D.Net's Pallitathya Help Line bags the Gender and ICT Award 2005
We are pleased to announce that Pallitathya Help-Line ( Call Center for the Poor and Under-privileged) project of Dnet has been selected as the winner of the Gender and ICT Awards for 2005. On behalf of the project, D. Net will receive a cash prize of USD 8,000 in the Gender and ICT Awards ceremony and Knowledge-sharing Session. This will be held during the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) Forum on 27-30 October 2005 in Bangkok , Thailand . The sponsors of the Award are the Association for Progressive Communications Women's Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP) and Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP).

About the Project
Introduction
During a time when there is disproportionate hype around using computers and Internet for tackling issues of economic deprivation and social injustice, this proposal presents the concept of using the relatively less ‘fashionable' technology – the mobile phone – as an effective ‘last-mile solution' to take information to the poor. The global wave of information and communication technology (ICT) revolution has not left Bangladesh untouched. With increasing zeal, government and non-government organizations have taken steps over the last few years to create relevant digital content for the poor. However, due to lack of adequate infrastructure facilities with very low teledensity and Internet penetration, it is often seen that the target groups are not getting access to these information. This scenario is in fact contributing towards worsening of the digital divide, since only a limited section of the populace are getting access to the information that are available through the Internet, CDs or other print media. For example, market price information about agricultural products in different markets are currently available through the Internet but they are accessible to only a handful of people and the target beneficiaries in rural areas are mostly left out.

Under such circumstances, this proposal suggests using the mobile phone, that has had remarkable success in Bangladesh with 60% of geographical coverage, to bridge the gap between information providers and the target beneficiaries. Questions from rural areas can be handled through a ‘help-line' manned by operators who are equipped with ICT-based system to respond to specific queries within a short time. It is important to recognize that not all queries can be handled through this service since many problems require physical inspection for a meaningful solution. The rest of the proposal provides details about the kinds of questions and problems that can be handled through such a mobile phone-based ‘help-line' in the initial stages of implementation. Dwellers of remote villages can also use the ‘help-line' service to disseminate urgent information during times of emergency, such as sudden outbreak of a disease, incidence of a crime or violation of human rights.

Statement of Need
In order to comprehend the needs for a ‘help-line', it is important to have a broad appreciation of the social and economic circumstances of Bangladesh . The country has a population of about 138.45 million in an area of 144,000 sq. km. Its major cities are one of the most densely populated in the world. It is a country well-known for its numerous waterways, with seven percent of the area within the national boundary being water mass. The southern boundary of the country is adjacent to the Bay of Bengal , claiming the longest natural beach in the world. Three major rivers of South Asia meet at the heart of Bangladesh and flows into the ocean in the south, which accounts for the country's infamy for floods and other natural disasters. Electricity has 20 percent of geographical coverage. Teledensity stands at 1.7 percent, mostly concentrated in urban areas. Communication infrastructure is not very well-developed with only about 10% of its highways paved. 78 percent of its citizens live in rural areas, with 35.6 percent living below the poverty line. Literacy rate stands at 58 percent, one of the lowest in Asia . In Bangladesh , infant mortality rate 7.7 percent, infants with low birth weight stand at 30 percent, and only 48 percent of the population have safe sanitation facilities. In education sector we have 15460 schools, 2339 colleges and about 21 public universities. The net primary enrollment is 90 percent and net secondary enrollment is 39.2 percent. (All data sources are from World Fact book, World Bank Database, UNICEF, Bangladesh Bureau of Education Information and Statistics and University Grant Commission, Bangladesh .)

However, it is a country of resilient people. Among the many positives, two points are specially highlighted for the purpose of this proposal: (1) Bangladesh is well-known for having one of the highest concentration of active NGOs and development organizations, thus making up for much of the government's inadequacy in providing for its citizens; (2) Mobile phones have made 60 percent geographical coverage in Bangladesh, which has already had a major positive impact on economic and social scenario of the country. The concept of ‘help-line' is based on these two major positive aspects of Bangladesh . The ‘help-line' aims to build upon the widely spread mobile phone network to strengthen the access of development organizations to reach their target beneficiaries and reduce the sufferings caused by information and communication gaps.

