“Scaling the Mobile Frontier” by Jan Chipchase
As part of Tech@State, the US State Department’s ongoing series of collaborative discussions on the subject of mobile money, Jan Chipchase (Executive Director of Global Insights at Frog) presented “Scaling the Mobile Frontier”, a talk exploring how we can leverage technology and partnerships for sustainable development and financial inclusion.
“When I started researching this topic, my hypothesis was that illiterate consumers would not be able to complete tasks on a mobile phone that included a textual interface, but I was proved wrong on two counts: the first is that illiterate consumers are adept at rote-learning the steps to complete a task *assuming they are sufficiently motivated*; the second is that in many instances illiterate consumers can benefit from *proximate literacy* — where instead of completing a task themselves, they turn to someone more literate than them for help with some or all of it. What they lose in privacy they gain in efficiency. In this context an illiterate mobile phone user who wants privacy will either go to a trusted friend, or to a sufficiently-trusted agent outside their neighborhood”
