Africa is witnessing a period of impressive economic transformation. Small business growth and technological innovation are bridging the development divide and lifting many out of poverty. Foreign investment has been pouring into the continent, viewed by analysts as one of the few remaining emerging market economies. Google's Eric Schmidt recently traveled to Africa on a technology tour citing Kenya's impressive gains in the ICT sector.

But the headlines and statistics fail to account for the large number left behind in the continent's race to develop. Social problems continue to plague African societies and threaten to reignite tensions, stalling long-term progress.

To address these challenges, grassroots leaders are working across Africa to introduce new models and practices to give voice and representation to marginalized groups, many of which include: women, children, and rural populations.

Referred to as "social entrepreneurs" these individuals work in partnership with local communities to use non-conventional approaches and innovative designs to address development challenges. Unlike traditional business entrepreneurs, their goal is not financial profit but societal gain.

In an effort to harness the collective expertise of these global change-makers, Stanford University's Program on Social Entrepreneurship was launched in 2011 to bring practitioners inside the classroom and on campus.

In April, three social entrepreneurs working to advance social, economic, and political change in Africa will spend the spring quarter in residency at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Turning justice on its head

After emerging from a decade-long civil war, Sierra Leone has been cited as a successful model of post-conflict development and stability. However, the formal justice system has continued to exclude large numbers of the country's rural population who continue to seek customary legal systems of representation. Recognizing this problem, Simeon Koroma co-founded Timap (which translates to "Stand Up" in the national Krio language) for Justice in 2003 to combine the best of both systems.

Through a network of highly trained paralegals and mediators located in 19 offices across Sierra Leone, Timap for Justice is helping clients navigate both systems to seek justice and address community-level concerns. To date, Timap for Justice has represented over 20,000 clients who are often the victims of human rights abuses at the hands of multinational corporations. Their innovative grassroots justice model together with Koroma's efforts to grow the organization has led Timap for Justice to be recognized on a national and regional level.

Transforming ripples into waves

Gemma Bulos - a California native - did not know the impact water would have on her life until she witnessed the world water crisis first-hand while traveling the world on a global peace campaign. A self described "accidental social entrepreneur," Bulos learned by actively listening to the needs of the local community and learning from their experiences. She co-founded A Single Drop for Safe Water in the Philippines to empower local communities to plan, implement, and manage community-driven water and sanitation solutions.

Recognizing the important role women play in the success of water projects, Bulos started her second entrepreneurial venture - the Global Women's Water Initiative (GWWI) - to work with rural women in East Africa to build simple water and sanitation technologies. Tailoring each project to the community's needs, GWWI equips women with the technical skills to build rainwater harvesting tanks, water treatment technologies, and toilets. All projects are constructed using locally appropriate and affordable technologies. Trainings have helped to spur micro-enterprise development, and have provided over 15,000 people with clean water and sanitation solutions.

Putting children's rights first

Malawi made international headlines as the destination for pop singer Madonna's adoption of two young children, but the country has made little progress in protecting the rights of their youngest citizens. Maxwell Matewere founded the organization, Eye of the Child, to advocate for children who are victims of forced marriage, child labor, abuse, and sexual exploitation.

Matewere's innovative model uses litigation, public and policy advocacy, and training of community organizations to lead national campaigns against child abuse. Since 2010, the organization has provided free legal aid to 47 cases of forced marriages, 13 cases of arranged marriages, and rescued 21 children from early marriages.

Through his work leading Eye of the Child, Matewere has challenged powerful actors in business and government to advocate for new practices and legislation to protect the interests and well-being of young children. In recognition of his work, Matewere was appointed as Malawi's special law commissioner to develop a national policy for anti-human trafficking and adoption.

Informing theory with practice

During the spring quarter, the three social entrepreneurs will participate in an undergraduate course (IR142) examining how social entrepreneurs advance democracy, development, and justice. Taught by Kathleen Kelly Janus, a lecturer at Stanford, the course will combine academic theory with the social entrepreneurs practical experience to present a more inclusive model of social change. Students will also be encouraged to partner with social entrepreneurs on service learning projects.