In view of the above scenario, let us visualize some specific instances of problems (in different areas) that villagers face due to lack of timely and cost-effective access to needed information or necessary social and legal support (we will only highlight cases of problems that can be addressed through a mobile phone-based service such as ‘help-line'). The cases selected below are very much representative of the circumstances currently prevalent in rural areas of Bangladesh .

Scenario 1 : A farmer in a remote village has successfully grown a high-yield variety of potato and wants to sell his product to a big market in town, but he does not know which town to go to. Physically visiting the nearby towns to weigh his options is not a financially viable option for him, and also since he rarely goes out of his village, he is not comfortable with the idea of venturing out into towns on his own. A seemingly kind-hearted middleman comes to his rescue. He buys the product from him at a relatively low cost and sells it a high price to a nearby town. The farmer never gets to know what he has been cheated out of, and entrusts his faith in the ‘kind-hearted' middleman again next year.

Scenario 2 : A fisherman living in a village near the ocean wakes up in the morning and notices that the sky is getting dark. He turns on his battery-run radio (since there is no electricity in the village), but unfortunately the weather update has just ended. He gets impatient since he has to wait another hour to get the next update and his radio batteries are running very low. He decides not to bother too much about the weather and set sail into the ocean hoping to come back early. His hopes are dashed when his boat is caught in a sudden storm in the middle of the ocean. One of his last thoughts was a wish that he could instruct his radio to repeat the weather update he had missed by one minute.

Scenario 3 : An illiterate old man in some village has been suffering from asthma for a long time. The well-respected village doctor, who has no formal training in medicine and has barely passed secondary school, is unable to find any remedy. He luckily admits his inadequacy and recommends the old man to go to a city to get treatment. Fortunately, the old man's son is financially solvent enough to consider taking his father to a city hospital. But the problem lies elsewhere – the father and son have never made a journey to the city, which takes about half an hour of walking, one hour of ride in a three-wheeled carriage (called ‘rickshaw'), and four hours of ride in a mini-bus. They have heard that the city is big with full of strange people with even stranger accents. They gather enough courage and arrives at the city bus-station one late afternoon. Their fears about the city soon dissipate when they are approached by a ‘kind-looking' gentleman, who takes them to a laboratory, gets some clinical tests done, and also makes an appointment with some doctor. They spend the next two days in the city only to find out that the whole process has cost them a fortune with no real results and the ‘kind-looking' gentleman is a fraud who has made a profession out of deceiving poor and illiterate new-comers to cities.

Scenario 4 : A student in a rural area has made village-history by being the first to have passed higher secondary school with ‘first division'. He decides to opt for higher studies in some good university in the city, but he has no idea about their admissions policies, entrance exam dates, and other regulations. He has no relatives in the city, and hence no one to turn to for help. He does not even know what his choices are in different cities, and he does not have enough financial resources to visit each city to find out. So he just goes to the nearest university, takes the entrance exam but unfortunately fails to pass that test. Now he is too late to try other universities since their deadlines have also passed. He waits another year for a second chance, but is again faced with the same problem of not knowing which universities he can try to get admitted to.

Scenario 5 : A rural woman has just been divorced by her husband due to lack of her parent's inability to give him the promised dowry (this is a very common scenario in Bangladesh ). She is neither sure whether she is eligible for any financial compensation, nor does she know of any institution that can provide her legal and social support. As a result, she timidly goes back to her parents' house and spends the rest of her life as an unwanted burden and gradually goes through a total loss of self-dignity.

