Developing apps that deal with social concerns

Share words of business wisdom with start-up entrepreneurs. Provide stay-at-home moms with valuable ideas for businesses they can start from home. Inform farmers of the latest commodity prices to guide the pricing of their produce. Match suppliers in the provinces in need of a market with buyers in search of new, innovative products.

These are just some of the eagerly sought-after services that any mobile phone—even the cheapest one on the market—can provide to help entrepreneurs in the country, and thus contribute to raising Filipinos’ income.

The problem is, the potential to use the mobile phone, specifically its short messaging or text service, for employment generation and entrepreneurship has not been fully explored, which is a waste considering that the Philippines enjoys a high mobile phone penetration of 91 percent, meaning 9 of 10 Filipinos own a mobile phone.

This yawning gap between reality and potential did not escape the attention of Globe Telecom, the country’s second-largest telecommunications company, its start-up incubator Kickstart Ventures Inc. and US-based AppBridge, a company established by Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum to bring needed mobile applications to those in poverty, enabling education, employment and economic opportunity.

And the desire to help close that gap led to the birth of Ideas & Apps Philippines Challenge—an initiative to develop free or low-cost mobile applications to address social problems that governments are facing, such as how to increase the income of Filipinos to enable them to at least meet their basic needs.

According to AppBridge founder Margo Drakos, the Philippines is the perfect place to launch the Ideas & Apps Challenge because of the high mobile penetration rate, familiarity with the English language and the opportunity to have a real and lasting impact on the poor, considering that about a third of 90 million Filipinos live on less than $2 a day.

The challenge comes in two phases. In the first stage, which ended on June 5, ordinary people gave their ideas on how to deal with Filipino social concerns using mobile communications.

Then from June 10 to September 1, mobile application developers, designers, business people and other interested parties will work on the best ideas gathered in the first phase to actually create and launch mobile solutions using the SMS service that is so popular among Filipinos.

The winning applications will be announced on September 10 in time for the World Economic Forum Summit in China and the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York.

“What we are very excited about is this opportunity to create a pilot program in the Philippines,” says Drakos.

She says AppBridge wants to design a platform that will help people deal with their concerns on education, health and wellness, job skills training, economic empowerment and financial literacy.

“What we found is that a lot of times, people on the ground know most about what their own environment needs. It’s not a top-down approach, so we need to have a platform where people can submit ideas for local solutions, and pair them with global community developers to build mobile solutions and then work in tandem with local telecommunications partners to be able to distribute these tools,” Drakos explains.

Also, Kickstart president Minette Navarrete says that “the beauty of this challenge is that it puts people at the center of the picture, recognizing real world problems … It encourages and empowers [people] to act and create solutions.”

To narrow the search, Navarrete says that the challenge is focused on five key themes: education; job skills enhancement and employability; entrepreneurship; health, wellness and humanitarian relief; and active citizenship and good governance.

The proposed applications must work on ordinary mobile phones, she adds.

The challenge deliberately highlighted the power of basic phones because, while the sales of smartphones have been increasing at a rapid pace, those who can afford them are still in the minority. Those who will benefit the most from these mobile applications can only afford devices with basic and yet useful features such as SMS.

“Digital inclusion is one of the big things that we care about,” says Navarrete. “The people you want to help cannot really buy the full featured smartphones.”

According to Navarrete, simple mobile applications make it easy to reach the majority of the population.

However, Drakos notes that most mobile applications are not designed for the poor—those who have much to gain from tools that can help elevate themselves. Thus, the Challenge wants to change the situation by including SMS and Voice aside from smartphone apps.

Globe will step in once the mobile solutions are developed.

“We are working in tandem with Globe to be able to distribute these tools. Because if you build the tools but there’s nowhere for them to go, then nothing is really realized,” Drakos says.

And that will be another waste of a golden opportunity to make meaningful changes.