Social entrepreneurs will engage the broader Stanford community through a series of speaking roles on campus during the academic quarter. They will also have the time and space to pursue their own research initiatives, contemplate the next steps on their journey as social change leaders, and document their own models of social change.

CDDRL's Program on Social Entrepreneurship was founded in 2011 by Kavita Ramdas, the former head of the Global Fund for Women and the current representative of the Ford Foundation in India. The program is now led by Faculty Director Deborah L. Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and affiliate faculty member at CDDRL.

This spring marks the third cycle of the program, which has welcomed previous social entrepreneurs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Malaysia, Palestine, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, who together work on critical problems of democracy, development, and social justice in their communities.

For more information on the program, please visit: pse.stanford.edu.

Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation that promotes “real and permanent good in this world,” has awarded a $1 million grant to CISAC to fund research and training on international peace and security projects over the next two years. 

Specific areas of focus include research on strengthening communities in Afghanistan through collaborative civilian-military operations, several projects on improving nuclear security, and a study of community policing interventions to increase public safety and stability in rural Kenya. 

“The breadth and extent of Carnegie’s support will be crucial in advancing CISAC’s research and teaching to help build a safer world,” said CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. 

As part of a project funded in part by the Carnegie Grant, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at FSI and the School of Engineering and a CISAC faculty member, and Siegfried S. Hecker – former CISAC co-director and professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering – will travel, consult and write on issues of nuclear security in Russia and China. Their goal is to increase technical cooperation between national nuclear laboratories in the United States and Russia. They will also pursue Track II dialogue with Pakistan to promote stability in South Asia.  

“It is crucial to promote cooperation with Russia and China on nuclear issues, both in terms of superpower relations and preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism around the world,” Hecker said. “Bill Perry and I will continue to use our broad network of contacts to promote common approaches to reducing global nuclear risks.” 

Also in the area of nuclear security, Lynn Eden, CISAC senior research scholar and associate director for research, will take a hard look at the conflicting U.S. nuclear weapons strategy and policy for her project, “Vanishing Death: What do we do when we plan to fight a nuclear war?” Eden will focus on nuclear war planning and draw out the implications for future nuclear policies, including achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. She intends to publish her research with the goal of better informing the American public about the paradoxes and contradictions of U.S. nuclear weapons policy. 

“A historically informed public will be in a far better position to democratically participate in nuclear weapons policy debates, including questions of reducing the role and size of global nuclear weapons arsenals,” Eden said. 

The Carnegie grant also will enable CISAC senior research scholar Joseph Felter, a retired U.S. Army colonel, to assess and compare the effectiveness of counterinsurgency strategies and operations in the Philippines and Afghanistan. The former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and commander of the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan, Felter has reported to the nation’s senior military officers and intends to generate a number of policy scenarios to be incorporated by the military. 

“CISAC brings scientists and engineers together with social scientists, government officials, military officers, and business leaders to collaboratively analyze some of the world’s most pressing security problems,” said Carnegie Corporation’s Patricia Moore Nicholas, project manager of the International Program.  “The original thinking and proposed solutions that emerge from these collaborations will help address a series of enduring and emerging challenges.” 

The funding for the project in Kenya will allow James D. Fearon, the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a CISAC affiliated faculty member to study the security sectors in Kenya, and then to use this research as a basis for developing effective strategies for peace building in other states in transition.

This book originated in a conference on "Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes" held at Stanford University in Oct. 2010. 

The revolutions sweeping the Middle East provide dramatic evidence of the role that technology plays in mobilizing citizen protest and upending seemingly invulnerable authoritarian regimes. A grainy cell phone video of a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation helped spark the massive protests that toppled longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Egypt’s "Facebook revolution" forced the ruling regime out of power and into exile.

While such "liberation technology" has been instrumental in freeing Egypt and Tunisia, other cases—such as China and Iran—demonstrate that it can be deployed just as effectively by authoritarian regimes seeking to control the Internet, stifle protest, and target dissenters. This two-sided dynamic has set off an intense technological race between "netizens" demanding freedom and authoritarians determined to retain their grip on power.

Liberation Technology brings together cutting-edge scholarship from scholars and practitioners at the forefront of this burgeoning field of study. An introductory section defines the debate with a foundational piece on liberation technology and is then followed by essays discussing the popular dichotomy of "liberation" versus "control" with regard to the Internet and the sociopolitical dimensions of such controls. Additional chapters delve into the cases of individual countries: China, Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia.