Scenario 6 : A water-locked village in a remote area is suddenly struck with cholera that is spreading at a fast rate. The village doctors are unable to cope up with the situation, and there are no MBBS doctors in a nearby location. The village has no phones or electricity and it takes half a day to get to the nearest city. There is one mobile service center, which can only make calls to mobile phones, but the villagers do not know which mobile phone number to call for help. The disease spreads at an uncontrollable rate and by the time the nearest government hospital responds by sending over some doctors, several children and old people have already died. Some NGOs, other private health organizations or even the central government could have responded faster if they had known about the problem, but the news never reached them on time.

Through a ‘help-line', the problems presented in the above scenarios can be handled with effectiveness and efficiency. In scenarios 1 through 4, a help-line operator, equipped with an electronic searchable directory of relevant information, can respond to the respective queries within a short time, either immediately or after a specified period of time. In scenarios 5 and 6, the operator, equipped with phone, fax, e-mail and a directory of service providers, can immediately send help requests and other necessary information to the relevant institutions for further action.

Currently, much of the information needed by people from villages is available through websites, printed publications, radio, TV and other media. But the main problem is in making these information available to the target beneficiaries when and where they need them in a cost-effective way. Also, in Bangladesh , there are many institutions, such as human rights organizations, legal support centers, health-service providers, disaster mitigation centers etc., which are actively involved in providing various kinds of support services to the poor and the underprivileged in rural areas, but they also suffer from lack of timely accessibility to villagers. The help-line proposes to serve as a platform to bridge these various information gaps.\

Project Objectives

As explained above, the ‘help-line' aims to serve primarily two functions:

(1) to serve as a link between information suppliers and the target beneficiaries through working as an ‘info-mediary': for example, getting the needed agricultural price information from the Internet and passing it on to a farmer.

Information Supplier => Help-Line => Target Beneficiary

(2) to serve as a link between service providers and the target beneficiaries through working as an ‘emergency information disseminator': for example, passing on emergency information from target beneficiary to relevant service provider.

Target Beneficiary => Help-Line => Service-Provider

This concept paper proposes a pilot project to test out the feasibility of such a ‘help-line' and also to identify the implementation strategy of a ‘help-desk', i.e. the desk from which an operator will respond to telephone queries and handle other urgent information from villages. The main objectives of such a pilot project are the following:

Project Description
As described above, the ‘help-line' project is a model in which villagers will call a mobile phone number (or a set of numbers) to make a specific query or to disseminate some urgent information. The call will be answered by an operator at a ‘help-desk' located at D.Net's headquarter building in Dhaka , who will respond as appropriate. The pilot phase proposed in this document will cover ‘help-line' services in four villages of Nilpahamari, Bagerhat, Jhenaidah and Magura districts. The villages are chosen on the basis of their remoteness from cities and also because of D.Net's previous and on-going project activities in these villages.

The services that will be available through the ‘help-line' in the pilot phase are the following:

The ‘help-line' pilot project will constitute the following activities along with their respective durations. The work plan is pictorially presented in Table 1 (see Attachment-1 titled ‘Tables') :

- Collection of relevant information, putting them in a database and maintain continual updating:
This will involve the following activities: (1) collection of information for building up the database that a ‘help-desk' operator will access – the information will be collected through various means, such as local-level surveys, visits to relevant organizations and the Internet (details of the kind of information to be collected and their respective sources are given in Table 2 (see Attachment-1 titled ‘Tables') ) (2) development of a database of information (3) updating that database from time to time as more information gets collected.

- Setting up partnerships with related organizations:
D.Net will set up partnerships with relevant organizations so that when the ‘help-desk' operators pass up information to them, they take immediate remedial actions. The kinds of organizations that will be included for such partnership are organizations working on issues of human rights, gender, underprivileged, natural disaster victims, legal support, emergency health services etc.

- Development of database-driven software to efficiently retrieve required information:
The information gathered will have to be entered in a database that can be accessed through an user-friendly application software that the ‘help-desk' operator can use to instantly retrieve the needed information. The design of the software and the database will be an evolutionary process and will evolve as more information gets collected and nature of information requirements is better understood.

