Peer 2 Peer Network

Summary

Although mobiles are increasingly heralded as “changing everything” in development they are mainly used to collect information from poor people or tell them what to do. Atma believes in a fundamentally different approach to international aid: using technology to help people help each other by sharing solutions, taking collective action, and building community resilience. Most existing approaches to mobile phones in development fail to trust users. Most M4D projects treat users as passive sources of information or users of content. Our goal is to create technology that connects people in the developing world —so they can build social cohesion and share critical information. Atma creates new pathways for information to flow by giving poor people a way to share information with their neighbors and build their power as consumers, producers, and residents.