Mobile Impact Machine: A new partnership model leverages the world’s largest interconnected industry to help break cycles of poverty

By Matthew Bauer, Founder & CEO, sparrow. Originally published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on June 10, 2014.

“Affordable mobile phones and the opportunities they usher in for the poor will be one of the most dramatic game-changing technologies the world has ever seen.”

When the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), the leading association of global mobile operators and related companies, made this point in a 2013 report, it raised a question: How do we take this very personal device, and turn it into a tool for creating social impact and building global empathy?

The possibilities of leveraging telecommunication carriers and their networks to help solve pervasive social issues are endless; we can use them to help improve access to education and health care, end violence against women, bolster entrepreneurship, stem the homeless epidemic, and empower those with disabilities. There are some great examples of this: M-Pesa, the mobile phone-based money-transfer and microfinancing service, is now serving tens of millions throughout Africa (60 percent of Kenya’s GDP is now transacted on M-Pesa). mHealth is improving health care by placing best practices in the hands of frontline health workers. Grameenphone started as a pioneering initiative to empower rural women of Bangladesh and has grown into the leading and largest telecommunications service provider in Bangladesh, with more than 48.68 million subscribers as of March 2014.

But while there are already many mobile technologies, applications, and programs aimed at improving people’s lives, as a whole they represent a mere fraction of the potential for impact that lies within the $2 trillion global telecom industry—an industry that has more month-to-month recurring customers than any other industry in the world. How can we unlock more potential?

Read the full article.