On May 26th we invited some representatives from the press to the launch of the next phase of our Mobenzi pilot project in KwaNyuswa (Valley of a thousand hills, KZN).

During our two week trial run in December 2009, agents had completed Mobenzi tasks using our company owned phones, under supervision and together at a central location. Since May 26th however, a group of agents have been working independently as private contractors to Mobenzi.

These are some of the major factors that make the launch of this phase of the pilot a significant step forward.

1. Agents are now working in their own time, requesting batches of tasks whenever they have a few minutes spare.
2. They complete tasks while at home, travelling on public transport or even between lectures at college.
3. Most of the agents are using their own mobile phones after having installed the Mobenzi application from a link we sent to them.
4. With each task that agent’s complete, associated credit is built up in their account. Once credit reaches a certain thresh-hold, funds are disbursed electronically to their phones using FNB’s SendMoney platform. Although some agents had to borrow our company phones, many have already earned enough income from Mobenzi to purchase their own, brand new compatible Nokia phones.

These changes in the way the pilot is being run are allowing us to test the scalability of the concept. We can now manage recruitment of new agents, assignment of tasks, monitoring of quality and disbursement of funds all from our central office.

With this platform in place, it is only the demand from businesses for the services of our agents that will slow the growth of Mobenzi.

Although we had 25 participants in the pilot, 2 members of the team were not present on the Friday afternoon. The following statistics are therefore based on the remaining 23 team members who completed the self-administered survey using the Nokia 3120 mobile phones we provided for the pilot.

Age, Gender and Language

The 25 pilot participants were all from the local community of Kwanyuswa. The average age of the team members was 24 and there was an even gender split. Each of the participants had completed grade 12 and could speak fairly good English. Their first language is isiZulu but each of them studied English as a second language.

Employment history

17 of the participants (70%) had never had a full time job at the time of running the pilot. A few participants had part time jobs but were able to make the 5 hour sessions each morning.

Household information

The 17 participants that were willing to answer questions about their households have on average 7 people living permanently at home. 16 homes had stoves (94%), 14 had running water (82%), 14 had a television (82%), only 10 owned a fridge (60%) and none of the households owned a motor vehicle.

Mobile phone usage

19 of the 23 participants (82%) owned their own mobile phone (53% Nokia, 21% Samsung, 16% LG). Most participants (60%) had used MXIT (a mobile instant messaging client) in the month preceding the pilot. 9 team members (40%) had used their phones within the last month to browse the web and download pictures, music or games. The average airtime expenditure per person over the preceding 3 months was R100 per month.

Demand for mobile tasks

If employed full time in another position, the participants expressed on average that they would probably like to do Mobenzi tasks for about 3.5 hours per weekday to subsidise other income. If working only part time in another position, the desired commitment increased to 5.5 hours. Over weekends the average expected commitment was 10 hours (Including Saturday and Sunday). This works out at between 27 and 37 hours per week. 5.5 hours of concentrated work is probably the ceiling for how much time someone could spend doing Mobenzi tasks in a single day.

Everyone agreed that most Mobenzi tasks would be completed at their homes, but most participants also mentioned they would probably complete tasks while on public transport (buses and taxis) and while walking around the local community.

Thoughts on Mobenzi

The major reason the participants noted for what they liked about Mobenzi was that the work was interesting and entertaining. Only one person answered that the work was boring. The biggest challenge the team raised was that some classification tasks were ambiguous and deciding on the most appropriate answer was sometimes very difficult.

Fatigue was a problem for some participants who mentioned that their hands started hurting by the end of the day or they battled to concentrate for so long (We ran the pilot for about 5 hours each day with short breaks every hour and a longer break for lunch).

The participants were generally very excited about Mobenzi. Some of their comments are included in a related article: Feedback from pilot participants about mobile tasks

Workin wit mobenzi ws great n hp w’l start soon. Al d best:-)

This is a great example of Textese (‘SMS language’ involving abbreviations and slang). This comment translates to regular English as ‘Working with Mobenzi was great and I hope We’ll start soon. All the best. (said with a smile)’
[61 vs 93 characters = 34% compression].

Mobenzi is a good program/organisation which will bring many job opportunities to people, its interesting and entertaining and at the same time its challenging you to think before answering each question. Last but not least it will improve English language for many people who work with mobenzi because most of time it all about English

This was a very positive comment from one of the participants. Internally, we had discussed the potential impact Mobenzi work could have on education (such as English comprehension), but we certainly never expected participants to pick that up as a benefit during a short pilot project (it’s becoming very clear that we should stop underestimating participants).

Establish marketing strategies for mobenzi to ensure availability of tasks and more employment.

This participant seemed eager to see us succeed and offered some business advice.

I would like to work for Mobenzi.!!!

No comments, it will be a previlage working at mobenzi.

It was fun ,challenging and informative about the world that we live in.

No comment everything is new and perfect I enjoy mobenzi.

Mobenzi is very interesting and it challenges my knowledge in English and makes you think. But mostly it’s going to give us some sort of employment. THUMBS UP MOBENZI!!

This final comment sums up the sentiment of the team. I don’t think we could have expected a more positive reception to the project from the participants themselves.

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.

Light Providers is a registered non profit organisation founded in 2005 by Vusi Kweyama, working primarily with young people in the region of KwaNyuswa. Their vision is to expose young people to their inherent potential.

They have a community centre and facilitate recreation and training programmes for youths between the ages of 10 and 28.

You can find more on the Light Providers website including a video overview.