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.

The MobileActive08 conference, due to take place between 13 and 15 October in Johannesburg, South Africa will bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders to explore, discuss, debate and discover methods to “unlock the potential of mobile technology for social impact”.

Being avid proponents of the important role which mobile and web technologies can play in addressing real-world issues, be they in a commercial or social context, we’ll be participating. Through the demonstration of our Mobile Researcher service we’ll collect, crunch and analyse real-time data at the conference. We’re really looking forward to the exciting lineup of speakers and other contributers.

Mobile Researcher has been leveraged by a number of organisations involved in areas of social impact such as Health, Education and Service Delivery. This conference, provides a wonderful opportunity to showcase the service which allows for surveys and forms to be designed online and deployed to standard mobile phones for conduction. It also provides a platform for ideas to be exchanged and collaborations forged.

For more information on the conference, visit www.mobileactive08.org.