Mobile Media Toolkit

Al Jazeera and partner organizations use SMS and mapping instances to amplify stories from an under reported region. The project is also an example of a working partnership between a media outlet, a mobile service provider, and a mapping platform.

In the Horn of Africa, Somalia makes headlines but often only because of drought, famine, crisis, and insecurity. Al Jazeera launched Somalia Speaks to help amplify stories from people and their everyday lives in the region -- all via SMS.

Check out the newest case study from the Mobile Media Toolkit to find out more about the project.

Somalia Speaks is a collaboration between Souktel, a Palestinian-based organization providing SMS messaging services, Ushahidi, Al Jazeera, Crowdflower, and the African Diaspora Institute. Al Jazeera's Soud Hyder said in an interview with us, "We wanted to find out the perspective of normal Somali citizens to tell us how the crisis has affected them and the Somali diaspora."

“The notion was that when the food crisis erupted this summer, we wanted to get word out from the ground level as to what was going on in that region,” Souktel's Jacob Korenblum said.

The goal of Somalia Speaks is to aggregate unheard voices from inside the region as well as from the Somalia diaspora by asking via text message: How has the Somalia Conflict affected your life? Responses are translated into English and plotted on a map. Since the launch, approximately 3000 SMS messages have been received. Here is just example:

I was born in the city of Wanlaweyn, and some of the people there are destroying things. I am poor now.

For Al Jazeera, Somalia Speaks is also a chance to pilot and test innovative mobile approaches to to citizen media and news gathering.

Read the entire case study here to learn more about how it works as well as challenges of the project.