Happy Birthday SMS
In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, forever changing the structure of society. It drove a sharp increase in literacy which broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning, bolstered the emerging middle class.
Move forward to only 29 years ago, December 1992, when a 22-year-old software developer Neil Papworth sent a text message saying “Merry Christmas” to a colleague, you could say it had a similar impact on communication.
In between these two events, there have been many other innovations that have had huge impacts on our society and the flow of information; however, using a phone to communicate words in addition to the voice was a huge development.
By the end of 2010, SMS was the most widely used application, with an estimated 3.5 billion active users and 6.1 trillion messages sent and a massive step change in how we transferred information and communicated.
Today while SMS still has a place, it has been superseded by data connections. Applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, and numerous others enable more information to be sent in more readable formats to a multitude of devices and recipients. To use this technology to support education, all that is required is a source device, content to send, a recipient device, and a data connection, something we all take for granted in our daily ritual of sending umpteen messages. Of course, for far too many people in the world, these are not accessible tools.
At theunconnected.org, we are embarking on a project to support girls in the slum areas of Mumbai to give them access to education; for many of them, this will be the first chance to receive any form of education. We’re doing this with the support of several partners to enable SAKHI for Girls Education to educate thousands of more girls. Using a phone and data connection, they will learn English along with other skills to vastly increase their opportunities, help them move away from the slums, and give them a chance at a better future.
When you send your next amusing WhatsApp video to your many groups, perhaps think about how valuable a link to an English lesson will be to that girl in India and how it may change her life forever.
As a side note, if you’re interested, you can buy that first text message sent by Neil Papworth, but we’d suggest if you have that sort of money, why not donate it to us, and we’d happily connect more Mumbaikar girls to education and make a real difference to the world. Just click here.
