Many organisations from east, central and southern Africa were well represented at the workshop and were joined by attendees from North America and the Philippines. There was quite a variety in experiences of mobile usage in the various attending social organisations. Most attendees where looking to gain a better understanding of where “mobile tech” could aid their organisations, whilst others had already successfully incorporated mobile technology into their campaigns and were looking to share their knowledge as well as discuss future trends.

Much discussion in the workshop centred around three main issues:

• The most common communication needs in practice,
• The restrictions put upon technological solutions in low-resource settings,
  
• What appropriate technologies are currently available, accessible and affordable?

These themes have been in common wth much of Cell-Life’s work to date and it was valuable to contrast and compare our experiences to those in other African countries. Many cutting edge mobile and telephony applications were presented, all of which took into consideration the resource-constraints typical of developing country contexts.

Cell-Life also made a number of valuable contacts at the workshop, including organisations that have experience in providing mass information services via mobile technologies. In turn Cell-Life has received much interest and feedback after attending this workshop, and looks forward to broadening its reach through potential collaborations initiated at the workshop.

A workshop session focussing on how to match resources to identified needs

  A Marabou stork, a common site in the capital city of Nairobi