I am seeking advice on the feasibility of using Skype for a project I am running to distribute life-improving information over mobile phones in low-income countries. We recently received funding from the World Bank to start this project in Bangladesh (link below). The idea is to run short, interactive audi courses to convey a few essential pieces of information, e.g., about water and sanitation, or maternal and newborn health. At the end of the course, there is a short quiz and if the caller passes the quiz, they get free airtime delivered to their phone for personal calls. As an additional incentive, we will try to recruit local celebrities to record the audio segments. I've attached a short document with some more information. This project is being run by a Boston-based company called Dimagi (www.dimagi.com) and a very large non-profit organization called BRAC (www.brac.net).



We would like to be able to develop a system that could be quickly used in many countries, and so Skype seems very attractive. I realize Skype does not have call-in numbers in many countries, but we hope this would change, and can imagine some work-arounds for the time being.


Any comments welcome and I'd be interested to talk to anybody at Skype who might be interested in supporting this work. Feel free to email me at nlesh@post.harvard.edu.


Neal

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The link for the recent grant is:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/O...:205098,00.html