Google's Values at Work in Africa

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 29

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It took a big step toward universal accessibility today when it launched a program in Uganda aimed at bringing information to poor rural and urban dwellers via mobile phones. Working with Grameen Foundation and MTN, the big African mobile carrier, Google has begun offering a handful of services that combine text messaging, search technologies, and databases full of locally relevant information. “We believe that finding information shouldn’t require a computer,” says Joseph Mucheru, head of Google’s operations in sub-Saharan Africa. Richard Mwami, public access manager for MTN Uganda, says: “This will help solve a great need at the bottom of the pyramid.” This project is a prime example of smart people scoping out a problem thoroughly and coming up with a technology and service solution that fits the needs and economics of a poor community. Bravo!

The project got its start 18 months ago. Grameen Foundation has been operating a village phone service in Uganda, and had nearly 50,000 people offering pay-by-the-minute mobile phone services to the masses. Grameen wanted to broaden into information services and it sought out Google and MTN as potential partners. They did extensive ethnographic studies to see what kinds of services the Ugandan people wanted, and then did pilot projects in the field to test out early versions of the services. They're launching with a few services and hope to add more later. Eventually, they hope to branch out to other countries in Africa.

For starters, there are three clusters of services. 1) Google SMS Tips includes a health information service focusing on sexual and reproductive health and AIDS provention, and another that provides farmers with agricultural information. 2) Google SMS Search supplies sports scores, weather, foreign exchange rates, horoscopes, and the like. 3) Google Trader is a marketplace where people can sell and buy goods and services. To get information, people type in a free-form query, Google's technology identifies key words and searches a database for possible sources of information, and the system sends text questions back to the customers to narrow down the results--presenting the one that seems most likely to fit the bill.

There are a number of SMS-based services already in use around the world, but Google's techies insist that theirs is better in several respects. The health and agricultural information is truly local. The market and price information is fresh. Users can express themselves with questions rather than paging through series of menus to get the information they want. And here's a ingenious element: A merchant can explore making a sale at a certain price to a buyer in another city. Then he can use the SMS service to find the cost of hauling his merchandise there. So he can find out before he agrees to a deal if it will be profitable for him.

The cost of the services are relatively low. The standard cost in Uganda today for an information SMS message is 220 Ugandan Shillings, or about 10 cents, but the Google SMA services will be offered at 5 cents per message. Initially, they'll be free. The system uses English, but most of the population can get by in English or find somebody to help them send and decipher messages.

Uganda is a poor country with 30 million people, half of them below the age of 15. The country's literacy rate has risen dramatically in the past decade, to about 70%. The cluster of services empowers the population economically, and, thanks to the health information service, could save tens of thousands of lives. This is what technology can accomplish if it's put in service to the people.

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