a vibrant global environmental campaign.
…
Other technological tools have been used to challenge MacroAsia's claims to environmental consciousness during its exploration phase. For instance, hi-tech geo-tagging has appeared to show that mining area claims have pushed deep into ancestral domain lands and legally protected eco-zones.

Maps of the intrusions have been loaded onto a Facebook page and linked to Google maps alongside an online petition calling for a halt to mining activities in the area."

Title: Mobile Financial Services Development Report 2011
Pages: 221 pp.
ISBN: 978-92-95044-80-7
Publisher: World Economic Forum
Date (published): 16/05/2011
Date (accessed): 12/08/2011
Type of information: research report
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTMl + pdf + zip)
Abstract:
"The Mobile Financial Services Development Report 2011 provides a comprehensive analysis of more than 100 variables across 20 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Developed in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group, the report measures the critical factors necessary to achieve meaningful scale of mobile financial services and to meet the needs of billions of individuals excluded from the formal economy.

Defining mobile financial services devel­opment in terms of the key drivers across the institu­tional, market and end-user environments that lead to adoption and scale, the aim of the Report is to build consensus by proposing a taxonomy and analytic structure for assessing the mobile finance landscape in addition to the provision of a comprehensive data set.

The report takes a wide-ranging view in assessing the factors that contribute to the long-term development of mobile financial services. Along with including mobile payments and transfers, vital financial services such as savings, credit, and insurance are also within the Report’s scope.

Measures of mobile financial services development are captured across seven pillars:

Regulatory proportionality
Consumer protection
Market competitiveness
Market catalysts
End-user empowerment and access
Distribution and agent network
Adoption and availability

The report highlights that the adoption of mobile financial services is currently confined to a few countries where access to financial services has been historically constrained and the scope of services limited to mobile money transfer. The findings also suggest that the adoption of financial services such as savings, credit and micro-insurance are nascent and that regulatory environments, market competitiveness and the financial literacy of end-users all need to be collaboratively addressed before meaningful scale can be achieved.

Countries such as Kenya and the Philippines are among the few countries covered by the report that have achieved adoption levels of more than 10% of their total adult population. A defining characteristic of these countries is a dense network of agents – retail access points that are capable of registering account holders and handling cash transactions. However, as these countries look to achieve scale beyond payments, focusing on factors such as government disbursements through the mobile platform, the competitiveness of their financial and telecom sectors, and better data collection to facilitate “test and learn” approaches will need to become a priority.

Several countries such as Brazil and India demonstrate relative strengths when compared to those countries that have currently achieved scale in mobile payments. The ability to leverage existing agent networks and consumer protection in Brazil may facilitate the development of more complex financial services through the mobile platform. The widespread availability of mobile phones within India, the degree of competition within its telecommunications sector and recent regulatory changes may drive dramatic improvements in adoption levels."

Title: Philippine precision farming gets a mobile upgrade
Author: Joel D. Adriano
Source: SciDev.Net
Date (published): 21/07/2010
Date (accessed): 03/08/2010
Type of information: article
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
Rice farmers in the Philippines will be able to dial a specialised service on their mobile phones to obtain tailored advice on fertiliser use when they plant their crops in September.

Scientists at the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), officials of the Philippine Department of Agriculture, and local private telecommunications firm Globe, have joined together to create the service that will enable poor farmers to tap into sophisticated 'precision agriculture' techniques commonly used in developed countries. These include technologies such as remote sensing, not often available to Asian farmers

Title: Who's got the phone? Gender and the use of the telephone at the bottom of the pyramid
Authors: Ayesha Zainudeen, Tahani Iqbal, and Rohan Samarajiva
Pages: 37 pp.
Source: LIRNEasia
Date (published): 15/06/2010
Date (accessed): 17/06/2010
Type of information: research paper, pre-publication draft
Language: English
On-line access: yes (pdf)
Abstract:
Much has been said about women’s access to and use of the telephone. Many studies conclude that a significant gender divide in access exists particularly in developing countries. Women are also said to use telephones in a different manner from men – making and receiving more calls, spending more time on calls, and using telephones primarily for ‘relationship maintenance’ purposes, in contrast to men. However, much of this research on usage patterns is based on small-sample studies in affluent developed countries. The article provides evidence that a significant gender divide in access to telephones exists in Pakistan and India, to a lesser extent in Sri Lanka, but is generally absent in the Philippines and Thailand. This article also challenges some of the findings of studies which claim that women’s and men’s use is fundamentally different, shedding light on women’s access to and use of telecom services at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in five Emerging Asian markets.

