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User testing mobile products for women: the why, and the how
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User testing a mobile product for women is an extremely important step of any mobile service - yet it is one that is often skipped as it may be seen as too expensive, too difficult, or simply not valuable.
In this recent blog post for the GSMA, newsletter co-editor Alexandra Tyers outlines some reasons for doing user testing for women, as well as giving practical, actionable tips in how to do it, using examples from Bangladesh.
Read more. |
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Smartphone app for sexual reproductive health
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Butterfly Works is initiating Oh my body, a smartphone application on sexual reproductive health rights. The demo version was developed after research in Senegal indicated girls look for practical information on how to manage their menstruation. The app contains animations, FAQs, games, myth busters and practical tips. The information is made available on mobile phones, both feature phones and Android devices.
Read more.
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UNESCO Mobile Learning Week 2015: empowering women and girls
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The theme for this year’s UNESCO Mobile Learning Week is empowering women and girls through mobile learning. The conference will be held in Paris from 23rd to 27th February, and is looking in particular at equitable access, creating gender-sensitive content and pedagogy, literacy, and skills development.
Attendance is free, and registration is open now!
Read more.
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Rapelang Rabana: South Africa’s mLearning mogul
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NRapelang Rabana, a visionary techpreneur who appeared on the cover of Forbes Africa before the age of 30, has one mission: ensuring that millions in Africa have the opportunity to earn an education. Her preferred vehicles of access are mobile devices, which led her to found the company Rekindle Learning.
Rapelang had this to say of the mobile learning opportunity: "If we truly wish to address our educational development challenges on this continent, including the need to skill at significant scale, we must ask how to begin articulating a mobile learning experience that better equips us to reach our own potential - a learning experience that effectively imparts core skills and knowledge, that improves organizational performance, that gets more kids through school."
To find out more about Ms Rabana’s successful startup in South Africa, read more |
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Safe Motherhood SMS service in Tanzania
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Tanzania’s safe motherhood SMS service, Wazazi Nipendeni, has recently celebrated its third year since its launch. To date, it has reached over 500,000 subscribers and has sent over 40 million messages. The service, which is free and delivered through Airtel, Tigo, Zantel and Vodacom, sends messages to pregnant women and their partners, with important information in order to promote a healthy pregnancy.
The service aims to grow to 1 million subscribers by 2016, and attributes its success to collaboration between a wide range of partners, from both the public and the private sectors.
Read more. |
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From mobile teacher to mobile technologist: career spotlight
To become a “woman in tech” is not an endeavour that requires being a prodigy, coding skills, or even a degree from Stanford. In this blog post, newsletter co-editor Ronda Zelezny-Green shares her experience of transitioning from being a teacher with worldwide mobility to a mobile technologist based in London.
Read more.
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Mobile phones drive women's economic empowerment
Cherie Blair Foundation have done an independent evaluation of their Business Women SMS service in Nigeria, Indonesia and Tanzania. The independent study assessed how the mobile phone service can affect the lives of female entrepreneurs, with very positive results, including increased self-confidence and strategies to handle business.
Read more.
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What’s the role for mobile with gender-related sustainable development goals?
Henrietta Miers’s blog post for SciDevNet highlights that by 2015, only two countries will have eliminated gender disparity in all levels of education. This slow pace of progress, Miers writes, could be hastened through the use of ICTs to facilitate education, particularly mobile devices.
Read more. |
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