MobileSenegal: Three Years of Lessons of Capacity Building with Impact Presented at the mEducation Alliance International Symposium: Partnering for Scale and Impact, http://www.meducationalliance.org/, September 5-6, Washington DC This presentation covers the work of MobileSenegal (http://mobilesenegal.org, http://facebook.com/mobilesenegal, @mobilesenegal).

1. MobileSenegal: Three Years of Lessons
of Capacity Building with Impact
Dr. Christelle Scharff
Pace University, New York, NY, USA
The 1st mobile
MobileSenegal community in
http://mobilesenegal.org Senegal since
2009
cscharff@pace.edu
@mobilesenegal /mobilesenegal
Presented at the mEducation Alliance International Symposium:
Partnering for Scale and Impact, http://www.meducationalliance.org/,
September 5-6, Washington DC

2. Founded in 2008
First initiative of this type in a
Francophone country of Africa
Goal: Capacity building in M4D

3. Collaboration with Universities

4. Project Social
Mobile
Mgt networking
Technology Monetization
Marketing
Community Global
Software
Entrepreneurship Engineering
Local Model for Process
Impact
Capacity
Quality
Building Assurance
Real Projects
Real Beneficiaries Design
Mentoring /
Oral / Written Skills Follow-up
Presentations English

5. Community
• Universities, companies, NGOs, associations,
incubators etc
• Mobile Innovations Dakar
– http://www.meetup.com/mobileinnovationsdakar
• Mobile Innovations Thiès
– http://www.meetup.com/mobileinnovationsthies
• Mobile Monday Dakar
– http://mobilemonday.sn First Mobile
Monday in West
Africa

6. Global Software Development
Interdisciplinary
Global vision of Mobile solutions
teams to work
Smarter Energy relevant globally
together

7. 4 Courses in 3
5 Bootcamps Dakar and St Competitions
Louis
3 Faculty 3 Years of Global
training Software Development
(US, Senegal, India,
Cambodia)
Publications
(M4D, ICSE)
More than 30 apps
More than developed (7
More than 200
250 students beneficiaries deployed, 7
impacted released)
From Dakar to Ziguinchor Evolving technologies

8. Outcomes
• A “license” in Mobile Application Development created
at the University of Thies in 2011
• KomKom was awarded a Judge Choice Prize at the
Nokia Calling All Innovators Competition in 2009.
KomKom was piloted in the artisan village of Thiès.
• StopMalaria was awarded first prize at the Population
Council Data Uncovered Contest in December 2011 and
presented at the GSMA Mobile Health University
Challenge 2011-2012.
• 5 applications submitted to MobileSenegal
competitions were released in the Google Play
(SenGeoSante) and Nokia Store (Africa Quiz, Donor,
CodeDeLaRoute, and Niett)

9. CibleCI
• CibleCI was developped by students at Pace,
Thies, ESP and ESMT (Dakar), and India in
2010, and piloted in Senegal in July 2012

10. Lessons
• Keys are:
– Creating and nurturing an ecosystem
– Having champions in Senegal
– Training faculty
– Working on real projects with real
beneficiaries (on the ground)
– Choosing the right tools
– Integrating mentoring from day ONE

11. Future
• Strengthen the project in Senegal and in the
sub-region during my Fulbright at UCAD in
Senegal