Abstract
In rural parts of the developing world, spreading awareness about critical issues in health, governance, and other topics is challenging and costly. Traditional media such as print, radio and TV each have limitations and offer little guarantee that new information is absorbed or retained by the target population. This paper describes Learn2Earn, a system that leverages mobile payments to bolster public awareness campaigns in rural India. Users call an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, listen to a brief audio tutorial, and take a multiple-choice quiz to check their understanding. People who pass the quiz receive a mobile top-up (about $0.14) and have the opportunity to earn additional credits by referring others to the system. We describe a pilot deployment of Learn2Earn in rural India that spread via word-of-mouth to over 15,000 people within seven weeks. Usage was concentrated among young men, many of them students. In a mixed-methods study, we draw upon call logs, electronic surveys, qualitative interviews, and other sources of data to suggest that Learn2Earn could be an effective way to build awareness about important topics.
- SMS Achariya. http://www.smsachariya.com/.Google Scholar
- SI Ahmed, MD. R Haque, J Chen, and N Dell. 2017. Digital Privacy Challenges with Shared Mobile Phone Use in Bangladesh. PACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW) (2017).Google Scholar
- Asterisk. http://asterisk.org/.Google Scholar
- J Berger. 2013. Contagious: Why Things Catch On .Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
- CGNet. http://cgnet.in/.Google Scholar
- Dipanjan Chakraborty, Akshay Gupta, Gram Vaani Team, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2019. Experiences from a Mobile-based Behaviour Change Campaign on Maternal and Child Nutrition in Rural India. In ICTD.Google Scholar
- Manu Chopra, Indrani Medhi Thies, Joyojeet Pal, Colin Scott, William Thies, and Vivek Seshadri. 2019. Exploring Crowdsourced Work in Low-Resource Settings. In CHI.Google Scholar
- Jonathan Donner. 2007. The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional "Missed Calls" on Mobile Phones. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , Vol. 13 (2007).Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A Fiszbein and NR Schady. 2009. Conditional cash transfers: reducing present and future poverty .World Bank Group.Google Scholar
- GiveDirectly. http://givedirectly.org/.Google Scholar
- Aakar Gupta, William Thies, Edward Cutrell, and Ravin Balakrishnan. 2012. mClerk: Enabling Mobile Crowdsourcing in Developing Regions. In CHI.Google Scholar
- Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro. 2016. The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya. Quarterly Journal of Economics (2016).Google Scholar
- IMWalleT. http://imwallet.in/.Google Scholar
- International Institute for Population Sciences. 2015--16. National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4). https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FR339/FR339.pdf.Google Scholar
- Jana. http://jana.com/.Google Scholar
- Zahir Koradia, Piyush Aggarwal, Aaditeshwar Seth, and Gaurav Luthra. 2013. Gurgaon idol: a singing competition over community radio and IVRS. In DEV.Google Scholar
- Ralf Kunnemann and Ralf Leonhard. 2008. A Human Rights View of Social Cash Transfers for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Brot fur die Welt, Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst (2008).Google Scholar
- Adam Lerer, Molly Ward, and Saman P. Amarasinghe. 2010. Evaluation of IVR data collection UIs for untrained rural users. In ACM DEV.Google Scholar
- Jure Leskovec. 2011. Social media analytics: tracking, modeling and predicting the flow of information through networks. In WWW (Tutorial).Google Scholar
- HLR Lookups. https://www.hlr-lookups.com/.Google Scholar
- Meghana Marathe, Jacki O'Neill, Paromita Pain, and William Thies. 2015a. Revisiting CGNet Swara and its Impact in Rural India. In ICTD.Google Scholar
- Mobile telephone number in India - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_telephone_numbering_in_India.Google Scholar
- Aparna Moitra, Vishnupriya Das, Archna Kumar, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2016. Design Lessons from Creating a Mobile-based Community Media Platform in Rural India. In ICTD.Google Scholar
- Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Amulya Yadav, and Amit Sharma. 2019. Optimizing Peer Referrals for Public Awareness using Contextual Bandits. In COMPASS.Google Scholar
- Neil Patel, Deepti Chittamuru, Anupam Jain, Paresh Dave, and Tapan S. Parikh. 2010. Avaaj Otalo - A Field Study of an Interactive Voice Forum for Small Farmers in Rural India. In CHI.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Paypal Terms and Conditions. 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180319113031/https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/invite/terms.Google Scholar
