By Montserrat Xilotl
 |
| Sierra Leone |
Negotiating and building
win-win solutions is an essential component for sustainable development, where
identifying common solutions and creative partnerships can go a long way to
boost profits and build more resilient lives. Identifying win-win solutions
that bring together smallholder farmers and vulnerable communities with the
ever-growing African telecommunications sector is a giant, in-your-face win-win
solution that can produce lasting impact on the lives and livelihoods of
millions of people while providing an attractive opportunity for the private
sector. But making it happen is easier said than done.
During various CIRDA Workshop and events, the CIRDA Team has
found promising opportunities for establishing partnerships with local mobile
telecommunication providers.
Mobile telephones are widely used in the developing world,
with Africa in the midst of a mobile revolution. In the past 10
years, Africa has become the world's second most connected region by mobile
subscription. Currently 720 million Africans own a mobile phone,
and it is expected that this year the number of cell phones on the continent
will exceed the population. Mobile phones and mobile technologies thus provide
an ideal platform to communicate early warnings and other vital climate
information to end users in a seamless fashion.
Innovative uses of mobile
phone communication technologies for collection of weather data are being
explored – for example, the company Telecel Faso in Burkina Faso is working
with the NHMS in Burkina Faso to test the use of rainfade technology to produce data on localized
precipitation equivalent to that of radar technology at a fraction of the cost.
In addition, the ubiquitous
towers used for mobile telecommunication can provide a secure location for
national hydro meteorological services (NHMS) to site equipment and facilitate
the collection and transmission of observational data. Research has shown that the locations of many such towers
are indeed suitable for the collection of representative weather data.
All too often, the greatest
challenge to the NHMS staff lies on how best to approach and successfully
engage mobile telecommunication providers. Answers lie in identifying win-win
solutions that are attractive to both NHMS and the mobile telecommunications provider.
Recently a presenter at a
CIRDA workshop shared the following graph; the data displayed are consistent
with similar CIRDA Team presentations during past events. The plot supports the
notion that that once reliable, useful weather information becomes readily
available via phone, the demand for phones and the
amount of air-time used goes up.
This has certainly been the
case in the US, Europe, Japan and India. The graph indicates that 39% of
feature phone users routinely accessed weather info via their phones; only
on-line games exceeded that degree of usage. The experience in other companies
is similar.
This points to potential
win-win opportunities for partnerships between NHMS and mobile phone companies
in which the public benefits from reliable, timely and readily available
weather information while mobile phone companies add a service of high value to
consumers thus increase their demand. Increased demand and air-time use in turn
grows revenues and has the potential to expand networks.
Of course, for this
potential opportunity to be realized it requires that mobile phone providers
develop applications that provide a quality service. NHMS need to be prepared
to provide appropriate products and services that are packaged for the
dissemination through mobile phones. The NHMS’s do have competition in this
area – several of the major global weather companies are willing to provide
mobile phone providers with basic product streams. Programmes like CIRDA are
working with national NHMS’s to enhance their capacity to produce this type of
information.
Where there is demand, there
is opportunity. Research indicates that there is an unmet demand for weather
information provided through mobile phone services. The potential upside for
the mobile phone company will drive the development of the necessary phone
applications. The question in the end becomes, who will be the first to
provide the information and data streams that will drive these applications?
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