Brenda Burrell

Freedom Fone's Brenda Burrell was featured in the USAID/fhi360/Afrilinks sponsored webinar entitled 'The Face Behind the App – Freedom Fone'.

I arrived in Nairobi early this week to help Radio Ergo set up a Freedom Fone service to be used to receive voice and SMS queries and feedback from Somali listeners living in and outside Somalia.

Whenever I’m in Nairobi I have to depend on taxis to ferry me around, giving me a great opportunity to catch up on local politics and social issues with the ever-opinionated drivers.

Visiting Kenya a few weeks before their March 2013 elections I took advantage of the long delays on Nairobi's congested roads to chat to our taxi drivers about their opinions regarding preparations for the elections and the presidential candidates contesting it. They shared their thoughts willingly and not unsurprisingly had different perspectives.

Freedom Fone faces a number of challenges in 2013 as it transitions from a donor funded development model to a community supported software project.

Historically, Freedom Fone was developed to help activists quickly set up automated voice menu, voicemail and SMS information services independent of the Internet and with a minimum of reliance on mobile network operators.

http://breezefmchipata.com/?page_id=2455

Tich and I are recently back from Lilongwe, Malawi's capital city. We were there to run a Freedom Fone user training workshop for six organisations involved in community mobilisation and 2-way information sharing.

OK, so there are still some hurdles to jump before the 40 finalists in the inaugural African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC) are whittled down to the 20 or so winners in this prestigious competition. Still, the next round should be really productive and interesting as the finalists meet in Zanzibar to work on their pitches and products ahead of the November 10 announcement of winners in Dakar later this year.

Freedom Fone trainers have been in Nairobi this month to assist with the first deployment of the platform for a reproductive health hotline.

Thanks to support from Women on Web / Women on Waves, reproductive health activists from Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya were able to use the opportunity to gather in the east African city to learn how to use the Freedom Fone software and discuss its potential as a channel for sharing information with mobile phone users.

Bart Sullivan is affectionately known as 'Captain' by the team of ICT officers who work at Farm Radio International's regional offices in Ghana, Malawi, Ethiopia and Tanzania. In my eyes, Bart earned his stripes today when he pulled off an audacious first for Freedom Fone and Farm Radio at Radio 5, a busy commercial radio station in Arusha's Njiro suburb. All round nice guy, Bart is also sharp and innovative... and as this story shows, very persuasive too.

Tich Siguake and I arrived in Arusha on the weekend to prepare for the start of our training workshop for ICT officers at Farm Radio International's HQ in Tanzania. We flew in to the exotic sounding Kilimanjaro airport at about 7pm where we were met by FRI's ICT and Radio Specialist, Bart Sullivan.

The award ceremony for the 2012 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize was held at the Presidential Palace in Tunis on May 3.

L to R: Stewart Chisholm, Open Society Foundations Media Program; Mark Whitehouse, IREX; Kathleen M. Fitzpatrick, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Wow, it’s hot in Dar, and this is winter in Tanzania. My ankles are swollen and it helps to sleep with a fan on at night. The city seems to be booming...buildings are going up in the city centre, bill boards compete for consumer shillings and the morning rush hour(s) is a force to be reckoned with. The most prominent products for sale are mobile related services – Tigo, Airtel (previously Zain) and Vodacom compete through vibrant advertising for a share of this lucrative market. Thanks to the competition, call and SMS costs have become very affordable in Tanzania.

As an information activist working in Zimbabwe, I've found the role of digital technologies in Egypt's revolution fascinating. Here are some observations surrounding the 18 days of protest, which successfully challenged President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30 years of rule.

1. People at the heart.

A big up to Farm Radio International's Nelly Bassily, for helping Freedom Fone to squeeze a workshop into the busy agenda at AMARC10 in La Plata, Buenos Aires today.

Nelly's networking and linguistic prowess delivered a meeting room equipped with projector and professional simultaneous translation in Spanish. She handily filled the role of impromptu simultaneous French translator, making it possible for many more people to follow my presentation.

In late May, Amy & I went down to Bulawayo to run a hands-on Freedom Fone training workshop for 11 participants based in Zimbabwe's City of Skies. The workshop was hosted there by a vibrant community radio station called Radio Dialogue. That will sound like a contradiction in terms as Zimbabwe has yet to award a broadcast licence to any community radio station in the country.

Freedom Fone's ability to fulfill it's promise as a must have tool for bridging the digital divide has yet to be determined. Millions of poor people have access to mobile phones, but with tariffs as high as they are in countries like Zimbabwe, experimentation in this field is still costly. And of course, for our project these are early days.

Open source telephony platform, Asterisk, has been used for years as an inexpensive alternative to proprietry PBXs, democratising this previously closed service industry. Why then did Freedom Fone choose to use FreeSWITCH as its telephony component instead of Asterisk? Our Project Architect, Alberto Escudero Pascual, will answer that question in the new year, but until then clues lie in this comment from Telecom Monthly: