BFI Summary Assessment

By utilizing the rapid growth of global cell phone use and text messaging, FrontlineSMS has successfully created a simple yet highly effective system for empowering millions of disenfranchised citizens to become active reporters of real-time data through a free and easy-to-use program that allows instantaneous two-way communication between large groups of people anywhere there is a cell phone signal. Allowing NGOs to effectively communicate in such a fashion has helped produce enormous improvements in many locales across a wide range of issues, including, but not limited to: voting fraud, healthcare, food security, price stability, human trafficking, domestic violence, emergency response and aid coordination for natural disasters, citizen journalism and open media.

FrontlineSMS focuses not on solving problems directly but on enabling the NGOs and ‘practitioners working in the field’ to increase their own capacities and effectiveness. By offering a technology that is free to download, easy to use, and flexible in its function, FrontlineSMS operates as a meta-solution that can be combined with or added to existing programs and projects.

Because FrontlineSMS is so simple and is open-source software it is easily adapted and used and is growing exponentially. The software has been downloaded over 12,000 times across 60 different countries, used by about 300 organizations, and has an estimated base of 12.5 million users. And while the statistics are impressive, they also highlight one apparent drawback to the project: the difficulty of tracking the true number of people using and benefitting from the software. Because it is free to download and share with others, it is impossible to know definitively how many people are using it.

Although initiated by one person, FrontlineSMS now has a diverse, highly competent and experienced team based in both the UK and USA. Their phone interview clearly demonstrated their understanding of how NGOs function and their own desire to grow the service to assist more people worldwide. Their personal focus and priority is dealing with communications and service delivery to the last mile or those remote areas that have the weakest telecommunications infrastructure. They have a realistic grasp of how to expand the usability of the program (i.e. by providing updated versions of the software, troubleshooting assistance and resources, and cross-platform design), as well as how to adapt to rapid changes in communications technology.

FrontlineSMS has already had a significant impact in critical sectors globally and appears to be well on its way to rapidly expand to more. It is a simple, elegant technology that will continue to assist positive agents-of-change worldwide in ways we are only beginning to understand. It is proving to be a very powerful tool.