This book also includes in-depth analysis of specific technologies such as Ushahidi—a platform developed to document human-rights abuses in the wake of Kenya’s 2007 elections—and alkasir—a tool that has been used widely throughout the Middle East to circumvent cyber-censorship.

Liberation Technology will prove an essential resource for all students seeking to understand the intersection of information and communications technology and the global struggle for democracy.

Contributors: Walid Al-Saqaf, Daniel Calingaert, Ronald Deibert, Larry Diamond, Elham Gheytanchi, Philip N. Howard, Muzammil M. Hussain, Rebecca MacKinnon, Patrick Meier, Evgeny Morozov, Xiao Qiang, Rafal Rohozinski, Mehdi Yahyanejad

On October 30, the Program on Human Rights (PHR) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) held a day-long conference to examine health and human rights. The conference was held to discuss how a rights-based approach to health services can impact the delivery of effective health interventions and advance other socio-economic and cultural rights in developing regions. The conference titled, “Why We Should Care: Health and Human Rights” was divided into five panels with presenters from diverse backgrounds and professions including lawyers, doctors, public health experts, students and activists.

The Program:

The conference started with a welcoming address by Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights. CDDRL Director Larry Diamond introduced the keynote speaker Paul H. Wise, professor of child health and society and pediatrics at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, and director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention. Wise's opening remarks began on a somber note, “The language of rights means very little to a child stillborn, an infant dying in pain from pneumonia or a child desiccated by famine.” In his address, Wise emphasized the need for an aligned and integrated rights-based approach that does not undermine effective and efficient medical interventions. “We need to fill the gap between the worlds of child health and child rights so that our programs and policies are both effective and just,” he stressed.

Following the keynote address, the conference presenters shared their work according to a geographic or thematic focus. The first panel brought together three generations of speakers from Stanford - a faculty member, a pre-doctoral fellow and a recent graduate - in a unique opportunity to share ideas and discuss possibilities of health work in Africa. Rebecca Walker, clinical instructor in emergency medicine at Stanford School of Medicine, presented her impressions and reactions on Mindy Roseman’s study of forced sterilization in Namibia. Roseman, academic director of the Human Rights Program and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, was unable to attend due to flight complications after hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast.

Eric Kramon, 2011-2012 pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL, spoke about the political sources of ethnic inequality in health outcomes in Africa.  Kramon’s work in Kenya illustrated how politics plays a determinant role in ethnic inequalities and consequently in access to health and health outcomes. Jeffrey Tran, a 2011 Stanford graduate in human biology, described the vision behind the launch of the Project of Emergency First Aid Responder in Western Cape Province, South Africa that he helped implement. Tran explained, “Individuals and communities are an integral part of the solution and we work with the communities to develop first aid training programs that are taught and eventually run by community members.”

Panel two was dedicated to the health impact of drones in Pakistan and in Gaza. Based on research by the Stanford International Clinic on Human Rights and Conflict Negotiation in Pakistan, Professor James Cavallaro and Stanford law school student Omar Shakir, explained that drones are not only responsible for deaths of civilians but also constitute a constant disturbance to social life and mental health of ordinary people, including their relations with children and the elderly. Drones impact other rights as well - such as the right to education - as children are prevented from attending schools for fear of drone strikes. Rajaie S. Batniji, resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate, explained the clinical diagnosis of traumatic disorders that result from constant surveillance and insecurity. He cited the work of Jonathan Mann in defining dignity and the devastating effects on physical, mental, and social well-being when these senses are violated. Batniji explained that populations in Gaza are prevented from living life with dignity and respect because they live under constant threat to their security and intrusion into their homes and communications.

