  Data enables Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to quantify the impact of
their initiatives to themselves and to others. The increasing amount of data
stored today can be seen as a direct consequence of the falling costs in
obtaining it. Cheap data acquisition harnesses existing communications networks
to collect information. Globally, more people are connected by the mobile phone
network than by the Internet. We worked with Vita, a development organisation
implementing green initiatives to develop an SMS-based data collection
application to collect social data surrounding the impacts of their
initiatives. We present our system design and lessons learned from
on-the-ground testing.
