One of the biggest challenges facing field operations in the developing world is access to accurate, reliable and timely information. Innovative uses for new technologies are increasingly being applied to classic humanitarian and development challenges.

With the recent proliferation of technology throughout the developing world, the ability to improve this access has become cheaper and the tools to do so more ubiquitous. It is clear that a fundamental reassessment of the way we interact with emerging technologies is already occurring across the developing world and that simple devices, like the mobile phone, are revolutionizing the way people in developing countries interact within their communities and with the larger world.

This past month the RapidSMS community, hosted by UNICEF, led a mini-summit bringing together key programmers and project managers who have contributed to various iterations of a new data collection platform.

RapidSMS is a SMS-text message based framework that incorporates a host of diverse mobile applications on the same underlying piece of computer code to enable mass-scale mobile data collection, remote health diagnoses, logistics coordination and communication. Whether tracking delivery of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) in areas suffering from famine or assisting rural health care workers provide better quality care, the ability to quickly collect, analyze and disseminate real time data is proving invaluable to everyone from operational managers to policy makers.

The current RapidSMS framework is a direct product of actual use cases from the field, crafted to solve specific and real problems. With successful pilots in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Uganda, a host of UNICEF country offices and partners are requesting support for similar projects. The time had come to pool together the knowledge and experience from past implementations, consolidate gains, and coordinate a pragmatic way forward.