Ordinary South Africans can be trained to collect research data using cellpones. Photo by: Kiwanja.net

A new study has identified how more ordinary people from rural and peri-urban areas can become involved in research, simply by using their mobile phones.

Currently there are a couple of organisations in South Africa that train people at grassroots level to collect data for research projects. This is an excellent way to uplift these people and create job opportunities.

All over Africa, health research done with the help of mobile phones is increasing. Creative Consulting & Development Works recently wrote a newsletter article about this phenomenon, referred to as mhealth. To read the article, click here.

The most recent study on mhealth in South Africa (published December 2009) entitled The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: A report from a household survey in South Africa, set out to “investigate the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey”.

Local women from Umlazi, close to Durban, hired as community health workers, were contracted by the researchers to collect data. None of the 24 women had any previous experience of data collection, but all had mobile phones and could SMS. They received 2 days of training using the software installed on their phones.

Researchers can check the quality of data collected more easily using mobile phones. Photo by: Rachel Strohm

Over the course of four months, 39,665 households were surveyed by these women. There were no hardware or software failures using the mobile phones.

The researchers found that the benefits of using mobile phones for data collection are as follows:

• Quality checks could be performed in real-time, and inconsistencies could be detected and rectified in a timely manner.
• The automated graphs and reports allowed the project manager to see how many surveys were completed on an hourly or daily basis.
• Data falsification could also be detected. If an unrealistic number of surveys were completed in a specific time, the project manager would be alerted that something is not right.

And of course, the income it generates for unskilled workers used to collect this data, is very valuable.

The researchers came to the conclusion that this is a “feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored”.

Read more about the study here.