-Set-up of ‘Help-Desk':
This will involve the following activities: (1) getting ‘help-line' phone numbers from mobile phone service provider (preferably Grameen Phone, since they have the widest coverage in Bangladesh and its top executives have already showed keen interest in collaborating with D.Net's ‘help-line' project); (2) physically setting up the ‘help-desk' in a room at D.Net's headquarter, with 3 computers connected in a LAN; (3) recruiting 3 ‘help-desk' operators with good communication skills and proficiency in computer usage; (4) providing necessary training to the ‘help-desk' operators so that they can respond to queries at the minimum possible time, or ask to call later at a specified time, if the information requires more than one minute to retrieve.

- Village-level mobilization:
This will involve the following activities: (1) selecting one or more mobile phone service centers (in each village) that villagers can use to call the ‘help-line' numbers; (2) recruiting an educated mobile operator lady to carry one mobile phone from door to door (the mobile operator lady will be engaged since, in the rural social structure, many women will be hesitant to come to the mobile phone service center to make a call); (3) providing training to the service-men at the mobile phone centers and also to the mobile operator lady so that they can ensure that only villagers with appropriate queries make the phone calls; (4) promotional campaigns in the four villages to make villagers aware of the services offered by the ‘help-line' project.

- Help-Desk Operation:
This will involve the following activities: (1) full-scale operation of the ‘help-desk'; (2) recording and transcription of all conversations for further research into the nature of queries, and identification of optimal ways to handle them.     

- ‘Lessons Learnt' Study: Months 1 and 6
This will involve two studies – one, a baseline study at the beginning of the pilot project, and another, an impact study at the end of the pilot project.

Impact of the Project

The village with the lowest income level had the most need : Among the four villages chosen for research phase, the village which had the lowest income level and was the remotest turned out to be the most active in terms of making calls to the Help-Desk. This goes to demonstrate that poorer villages also tend to be more information-starved and there is a greater propensity to pay for livelihood-related information despite the economic hardships. This has been a significant finding in terms of putting priority towards targeting the poorest and remotest villages for such information services.

House wives represented the biggest user-group of the Help Line : In the research phase, it was found that house-wives were by far the biggest user-group of Help-Line [refer to Table 1]. This shows clearly that it this group that is perhaps the most deprived in terms of access to information. It is often found that telecenter-based information services are not able to address their needs sufficiently due to lack of their mobility and other social constraints. Mobile-phone based services such as Help-Line can potentially bring about immense benefits to this group of end-users.

Areas of greatest livelihood challenges are related to health and agriculture : The research project found that most queries were in the areas of health (majority of which came from housewives) and agriculture (majority of which came from farmers) [refer to Table 2]. These finding shows where the greatest needs are, and also where awareness raising campaigns need to be strengthened further that may in turn generate more queries.

Table 2: Distribution of Questions by Types of Livelihood Problems

The database of information greatly facilitated the efficiency of Help-Desk operators : The Help-Desk operators at D.Net Office who responded to the queries from villages had access to a database-driven software application that had a sizeable amount of relevant data in an easily searchable format. One of the major areas of research has been to develop an efficient human interface in Bangla for handling queries which are often complex in nature. It still is an evolutionary process as the software application is still undergoing revisions.

Availability of multiple options for placing queries to Help-Desk ensured that no one returned without service : The Help-Line service had multiple options to place queries [refer to Table 3], including ‘free-time' every week. This ensured that everyone no matter how poor could place their queries, and also helped the researchers in identifying the range of types of queries from different social groups.

Why Mobile Phone?

• It is easily available at almost all corners of Bangladesh
• It is an interactive tool where both information provider and receiver can interact with each other
• It is the quickest method among all other existing channels to forward problems to the experts and get the feedback quickly as well
• This technology is very simple to use

Table 3: Different channels for interacting through Help Line

* Two times in a week (Sunday 9.00 to 11.00 AM and Wednesday 5.00 to 7.00 PM ), the villagers asked their questions through mobile phones free of cost.

