In mobile phone journalism, Africa is ahead of the west

Thanks to the iPhone and other smart phones, in the western world mobile phones are getting increasingly important for journalism. But in Africa, the phone has been used as a broadcast device for quite a while.

In fact, the use of mobiles in Africa is in many ways ahead of the west.

No need for an app, though, as bandwidth is still rather small. Headlines are simply sent out as text messages, and texting is used to report the news in as well. Although the mobile phone penetration is far behind Europe or Asia, it is rapidly growing. In Africa, four in 10 people now have a mobile phone.

The mobile phone is in some ways the PC of Africa, and creative ways of using it are emerging.

"Apart from radio, mobile phones are a relevant distribution tool for news. Newspapers only matter in urban areas and with policy makers," says James Mbugua, a business writer at Radio Africa operating in Nairobi who was recently visiting London with a fellowship of the Investment Climate Facility for Africa.

"TV has maybe gained, but newspapers provide the content that they actually talk about. The majority of people is getting their news with radio as it has a lot of reach in rural areas, or with mobile phones. So quite a few of the media houses send out text messages with breaking news, final scores of sport games and stocks."

Access to the internet is still not common in Africa and high-speed capacity rare. This should be partly tackled by the East African Submarine System, a fibre-optic cable linking 20 African countries, which will go live on June next year. However, as Africa is still a troubled continent, news is important to emigres in the US and the UK: "A couple of newspapers are making money online because they target the diaspora," says James Mbugua.

As radio waves are sometimes blocked in countries such as Zimbabwe, text messages can be an important news source. For example, the London-based SW Radio Africa that is part of Guardian's Activate 09 project sends out a selection of headlines to 30,000 people in Zimbabwe via SMS.

It is no wonder that several African journalism or blogging projects are using the net as a hub for information from mobile phones. The crowd-sourcing project Ushahidi, for example, was developed in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It maps incidents using information from text messages or online sources, and as the application is open source, it can be used around the world.

"What we look for in crowdsourcing is reaching a critical mass of information where communities are dialogging with each other and are able to make sense of the situation due to the increase level of communication going on," explains Erik Hersman, the co-founder of Ushahidi.

Today, Ushahidi can provide a model for crowd-sourcing projects elsewhere as the issue of how to process and verify massive amounts of information isn't just an African problem.

To get around this problem Ushahidi has recently launched a project called Swift River which is about gathering as much information as possible and then running it through machine-based algorithms, helping experts to understand the veracity and the level of importance of the gathered information.

Also visionary is using the mobile phone as a multiple device – a remote control for your house or your car, or as a credit card.

"The mobile phone is the most important new technology," says Mbugua. "It is accessible. It is used in Kenya as a mobile wallet. A lot of people don't have credit cards or even bank accounts. So since 2007 a service was established that has 8 million users and is used to pay even cab drivers or pubs. Meanwhile there were a couple of international mobile conferences in Kenya."

The Africa of today shows that the visionary technological ideas of this century won't be only developed in high-tech countries. Several blogs document this, for example Appfrica, Afrigadget or WhiteAfrican.

They are informative about the inventive ways people in Africa deal with technology, for example finding ways to charge batteries on a continent that has more phones than electricity.

As energy resources become scarce in the future, the African solutions of today are definitely worth studying.