Title: Cambodia, Malaysia, Pakistan and the Philippines: Cross-country Study on Violence against Women and Information Communication Technologies
Author: Sonia Randhawa
Pages: 7 pp.
Publisher: genderIT.org
Date (published): 22/02/2010
Date (accessed): 24/02/2010
Type of information: research article
Language: English
On-line access: yes (pdf)
Abstract:
This article presents and compares the findings of four national reports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Pakistan and the Philippines undertaken by the Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP) as part of the project “Strengthening women’s strategic use of ICTs to combat violence against women and girls”. Asia has been at the forefront of embracing new information and communications technologies (ICTs), and in using them to promote democracy and human rights. From using SMSes to coordinate public protests in the Philippines, to circumventing the firewalls of Burma and China, Asians have shown ingenuity in mobilising ICTs for innovative rights-based purposes. However, ICTs in the region have also been used to violate rights, through increased opportunities for censorship and surveillance; whether surveillance by the state, or by perpetrators of violence against women (VAW). This article looks at the intersection between ICTs and violence against women, an area often overlooked in the discourse on ICTs and human rights, which tends to focus primarily on issues of access and freedom of expression.

Title: Window on the Unbanked: Mobile Money in the Philippines
Author: Mark Pickens
Pages: 4 pp.
Publisher: CGAP: Consultative Group to Assist the Poor
Date (published): 12/01/2010
Date (accessed): 15/01/2010
Type of information: research brief
Language: English
On-line access: yes (pdf)
Abstract:
In 2009, CGAP teamed up with the GSM Association (GSMA) and McKinsey to measure the global market for financial services delivered via mobile phones (mobile money) in 147 developing countries. This is the first study of mobile money and the unbanked—those without access to formal financial services—estimated to be almost 4 billion worldwide.

The Philippines provides a window onto the complex financial lives of low-income families. Three out of four Filipinos are unbanked (Demirgüç-Kunt, Beck, and Honohan 2008). The country hosts two of the earliest pioneers in mobile money—Smart’s Smart Money launched in 2001 and Globe’s GCASH launched in 2004. CGAP, GSMA, and McKinsey gathered data on 1,042 unbanked consumers in the Philippines, split between mobile money users and nonusers.

Title: Bottom of the Pyramid Expenditure Patterns on Mobile Phone Services in Selected Emerging Asian Countries
Authors: Aileen Agüero, Harsha de Silva
Pages: 29 pp.
Source: CPRsouth
Date (published): 15/12/2009
Date (accessed): 22/12/2009
Type of information: conference paper
Language: English
On-line access: yes (pdf)
Abstract:
This paper evaluates the importance of mobile telephone expenditure in consumer budgets of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Thailand. We examine if mobile phone services in the selected countries display characteristics of a luxury good or that of a necessity. Upon evaluating the expenditure patterns as a share of total personal income we conclude the service to be a necessity.
Welfare and poverty issues are then addressed with the estimation of Engel curves, as they show how consumption of various goods and services change with variations in the consumer’s income. We estimate Engel curves for expenditure on mobile telephone services for the BOP in the selected countries to show that mobile phones are part of everyday lives among the selected consumer group.

See also:
Presentation pdf

Title: A Comparison of Mobile Money-Transfer UIs for Non-Literate and Semi-Literate Users
Authors: Indrani Medhi, S.N. Nagasena Gautama ,Kentaro Toyama
Pages: 10 pp.
Source: CHI 2009, April 4–9, 2009
Publisher: ACM
Date (published): Spring 2009
Date (accessed): 01/12/2009
Type of information: research paper
Language: English
On-line access: yes (pdf)
Abstract:
ABSTRACT
Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the “unbanked”. However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best.
In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa.
This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken
dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task-completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.
(via MobileActive.org )

Title: Modern ways to access new agricultural technologies
Source: Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture
Date (published): 19/11/2009
Date (accessed): 26/11/2009
Type of information: article
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
The Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) through the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture (OPAPA) Program has developed ICT-enabled information services that allow farmers and extension workers to have easy and direct access to a wide array of agricultural technologies.

These services, which include the Farmers’ Text Center, e-Learning, e-Forum, Pinoy Farmers’ Internet, Web Conferencing, Cyber Communities, and Mobile Internet Bus, are the products of a three-year pilot testing conducted by OPAPA in multi-locations through the establishment of ICT-enabled farm villages called cyber communities

Title: Do low-income mobile phone users want mobile money?
Author: Kabir Kumar
Source: CGAP: Consultative Group to Assist the Poor
Date (published): 20/11/2009
Date (accessed): 20/11/2009
Type of information: blog post
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
Since the official launch of GCASH in early 2004, Globe Telecom’s subsidiary GXI set-up a number of initiatives to help them arrive at a strategy for mobile banking in the Philippines. As part of those efforts, CGAP and GXI partnered to roll-out GCASH in three predominantly rural and low-income provinces of Bohol, Palawan and Surigao. Our goal was to understand how to expand the reach of GXI’s agent network into smaller towns and how customers would use the service. I am writing to share briefly what we learned in terms of customer usage and preferences in the low-income provinces that we have been working in.