While the main aim is to give them a chance to have a training that can ultimately lead to a long-term job or to revenue generation through freelance assignments, the initiative has many side-effects on African societies. Reporters are selected among local communities, and once trained, they report about those very communities, about their issues, hopes, and preoccupations, whether political, economic, social, or security-related. Regarding the latter point, the phone appears as an efficient conflict-preventing tool, as the Kenyan example below illustrates.

In late December 2007, that country plunged into an unprecedented crisis in her history. An electoral process that was supposed to deliver a verdict as to who would lead the country ended with the country’s sons and daughters divided along tribal lines and fighting each other. The VoicesofAfrica mobile reporting project was a prime and privileged witness of the conflict-in-making, as it voiced fears and worries from rural areas weeks before violence erupted.

“I don’t think that there is enough civic education because the clan issue is still strong, and most people tend to vote in terms of clans”, Siat Osman Ibrahim told one of our mobile reporters in early December 2007.Ibrahim is a former mayor of Garissa who was vying an MP seat for that constituency. Responding to the reporter’s query about what was urgently needed to be done, Ibrahim said more civic education was needed in rural areas. He blames politicians who invested more in clanism and tribalism rather than in proper civic education.

Equipped with Nokia 73 mobile phones, with a GPRS internet connectivity, reporters were dispatched all over Kenya to cover the pre-electoral atmosphere. Statements like Ibrahim’s were then received as mere propaganda, but are now analysed as clear clues that could have helped prevent the blood bath.That chapter of the Kenyan history closed with a rigged poll and subsequent tribal violence. This time every body was there, including observers, journalists, high ranking diplomats and so on. But it was too late as the situation had reached the point of no return.

Eventually bloodshed stopped and things seems to go back to normal. However, the reports being sent in from Kenya, especially from Meru where many displaced still live, show that that normalcy is only artificial. ‘ Those who kicked us out of our homes are still planning revenge’, said one displaced in March 2009, adding that he could not return home. More importantly, and that is where the conflict-prevention role of mobile reporting jumps in,  he warns that if nothing is done, a ‘bigger problem’  might follow.

The project's experience in Kenya is worth sharing with other parts of the world where local community-based conflict prevention and peace building efforts are needed. The phone is the eye that sees, stores, and the themometer that measures the social temperatrure in a quite spontaneous way. This potential resides in two major factors:  firstly, the phone is something ordinary to almost every body and does not intimidate people when interviewed with it; secondly, reporters are locals who live in the community they report about.