Vivek Srinivasan, manager of the Program on Liberation Technology at CDDRL, presented his experience on the Right to Food Campaign in India. He believes that this campaign has led to the mobilization for rights and the provision of services. “Not all demands are confrontational. Communities begin demanding something that is perceived as small in scope but have ramifications that extend to other rights such as the right to education, the right to housing and the right to work.” According to Srinivasan, the Right to Food Campaign in India has had a tremendous impact in putting hunger on the policy agenda. Suchi Pande, an activist-researcher who worked on the Right to Information Campaign in India for over seven years and was the secretary for the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information from 2006 to 2008, supported Srinivasan’s argument of strong correlation in achievements and right-based mobilization. However, Pande pointed out that despite successes in the Right to Food Campaign, other economic and social rights including the right to health in India continues to be a non-issue for politicians and the government. She is optimistic and believes that rural public hearings, the role of the right to information and its supporting mechanisms will facilitate access to public health in rural India.

In panel four, Sarah MacCarthy showed results that suggest that counseling and testing services for HIV-positive pregnant women remain limited, insufficient or lacking in quality in Salvador, Brazil. “While Brazil’s HIV/AIDS program has been internationally acclaimed, national practice still fails to meet national and global guidelines,” she explained. Calling attention to the regional discrepancies in the HIV/AIDS policy and program implementation in Brazil, Nadejda Marques, manager of the Program on Human Rights at CDDRL,, expressed concerns about the implementation of an HIV/AIDS program in a context of limited resources. “In Angola, counseling and voluntary testing units for HIV/AIDS don’t have drinking water or sanitary conditions to receive patients. They lack basic equipment for testing and data collection, there is a generalized shortage of doctors, and health care providers have no specific training on HIV/AIDS.” Despite this alarming situation, Marques explained that advocating for the rights of persons living with HIV/AIDS in Angola has put in evidence the failure of a heath system unable to provide even the most basic services to its population and has enabled mobilization in a context where human rights are routinely violated.

Ami Laws, adjunct associate professor of medicine at Stanford, described how a physician can provide services in collaboration with the judicial system to advance human rights. Laws is an expert witness on cases of torture survivors that require asylum status in the U.S. and has worked mainly with victims of torture in the Punjab region in India. Everaldo Lamprea, a JSD candidate at Stanford Law School and an assistant professor at Los Andes Law School in Bogotá, Colombia, spoke about his recent comparative study on health litigation in low and middle-income countries. The escalation of right-to-health litigation in these countries can have unexpected and harmful consequences to healthcare reforms and the enforceability of the right to health. In part, this is because significant financial resources are allocated to the litigation processes and not to the health system. In addition, while litigation can highlight gaps that exist in the health system that need regulation, countries have been very slow to adapt and adjust to these signals.

Next Steps:

A number of key ideas, questions and insights emerged from the conference including:

. How to identify an effective intervention that will also mobilize communities to advocate for its implementation?

. How to provide services to the more vulnerable populations without alienating a contingent that has access to basic health care services?

. What instruments can be used to share best practices among national healthcare systems?

. How do global priorities adapt to contexts of limited financial resources and human capital?

. How can punctual achievements in rights that guarantee access to health be expanded for the achievement of other social, economic and cultural rights?

The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL will continue to pursue a research agenda examining health and human rights following the conference and announced that it will be the thematic focus of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Speakers Series in 2014. The PHR is also actively seeking support for research projects that include a right to health component at the core of its academic investigation for the 2012-2013 academic year.

NAIROBI, Kenya – Single-room shacks with mud walls, metal roofs and dirt floors sleep families of eight here. Plastic bags filled with human waste are thrown into unpaved streets, earning the nickname “flying toilets." Trash piles up in front of homes and storefronts. The flies are everywhere. People struggle to survive but the appetite for change is strong.

This is Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum home to hundreds of thousands packed onto one square mile of land. Kibera's population is a matter of debate – and politics – with unofficial estimates ranging from 250,000 to 1 million.

And it is next door to some of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. On its edge lies a golf course serving the elite, the lush green grass a stark contrast to the rusted metal roofs that clutter Kibera's skyline.

More than half of Nairobi's residents live in human settlements like Kibera. Photo Credit: Sarina Beges

The government says those who live here are illegal squatters, and officials withhold basic public services like electricity, sewage and waste collection. Health care and education are expensive and out of reach for those struggling to find steady employment amid the rising price of food and fuel. Water is scarce here – a resource turned on and off by the government and a commodity overpriced by a handful of private dealers.

