Siyanda brought together an excellent group of people who I really enjoyed working with today. Mbongwa (featured in the title image who calls himself Kingdom), Ayanda, Nobuhle, Nieh and Bonga are all between the ages of 20 and 26 and are all currently seeking part or full time employment. Their first language is isiZulu but they all speak English fluently.

The team of mentors who will help support the extra 20 pilot participants who will join us next week.

I had fairly high expectations for how easily the participants would pick up the concept and would be able to process tasks. We had discussed last week whether an introductory training session was necessary – to explain how the mobile application works, how to skip between questions and complete the various question types etc. But based on my interactions with youths from the area, I decided to try and see what progress the participants could make without any training at all.

I started the session by introducing myself to the team and giving them a brief overview of Mobile Researcher and how we created Mobenzi to try and leverage the platform for completing tasks. This took about 15 minutes and the team really picked the idea up quickly and were eager to get started. I handed out the 5 new Nokia 3120 classic phones and told them there was a shortcut to the application on the main screen.

The Nokia 3120 classic that we installed the Mobenzi application on for the pilot.

I was very encouraged to hear discussion about the make and model of the phone and it’s various features without me saying anything about it. In their community a person’s phone is a hugely significant status symbol and everyone seems to know about each others phones (it took some convincing to get them to agree to hand the phones back after each session).

Without any instruction, most of the participants had the application open and simply started completing tasks. Although I had high expectations, I still thought there would be many questions and a fairly slow start. But within half an hour of me arriving at the venue, the participants had their heads down and were completing tasks. A few questions popped up during the day, but none that the other participants couldn’t answer themselves.

It is difficult for us to understand how central a phone is to youth in communities like Kwanyuswa. Their familiarity with the technologies made the transition to ‘working’ on their phone completely natural.

I jotted down some notes from our discussions that illustrate how important phones are to them.

Everyone uses Mxit around here. Even our parents.

Mxit is a South African instant messaging system that millions of people use for cheap, quick communication on their phones. One of the guys said that he installed Mxit on his mom’s phone so that he could chat to her from home about what to buy when she goes shopping in town.

I installed Opera mini on my phone and at one stage used to spend over 8 hours a day browsing the internet and using applications. I used to spend at least R100 per week on airtime, but it was still cheaper than the internet cafes. I would only go to the internet cafes if I needed to print.

This was a quote from Kingdom who really flew through tasks today. I am definitely expecting experience with services like Mxit to play a huge role in how easily new Mobenzi agents can get started and how productive they are in their work.

The tasks themselves involved structuring free text sms messages by answering a series of questions about the sms. The participants varied in the time taken to complete each task, averaging at around 2 minutes (for about 5 questions per task). I did a brief analysis of the quality and I was very pleased to see almost 100% accuracy on the small set of tasks that I looked at.

I found the first day of the pilot incredibly interesting and I am now even more excited for the future of Mobenzi.