- Frank Pega, Sze Liu, Stefan Walter, Roman Pabayo, Ruhi Saith, and Stefan Lhachimi. 2017. Unconditional cash transfers for reducing poverty and vulnerabilities: effect on use of health services and health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2017).Google Scholar
- Meghna Ranganathan and Mylene Lagarde. 2012. Promoting healthy behaviours and improving health outcomes in low and middle income countries: A review of the impact of conditional cash transfer programmes. Preventive Medicine (2012).Google Scholar
- Agha Ali Raza, Farhan Ul Haq, Zain Tariq, Mansoor Pervaiz, Samia Razaq, Umar Saif, and Roni Rosenfeld. 2013. Job Opportunities through Entertainment: Virally Spread Speech-Based Services for Low-Literate Users. In CHI.Google Scholar
- Agha Ali Raza, Rajat Kulshreshtha, Spandana Gella, Sean Blagsvedt, Maya Chandrasekaran, Bhiksha Raj, and Roni Rosenfeld. 2016. Viral Spread via Entertainment and Voice Messaging Among Telephone Users in India. In ICTD.Google Scholar
- Agha Ali Raza, Bilal Saleem, Shan Randhawa, Zain Tariq, Awais Athar, Umar Saif, and Roni Rosenfeld. 2018. Baang: A Viral Speech-based Social Platform for Under-Connected Populations. In CHI.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Agha Ali Raza, Zain Tariq, Shan Randhawa, Bilal Saleem, Awais Athar, Umar Saif, and Roni Rosenfeld. 2019. Voice-Based Quizzes for Measuring Knowledge Retention in Under-Connected Populations. In CHI.Google Scholar
- N Sambasivan and E Cutrell. 2012. Understanding negotiation in airtime sharing in low-income microenterprises. In CHI.Google Scholar
- N Sambasivan, E Cutrell, K Toyama, and B Nardi. 2010. Intermediated Technology Use in Developing Communities. In CHI.Google Scholar
- Mari Marcel Thekaekara. 2019. A huge land grab is threatening India's tribal people. They need global help. The Guardian.Google Scholar
- Triggerise. http://triggerise.org/.Google Scholar
- UNOCHA. 2014. Ebola virus disease outbreak: Overview of needs and requirements. https://www.unocha.org/sites/dms/CAP/Ebola_outbreak_Sep_2014.pdf.Google Scholar
- Aditya Vashistha, Ed Cutrell, Gaetano Borriello, and William Thies. 2015b. Sangeet Swara: A Community-Moderated Voice Forum in Rural India. In CHI.Google Scholar
- Aditya Vashistha, Ed Cutrell, Nicola Dell, and Richard Anderson. 2015c. Social Media Platforms for Low-Income Blind People in India. In ASSETS.Google Scholar
- Aditya Vashistha, Edward Cutrell, and William Thies. 2015a. Increasing the Reach of Snowball Sampling: The Impact of Fixed versus Lottery Incentives. In CSCW.Google Scholar
- Aditya Vashistha, Pooja Sethi, and Richard Anderson. 2017. Respeak: A Voice-based, Crowd-powered Speech Transcription System. In CHI.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Aditya Vashistha, Rajan Vaish, Edward Cutrell, and William Thies. 2015 d. The Whodunit Challenge: Mobilizing the Crowd in India. In INTERACT.Google Scholar
- Nikolas Wolfe, Juneki Hong, Agha Ali Raza, Bhiksha Raj, and Roni Rosenfeld. 2015. Rapid Development of Public Health Education Systems in Low-Literacy Multilingual Environments: Combating Ebola Through Voice Messaging. In SLaTE (Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education), Satellite Event of INTERSPEECH.Google Scholar
- Susan Wyche and Jennifer Olson. 2018. Gender, Mobile, and Mobile Internet | Kenyan Women's Rural Realities, Mobile Internet Access, and "Africa Rising". ITID (2018).Google Scholar
- Amulya Yadav, Hau Chan, Albert Jiang, Haifeng Xu, Eric Rice, and Milind Tambe. 2016. Using Social Networks to Aid Homeless Shelters: Dynamic Influence Maximization under Uncertainty. In AAMAS.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Learn2Earn: Using Mobile Airtime Incentives to Bolster Public Awareness Campaigns
Recommendations
Facilitating Media Distribution with Monetary Incentives
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsCommunity media forums such as CGNet Swara and Mobile Vaani leverage interactive voice response (IVR) technology to enable feature phone owners in underprivileged regions of the world to call a toll-free phone number and listen to and report local ...
Learnings from an Ongoing Deployment of an IVR-based Platform for Voter Awareness
CSCW '19: Conference Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social ComputingSpreading awareness among voters is a critical first step towards ensuring democratic participation. We report results from an ongoing deployment in India where we use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to raise awareness about voting. People ...
M-Pesa adoption and usage: a qualitative study of young Kenyan entrepreneurs
ICTD '19: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and DevelopmentGlobally, there exits the largest ever youth population, otherwise known as the "youth bulge." Youth populations are especially sizable in developing countries like Kenya, where despite economic growth the challenge of creating job opportunities for ...






Comments