In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students prepare for the baccalauréat. We find that students used …

We created a system to send regularly-spaced, multiple-choice questions to students' own mobile devices to help secondary school students in Cameroon with exam practice via either SMS or WhatsApp. Students' participation rates were heavily impacted by trust in the intervening organization and …

Their results were surprising. With all the hype around Internet messaging services like WhatsApp, the researchers were expecting WhatsApp to well outdo old-school SMS text messages. Yet, SMS beat WhatsApp for mobile phone test prep!

We present an SMS-based system for providing transit information based solely on existing cellular and GPS networks. We developed and applied our system to privately-run marshrutka buses in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, our goal is to more broadly address issues of ad-hoc shared transportation …

This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a …

Short message service (SMS) is cell phone technology that is a simple and flexible transport mechanism for programmatic information exchange in developing regions for database-based applications. MySMS takes advantage of this medium by providing a framework using SMS as a transport layer to allow …