But mobile phones are so cheap and easy to access that more than 70 percent of people living in Kibera have one. Harnessing the potential of technology for development, an innovative course at Stanford is designing mobile phone applications to improve living conditions in Kenya's slums.

Incubating ideas

Stanford professors Joshua Cohen and Terry Winograd created Stanford's Designing Liberation Technologies course, which is taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) each spring. Grounded in the principle that an effective product cannot be designed without participation from the local community, the course pairs student teams with NGOs to co-create technology platforms.

"We started with the belief that by combining emerging mobile technologies with human-centered design, our students could find new opportunities to change people's lives for the better," says Winograd, a computer scientist. "We were fortunate to develop connections with strong local organizations that could guide our understanding of the needs and provide a vehicle for turning our students' ideas into real programs."

The course is part of the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. Cohen and Winograd helped launch the program in 2009 with CDDRL Director Larry Diamond to explore how technology is being used to advance change in the developing world.

Originally funded with support by Nokia Research Center in Africa, the course is now supported by the Silicon Valley-based Omidyar Network.

One of the first ideas to come out of the class is M-Maji, which means “mobile water” in Swahili. M-Maji is a mobile application that uses a two-way SMS system to provide users with accurate and up-to-date information on the location, price and quality of one of Kibera's most precious resources – water.

Water economics

Water is scarce, expensive and can often be contaminated in Kibera. The government supplies water to Kibera just two or three days a week. When the water flows, vendors fill large hundred-gallon plastic storage tanks that tower imposingly from the rooftops.

A water tank sits atop a water vending station. Photo Credit: Sarina Beges

Water is collected from kiosks housed in storefronts along dusty streets and open gutters. Young girls pour water from rusty faucets into large jerrycans and struggle to carry the containers through Kibera's pock-marked streets. They spend about two hours a day collecting water for drinking, cooking, cleaning and bathing.

"On a good day they can go to their normal spot to find water, but on a bad day they have to keep walking around until they find a source," says M-Maji co-founder Sangick Jeon, a Stanford PhD student.

Jeon explains that water has turned into a big business in Kibera and large cartels deemed "the big five" control the price and availability of water, shutting out the smaller vendors from the marketplace. That means Kibera's residents pay more than double the cost for water than their rich neighbors on the other side of the golf course.

Water quality is always a concern.

"Most water is contaminated because steel pipes are stolen and they use above ground plastic pipes that break off and flying toilets can seep into the pipes," Jeon says.

Jeon is researching conflict and cooperation in Africa. He took the course taught by Cohen and Winograd two years ago and has stayed invested in M-Maji. He says Kibera is a fascinating place for a political scientist to work, but also points to the strong partnerships that have allowed the project to take root.

When asked about how the M-Maji technology works, Jeon laughs.

"I am just a political scientist," he says. "The guys at Umande Trust are doing it all."

Dialing for water

Kelvin Lugaka is a young Kenyan water specialist at Umande Trust who leads the M-Maji project. He implements the technology and gets people to use it. Lugaka grew up in Kibera and is proud of his childhood home that he calls a human settlement, not a slum. His parents and siblings still live here, and he knows all the water vendors in the five villages where the technology is being piloted.

Walking through Kibera, Lugaka shows how M-Maji works on a very basic Nokia mobile phone – the kind that costs the equivalent of $15 on the second-hand market. The technology was developed by a local team of Kenyans working for Wezatele, a Nairobi-based startup located at the iHub technology incubator.

Lugaka dials *778# onto the phone's large buttons. A few seconds later, a SMS message pops up on the phone's small screen prompting him to press "1" for water, "2" to sell water or "3" to file a complaint. He presses "1" and a list of villages appear that have water available that day. Next to each landmark is the cost of water that day.

Because there are no street signs in Kibera, the M-Maji team had to use popular landmarks – schools, health clinics and churches – to identify water vendors locations.

"M-Maji is going to have the coordinates for water vendors, which will allow people to find out information about water and the cost of water today, so people can move to a different water vendor (if the price is too high)," says Lugaka.

Each morning the registered water vendors are responsible for entering the price of water at their kiosks into the M-Maji system. Lagaka currently has 45 water vendors registered in the system but would like that number to grow to 100.

