Last Tuesday it was 9 degrees at 9am in orderly Johannesburg and 28 degrees with sweat inducing humidity at 7pm in chaotic Dar. After negotiating the jam-packed arrivals hall we smiled in relief when we discovered John holding up a torn piece of cardboard with Freedom Fone scribbled on it. We couldn't speak Swahili and he couldn't speak English but we made our greetings and jumped into his car for the ride of our life to a lodge off the Old Bagamoyo Road in Michokeni B.

Dar was thrillingly alive, jumping with activity of all kinds. Flashing past us . . .

Two guys on a bicycle. One of them had a goat draped over his knees. A beggar with buckled legs dragged himself through an intersection, craning his neck to ask for money from people in cars. He wore slip slops on his hands. The storm water drains on the sides of the roads were full of water breeding malaria and other diseases. Little boys' trawled homemade fishing lines through the muddy ditch water hoping for a catch. We saw a young man fill a water bottle from the litter-strewn canal, and we hoped that he wasn't going to drink it.

The next day we met up with Bart, Margaret and Lilian the Farm Radio International (FRI) crew who we'd come to train to use the Freedom Fone software.

FRI is a Canadian-based, not-for-profit organization working with about 300 radio broadcasters in 39 African countries to fight poverty and food insecurity. FRI has partnered with Freedom Fone to engage our software in the support of small scale farmers in Tanzania. FRI have established 5 listening communities attached to 5 community radio stations in varied locations in Tanzania. These community radio stations broadcast programmes that assist farmers in achieving better yields as well as helping answer questions related to the various agricultural challenges they might be experiencing. FRI is currently exploring the use of information communication technologies to complement and extend the usefulness of radio broadcast programmes.

They selected Radio Maria, a Christian radio station based in Dar es Salaam, to deploy Freedom Fone. Three main reasons influenced their decision to do this:

- Radio Maria is a well-resourced radio station both in terms of human resources with high technical skills and experience, and equipment/infrastructure.
- Radio Maria broadcasts some of FRI's agricultural programmes.
- Radio Maria has very wide coverage in Tanzania.

FRI's listening groups with Radio Maria have expressed a particular desire for information about raising chickens. Local chickens are an excellent income source for small-scale farmers, as they have low input costs and high demand and a ready market. However, many farmers experience high chicken loss due to poor management: not keeping the chickens safely, feeding them properly or looking after their hygiene sufficiently. Better information helps farmers lose fewer chickens, and thus make more money out of them. FRI's Freedom Fone deployment will draw on this desire for more information about chicken management, and their broadcast programme called, Heka Heka Vijijini (Busy Busy in the Village), will be adapted into short segment audio programmes using Freedom Fone software.

FRI also intends to use Freedom Fone in Ghana . . . stay tuned!

Lilian, the presenter of Heka Heka Vijijini (Busy Busy in the Village)

In 2007 Brenda traveled to Sao Paulo as a participant at MobileActive.

In 2008 Kubatana submitted a request to MobileActive to facilitate a presentation on Freedom Fone with a live demo. We were pleased to be accepted and three members of Kubatana attended MobileActive in Johannesburg.

The MobileActive Conference gave us the opportunity to network with, and learn from, the variety of activists, practitioners and service providers who attended. We cannot emphasise enough how important it is for activists such as ourselves living in a repressive media environment to get out, meet and be inspired by others.

Brenda presented Freedom Fone in two back-to-back mini talks. The Kubatana team collaborated with the Tactical Technology Collective (TTC) to bring Bobby Soriano out from the Philippines in order to both assist in trouble shooting Freedom Fone both in and outside of the conference activities. Bobby also presented the new TTC toolkit, Mobiles in-a-box, as well as having a million meetings with a lot of other groups.

Bobby Rocks!

Our presentation on Freedom Fone generated much interest and we are excited by a few potential collaborations. One of these is working with Stephanie Walters, a consultant representing the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), to disseminate information using mobile phones, on sexual violence in the DRC.

We were also happy to make connections with representatives from AfricaFiles, Cell Life, Balancing Act, UNICEF and Google.org.

Our team took the opportunity to learn from a variety of presentations. These included Mobile Tech in Citizen Participation, Innovations in Mobile Social Marketing, Mobiles in Disaster Relief and Mobile Phones for Activism and Advocacy. The depth of the presentation of Hernan Nadal from Greepeace Argentina was particularly useful.

We were pleased at how many activists and organisations at MobileActive were willing to collaborate with us and share information. In particular Laurie Butgereit from the Meraka Institute (African Advanced Institute for Information and Communications Technology) specifically offered her organisations assistance in making available any of the software that they have developed available to us. Peter Benjamin from Cell Life also looks like an exciting partner as we take Freedom Fone out into the world.

The MobileActive Conference allowed us to reconnect with impressive folk working in a variety of areas, for example Chris Csikszentmihalyi who remains a valuable supporter and mentor in our project, Toni Eliasz from Ungana-Afrika, who is always worth listening to and learning from, Mark Bellinsky and Emily Jacobi of Democracy 2.0 Burma Youth Program (check out their Knight News Challenge Garage entry), Peter Benjamin, Russell Southwood (Balancing Act), Al Alegre and many others.

We continue to be inspired by so many activists working for a better world.

A conversation with David Sasaki from Rising Voices, Chris and Dan from the MIT Media Lab, and Juliana Rotich from Ushahidi, gave us a chance to check in with other Knight affiliates and hear about their favourite sessions and their thoughts on mobile technology and activism.

The MobileActive Conference also gave us the opportunity to check in with some of the women we are working with in preparation for the AWID feminist conference in Cape Town in November. Cheekay Cinco helped us find our F Spot in an interview she did with us analyising the feminist undercurrents of our work.

Outside of the conference we re-connected with Supreme Court Justice Edwin Cameron. Living openly with HIV, he is an outstanding role model and we valued speaking with him about many issues, including personal stuff like ways to keep our batteries charged in Zimbabwe's exacting environment. We also checked in with Phumi Mtetwa the director of The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) who reminded us that there is still so much work to be done in making South Africa a safer place for women.

Thanks and high praise go to Katrin Verclas the director of MobileActive for facilitating such a valuable learning exchange.

Viva women in mobile activism!

There are a couple of great opportunities coming up where we'll be able to present the Freedom Fone concept to others and get feedback about development and implementation. In September we will be attending the International Media Support conference in Copenhagen. The theme of this gathering is New Media and Networked Communications Environments: Opportunities and Threats for Press Freedom and Democratization. Closer to home, in October, hopefully we'll be participating in the MobileActive workshop in Johannesburg. It's all thanks to the MobileActive gathering in Toronto in 2005 that the idea of Freedom Fone came to be.

In the meantime in the midst of being involved in spectacularly weird elections, an economy in nose dive and visits to fellow human rights defenders illegally detained, we're still very excited about progressing Freedom Fone. Life in a failed state certainly isn't boring.