The Mobile Citizen Program
The Mobile Citizen Program aims to accelerate the development and implementation of mobile services to address acute social and economic problems. We will provide support to develop citizen-centric solutions that target low-income groups in urban and rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region.
The main program objectives are:
Strengthen local technical capacity to design and develop mobile services
Seek empirical evidence of social and economic impact that can demonstrate the genuine potential of mobile services to policy makers and entrepreneurs
Design and establish business models that would enable replication and scaling up of mobile services that are developed through the program
In particular we will focus on the following areas, with special attention given to gender and diversity issues: health, education, government, commerce, social protection, and employment.
The program will provide funding in the form of grants ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 USD. These grants will be used to develop and implement a maximum of 8 mobile service projects to tackle concrete and severe problems affecting low-income population in cities and rural areas of LAC.
The Mobile Citizen Program is brought to you by the Science and Technology Division of the Inter-American Development Bank, with the support of the Italian Trust Fund for Information and Communication Technology for Development.
Mobile Services Roadmap
1st Phase: Problem Selection
The main objectives of this phase are:
Select key problems that affect low-income communities in the LAC region.
Establish partnerships with companies committed to working towards tackling these problems.
Activities:
Call for Problems (CFP) (From October 20th, 2009 to November 19th)
Pre-selection of Problems (From November 20th, 2009 to December 21st)
Partners Matchmaking (From December 22nd, 2009 to January 30th, 2010)
1st Phase Timeline
2nd Phase: Design and Implementation of Solutions
The objectives of this phase are design, implement and rollout innovative mobile services.
Activities:
Call for Solutions (CFS) (From March15th, 2010 to April 7th)
Solution Providers: Final Selection (From April 8th to May 7th)
Design and Implementation of Mobile Services (Starting at the end of May 2010)
Rollout (~November 2010)
2nd Phase Timeline
3rd Phase: Implementation and Impact Evaluation
The two major objectives of this phase are:
Seek empirical evidence of impact to demonstrate to policy makers and entrepreneurs the real potential of mobile services for social and economic inclusion.
Design and apply business models that are profitable, which is a major barrier in moving towards full-scale sustainable projects
Activities:
Sustainability
Results Impact Evaluation
Dissemination
