In rural areas, there are several sanitation service providers (installers, material providers). How can 50 households in the locality obtain aggregated information on offers or deals from these service providers through their mobile phones - and through access to information on such deals, consequently have a greater incentive to use sanitation services. End user is in rural areas, high illiteracy.
Problem from Craig Kullmann, ckullmann@worldbank.org
As listed above there are several countries that could potentially use this type of application to help link consumers to service providers and simultaniously incentivize service providers to go to hard to reach areas by aggregating households.
This would ideally increase access to information at the household level on how to identify service providers, and from a service provider perspective is to gain efficiencies in delivering their services by bundling households.
High illiteracy
Images, voice
Sanitation Marketing projects in Nicaragua, Peru, Tanzania, Cambodia, and Indonesia.
Scaling Up Rural Sanitation webpage at www.wsp.org
There is potential for the solution to be introduced in the countries listed above
Comments
I think another way to look
I think another way to look at the solution (instead of groupon) is almost like a google text message. Using some sort of sms networking site might be another way to look at this. For example, suppliers/vendors could be registered through some sort of government/private sector training for the construction of on-site sanitation (latrines) and their contact details were entered into a database.
Through the local or national local government social marketing of sanitation, they could put as a tag line on their radio message , "if you are interested to locate a provider near you please send an SMS to XXXXX"
The SMS networking site would then respond send them back a text message with the contact details of providers near them.
This may facilitate communication directly between the consumer and provider in hard to reach areas instead of relying on intermediaries such as local government outreach workers to convey where the household demand exists to providers.
The questions that I have are:
do open source sms networking sites exist?
does someone need to manage to this the site or once suppliers are registered can it almost be on automatic pilot?