MICROCAPITAL STORY: Technology Review Names Tapan Parikh 2007 Humanitarian of the Year for His Work on Mobile Phone Technologies Designed for Microfinance and Rural Development

Technology Review, an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has named Tapan Parikh its 2007 Humanitarian of the Year for his work on mobile phone technologies geared toward microfinance and other rural development initiatives. Mr. Parikh, a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Washington, was honored in Technology Review’s 2007 report, TR35, which showcases the technological achievements of pioneering innovators under the age of 35.Mr. Parikh’s innovation is CAM, a framework of mobile tools that integrate through the use of a camera-enabled mobile phone. The CAM framework uses the mobile phone to capture images, scan documents, and to record and transmit financial transaction data.

Here is how it works.

First, microfinance institution (MFI) field agents are armed with CAM-enabled mobile phones and CAMForms, specially printed documentation containing barcodes and free-form fields for hand-printed data. Next, the field staff accepts applications, collects payments, and processes transactions by completing the CAMForms. The CAMForms are scanned on-site using the mobile phone’s built-in camera. Special software on the phone called CAMBrowser processes the barcode and hand-printed data and interprets the information via a scripting language called CAMScript. The data is store on the phone until the agent is within range of the mobile network. Finally, once in range, CAM utilizes the phone’s Short Message Service (SMS) to transmit the data to a management information system (MIS) where it can be stored, managed, and reported on.

According to Mr. Parikh, the key design elements of the CAM framework are:

Maintains a linkage to existing paper-based processes
Camera and display allow for multimedia user interface
Easy to program and use
Utilizes existing SMS technology for data transmission
Leverages a mobile phone as the computing platform (battery-powered, familiar, cheap, immediately useful)
Field agent-based, allows for distributed data collection and dissemination

Mr. Parikh’s field usability study focused on microfinance self-help groups (SHG) in India. Self-help groups are small 12-20 member cooperative lending arrangements of which most members are from poor and disadvantaged classes. Members have little or no access to traditional financial services so they pool funds and make loans to each other for entrepreneurial purposes. Most SHGs are propagated and managed by various MFIs and non-government organizations (NGO). To test CAM’s effectiveness, Mr. Parikh deployed CAM to 14 NGO field staff members. The staff members had a 7^th grade to college level education and were able to learn the CAM system within 3 days. Each form that was scanned took about 30 seconds. Data was collected at each SHG meeting in 8-10 minutes and the error rate was less than 1%.

In addition to microfinance, Mr. Parikh is also exploring CAM’s potential to solve other rural development problems. Other uses include agriculture, supply chains, healthcare, and disease management.

For more information about Mr. Parikh’s CAM framework, download his presentation, “Designing Appropriate Computing Technologies for Rural Development” at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tapan/papers/Appropriate_Computing.pdf.

-Steven Craig

Additional Resources:

Technology Review: http://www.technologyreview.com

Tapan S. Parikh: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tapan/

CAM: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tapan/projects/CAM/index.html