Frontline SMS: Pastoralists Check Stock Prices on Their Mobiles

Sellina Narumbe is a pastoralist from Isiolo, northern Kenya.  Reliant on her livestock for her survival, she has been hit hard by the ongoing drought sweeping parts of the country.  Lack of pasture has killed forty of her fifty goats, and left her with only seven cows from her original stock of twenty. 

In collaboration with the World Food Programme, ActionAid has been providing vital monthly food rations to over 80,000 people in Isiolo.  Distribution of the supplies is handled by community members themselves through self-organised “Relief Committees”.  Sellina acts as Secretary of her local Relief Committee, overseeing distributions in five villages.

She’s also recently joined a project being rolled out by ActionAid and infoasaid, a consortium of the BBC World Service Trust and media development agency Internews.  The project aims to help combat food insecurity amongst communities affected by the drought, using innovative technology – Frontline SMS and Freedom Fone – to transmit information simultaneously to multiple recipients from a laptop computer.

250 Relief Committee members – Sellina included -  were provided with mobile phones and solar charges as part of the project...