Demand for Help-Line service will increase with lowering of mobile phone costs : The research phase strongly suggested that the current cost of mobile phones in Bangladesh is a significant inhibiting factor to using the Help-Line service. Differential pricing strategies in this experimental phase revealed that the demand for information service is highly price elastic [refer to Figure 1]. Reducing the price of mobile phone costs will significantly increase the popularity of Help-Line service.

The Help-Line service enhanced the social status of mobile operator ladies : The Help-Line service contributed to enhancing the social status of mobile operator ladies, as they went around the village connecting people of various age and occupation with Help-Desk operators. She was earning a modest income, while at the same time providing a necessary service to villagers in the process. During the course of the project, she became one of the ‘sought-after' residents of the village, which also had a direct positive impact on her own self-assessment. For example, in one of the villages, a local school teacher (teachers are generally locally regarded as the most knowledgeable group) came to seek advice from the mobile operator lady.

Business model around the Help-Desk is feasible : Although the research phase did not provide sufficient time to develop a full-fledged business model, it did provide strong indication that there is sufficient demand for livelihood-related information and there is also willingness to pay for that information even in the remotest and poorest corners of Bangladesh . It is very likely that if the Help-Desk service can reach critical mass around the whole country, a sustainable business model can be developed around the service. With lowering of mobile phone costs (as is expected to happen soon with greater deregulation in the mobile phone industry of Bangladesh ), the critical mass can be reached more easily.

Partnership has been a key element of success : One of the major factors of success behind Help-Line is partnership with the government, private sector entities and other NGOs. Partnership has been for several purposes: (1) to gather livelihood related information (2) to gain acceptance in local communities (3) to get subsidized service charges from infrastructure providers. In each case, the partnership has been a win-win scenario, which has formed the basis for strong sustainable collaboration. The content providers have benefited from further outreach at minimal cost; the local community groups have benefited from increased services and economic activities in the community; the infrastructure providers from benefited from increased publicity.

Importance of Spreading Reach of Help-Line
Now that the preliminary research phase is over, some initial concepts tested and some important outcomes found, it is crucial that the Help-Line continues and spreads across a greater part of Bangladesh . The Help-Line can also work as an important complementary service in areas, where telecenters are already available, since this service can reach users that telecenters often cannot. The Help-Line can also be a stand-alone service in areas where there are no telecenters, since it offers some unique advantages, such as low set-up cost, easily scalability, less gender bias, less complex management overhead etc.

D.Net is committed to spread the reach of Help-Line and also assist other public and private entities to provide information services through mobile-phone based model.

Way Forward through Multi-Stakeholder Partnership
D.Net is committed to continue the Help-Line service and spread its reach to increasing number of villages and further exploring ways to enhance the service. It will establish stronger partnership with the government and other public and private institutions to collect and develop content in Bangla in a format that is easily searchable through online and offline means. It will establish partnerships with public and private service providers to spread the reach of Help-Line services. It will establish partnership with mobile phone service providers and Internet Service Providers for subsidized rates in return for opportunities of their publicity and greater outreach. For example, D.Net may partner up with Grameen Phone and train Palli-Phone ladies to provide Help-Line services as a value-add to already existing services. D.Net eventually plans to spin off a socially-aware private company that will provide the Help-Line service in a fully commercial mode.

Closing
From D.Net's experience with action-research in several villages, it is clear that there exists a huge demand in villages for various kinds of information. While the ‘help-line' can only satisfy a part of that demand, it can nevertheless play an important role in identifying the nature of information need of villagers and their willingness to pay for different kinds of information. The ‘help-line' pilot project can revolutionize the perceptions and models surrounding IT-based service-delivery at rural level in developing countries.