www.masawa.org
THIS INFORMATION is NOT AUTHORED BY SMALL SOLUTIONS BIG IDEAS.  Please see the website discussed here.  Make comments and suggestions for Small Solutions projects.  These are the powerful ideas we want our partners to be considering.
Sandra Thaxter, Alan Papert, Edo Kombana
This information was posted as one of the Ideas on the website for a US State Department site www.apps4africa.org.  This  is one of the "Ideas" submitted to this competition.
As far a innovations,  Small Solutions Big Ideas, is on board with "open platforms" and "technology for democracy".  This is our mission also.  We encourage our partners and our supporters to read about some of the submissions to this contest.
Quoted from  Website masawa.org
"Masawa, derived from the Arabic word for ‘equality’, delivers information and services to the palms of the poor through powerful mobile applications on lower-tech phones. For millions of the world’s poor, cell phones are primary portals to information and communication, the fundamental means of escaping isolation and poverty. Yet mobile phones are not fully benefiting low-income users. A fragmented market, supply-driven products, and cumbersome text-based applications prevent mobile solutions from reaching scale.
Masawa scales mobile solutions through the creation of a shared technological platform, connecting NGOs and local developers to produce a new generation of locally-driven applications. We link developers and users worldwide through an online, open-source marketplace.
By 2015, the Masawa platform will be hosted on 10 million handsets globally.  Our efforts increase access to information, services, and communication for the poor, while simultaneously enhancing NGOs’ abilities to serve this population effectively and efficiently.
 Common Technology Platform. Masawa uses a common base code and platform to launch applications. We use Java, a programming language familiar to developers across the world, to encourage participation and collaboration. There are over 800 million Java-enable phones and more than 4.5 million Java developers, with a substantial number of those in the developing world. Java delivers the biggest technology bang for the lowest handset buck."