Round 1

ANIC is looking for ideas that will transform the way that African media work. This means that your idea should offer significant and tangible improvements to existing tools or techniques, or should propose new ways for African journalists to gather news, tell stories, engage with audiences, or sustain media organisations.

Ideas that have the potential to be replicated or that could scale continentally will have an advantage.

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Targeted mobile sourcing and engagement

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Targeted mobile sourcing and engagement

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1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Develop a platform for gathering data & creating sustained engagement via mobile phones, revealing patterns of experiences and needs.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Numerous services enable mobile data collection, including Jana, Mobenzi, Episurveyor, and FrontlineSMS. Our platform uniquely visualizes patterns of needs and experiences to enable targeted engagement with small groups of people.

3. Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media [50 words]

More than 500 million Africans own mobile phones, affording African media an opportunity to engage, and make news more relevant and reflective of African life. Social media engagement helps but tends to reach wealthier Africans, leaving out the experiences of those without broadband, data plans or smartphones.

4. How and why will your solution work? [100 words]

One word: Team. The technology we propose creating is actually not terribly difficult to build. The components are easily pieced together. What will be critical is developing the user base so that the platform has a high level of utility on day one. Our team and partners have a proven track record of building crowdsourcing solutions for journalists, and mobile experiences that scale and engage millions of Africans via feature phones. We also have access to a large network of media and journalists throughout Africa, to help test the concept and adopt it once it’s developed. Our team also benefits from experience building off of established mobile information-gathering and mapping platforms Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Andrew Haeg - Veteran journalist, former Knight Fellow, co-founded PIN, a crowdsourcing platform used by 70 U.S. newsrooms and the Mail and Guardian.

Dale Zak - Developed iOS and Windows Mobile app for Ushahidi, open-source plugins for the FrontlineSMS messaging system, and coordinated many tech for social good initiatives.

Nic Haralambous/Motribe - Co-founder of Motribe, former journalist with the Mail & Guardian and the Financial Mail.

Technical advisors and partners - Ushahidi, Frontline SMS, the Mail & Guardian, IDEO.org, the World Press Institute and the African Media Initiative will help prove, test and spread the platform.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

The prototype will build off of a number of existing, open-source tools, including the forms plug-in that Dale Zak has already built for Frontline SMS, Ushahidi’s data-collection platform and mapping software and other freely available visualization tools such as Google Chart. Here is a mockup of how we imagine the tools fitting together.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

We expect to earn revenue by charging journalists and newsrooms for use of the platform, and by extending paid access to others seeking cost-effective focus group capacity in Africa, including service designers, NGO’s, local governments, and others.

Requested amount from ANIC: $100,000

Expected amount of time required to complete project: 24 months

Total Project Cost: $400,000

Name: Andrew Haeg
Twitter: @andrewhaeg
Organization: NA
Country: United States

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