A unique partnership

Josiah Omotto is one of Umande Trust's original founders. Raised in Kibera, Omotto has devoted his work to improving water and sanitation conditions in the community.

He has a booming voice and commanding presence. When he speaks, everyone in the room listens.

"Umande Trust implies that you wake up in the morning with a new perspective on the world," Omotto says. "We work on projects that do not recycle the ideas or biases of yesterday."

The power of technology to advance change has always been part of Omotto's vision for development in Kibera and before working with Stanford he claims there were no other mobile phone-based projects here.

"Access to information is power and technology represents the future potential to transfer and share information," he says.

Over a lunch of rice, vegetables and bits of meat, Omotto talks about the unique partnership with Stanford. It’s unusual to see student researchers in the field translating knowledge into practice and impact, he says. Other researchers have showed up at Umande Trust to collect data for their surveys. But they rarely stay long enough for lunch or a walk through Kibera.

Before the course starts, students spend over a week in Kenya meeting with local NGO partners, conducting needs assessments with the community and developing the ideas that will turn into their design projects.

Some of the prototypes created have used mobile phones for reproductive health counseling, to coordinate a system of community foot patrols, provide legal advice, report violent crime, and incentivize savings, among others. With the ease of a mobile device, they attempt to break the information divide that exists in Nairobi's poorest communities to connect users directly to medical, health and legal professionals.

Not all the projects succeed. But M-Maji seems to be defying the odds.

Leveling the playing field

A female water vendor hopes the M-Maji service will increase business at her kiosk. Photo Credit: Sarina Beges

Standing outside in the hot afternoon sun as water trickled from the tap into the muddy street, one of Kibera's few female water vendors enthusiastically endorsed the M-Maji service. She’s optimistic that the service would drive more customers to her smaller kiosk that struggles to compete with the larger vendors in Kibera.

At her station, a teenage girl rinses her clothes in bright red plastic basins of soapy water as young children run through the narrow streets filling small tin cups. As they drink, dogs fight over scraps of garbage.

"M-Maji allows the poorer water vendor to enter the marketplace," Omotto says. "The larger water vendors are well known, they control the water supply and are connected to big political players and the government. The moment you make this information open you liberalize the system."

M-Maji's co-founder agrees.

"The system will put downward pressure on the water prices so if you are selling water for five shillings when it is only worth two shillings, then someone else will sell it for four and people will go there," Jeon says.

In discussing the politics of water, Omotto says water is one of the few areas the Kenyan government has been making an effort to improve in Kibera.

"The government does not invest in informal settlements," he says. "Resources are typically channeled outside the city into rural areas or spent on defense and the police."

Omotto shrugs his shoulders when asked why water policy has improved in Kibera and suggests that the new Kenyan constitution – which contains provisions for water rights – might be the answer. Or he just chalks it up to politics, suggesting that it may have to do with the political ambitions of the current water minister. Not surprising in a country where resource allocation and politics go hand-in-hand.

Scaling the service

As the project grows, water quality testing is going to be an important component. M-Maji is planning to do periodic tests on the water quality and would eventually like to employ infographics technology to visually plot the sources of contaminated water for residents. Jeon is hoping to work with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's office in Kibera on water quality testing.

While M-Maji is gearing up for a full launch of the service this year, they expressed concern about the sustainability of the project. For the pilot they received small grants through the Freeman Spogli Institute's Global Underdevelopment Action Fund and the Center for Innovation in Global Health. But it is uncertain where the funding will come from going forward.

M-Maji does not charge people to use the service, which is equivalent to the cost of sending a text message, but will be unable to subsidize the service indefinitely.

"The cost of sending a message through M-Maji is the cost of one vegetable or liter of water," Omotto says, underscoring the trade-offs that will force the M-Maji team to work hard to prove the utility of the service to the community and vendors.

Umande Trust has already received 400 calls from community members interested in the service and believes M-Maji will have traction on the ground once it is fully launched. Lugaka has been busy working with the local radio station in Kibera to develop advertisements for M-Maji as part of a larger community outreach strategy.

The problem of water availability and quality are not unique to Kibera. If the project takes off it has the potential to scale to other human settlements across Africa and the world.

"If the technology works perfectly then Kibera is just the start,” Jeon says.