By Jonathan Kalan BBC News, Nairobi

Connecting the 'last mile' of market

research in Africa
Problem
 There’s been lack of data for the purpose of Marketing research in Africa.
 As said by Jasper Grosskurth, Managing director of Research Solutions
Africa, a pan-African research firm based in Nairobi, Kenya.

"One thing about data in Africa is that there's a huge lack of it, "If there is
data, it's usually unreliable and dubious,"

 For Example, in 2010 Ghana announced it had changed its base year for
calculating gross domestic product (GDP) from 1993 to 2006, and
overnight the country’s GDP jumped 60%.
 "Suddenly Ghana was much richer than we thought it was," explains
Morten Jerven, author of Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African
Development Statistics and What to Do about It.
Problem
 Much of the problem is that African governments have not put
statistics at the forefront of policy and institutional reform
agendas, leaving the private sector and non-governmental
organizations to fill in the gaps.

 Yet the uncoordinated demands and needs from both sectors have
resulted in fragmented collection of data.
Traditional Date collection
 Previously date was collected old-fashioned "Land Rover"
methodology.

 For many research firms, traditional data collection has involved

sending a fleet of researchers out with pen and paper to all corners
of a country.
Online Survey
 Users sign up for Jana through a mobile-friendly website or Facebook
app, enter their information, and pick what surveys they qualify for.

 After completing the survey, airtime - ranging from 50 US cents to $5

(30p to £3) - is automatically credited to their phone.

 Jana's platform integrates directly into the billing systems of 237 mobile
operators, enabling 3.48 billion people in emerging markets to be
rewarded with airtime for taking part in surveys.

 The idea, says Mr Eagle, is to offer financial compensation for users that
matches the valuable data they are offering to market research
companies - data that would be much more expensive to obtain in other
ways.
Problem with online survey
 Although Jana rewards users through mobile airtime, users
need an internet connection to fill out the surveys. The vast
majority of mobile phones in Africa are feature phones,
which can access the internet, but are generally sluggish in
browsing and have high data costs.

 In most cases in Africa, Mr Eagle says, users pay to go to local

internet cafes, which could also cost them part of their
reward.
BiNu's "Research and Rewards" 
 BiNu, an Australian firm launched in 2011, is a platform that gives
basic mobile feature phones essentially smartphone-like
capabilities by offloading all the processing to a cloud-based
server, which offers an app store.

 Through BiNu's "Research and Rewards" platform, customers are

prompted to opt in to receive surveys and questionnaires, for
which they are rewarded with BiNu "credits", convertible to music,
books or airtime.
Limitations of Digital Survey
 The problem with digital panels and response rates is that often all
you know about the respondents is gender, age, and location or
country
 if some organization want to run a well-balanced, representative
survey, that's tough. It's not as randomized.

 Although digital is cheaper, and perhaps better for basic opinion

polls if some company want to thoroughly evaluate a
development project, for example, "it won't work".

 Nevertheless, small and medium-sized businesses are keen to take

advantage of the benefits that digital can offer.