With this ambition, and some help from the Business Trust’s Shared Growth Challenge Fund, we’ve launched Mobenzi – a technology service which seeks to remunerate low income workers for completing simple tasks on their phones which are valuable to business and are not easy for a computer to perform. The name originates from the Zulu word for work – “umsebenzi” and the concept of mobility.

Over the next few months, we’ll be running a series of pilot projects to craft the software offering, assess tasks which work well, and work through a million other challenges.

What’s really exciting for us is that this is finally happening and allows us to pursue our philosophy that you can combine software, commercial enterprise and social development. We’ll be sharing a lot more about the initiative on the Mobenzi website – we hope you’ll join us on the journey.

Over several months we worked closely with them to prototype and test early versions of our mobile application. The project demands pushed the envelope of what was possible with entry level handsets of the time. The rudimentary web-based survey designer also began to take shape.

In the early days, the Mobile Researcher back-end was a PHP/mySQL implementation which utilised the CakePHP framework (a Ruby-on-Rails port). As the solution grew in complexity and response volumes swelled with large scale data collection projects with the Medical Research Council and Human Sciences Research Council, we felt that a migration to a more robust ASP.NET/SQL Server platform was warranted.

Once we migrated to what is now our current architecture, we launched our API which has facilitated the development of bespoke systems, providing capabilities for real-time logistics management, monitoring and evaluation in addition to paperless data collection.

Starting out, we weren’t exactly sure what we’d end up with or even whether what we wanted to achieve would be possible with such limited devices. But now, almost 4 years later, Mobile Researcher is an enterprise level SaaS field research and data collection platform which includes many of the features of solutions designed for “high-end” hardware. Whilst the feature set is continually growing, it’s the simplicity and familiarity of the solution which we keep central as we forge ahead with development.