Our story

Freedom Fone was conceived by Kubatana. Founded in 2001, the Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe seeks alternative ways to inform and engage civil society in Zimbabwe; it aims to inspire positive social change by sharing information and ideas via Internet, email, mobile phones and print publications.

In Zimbabwe, freedoms of association and expression are regularly repressed. The political and economic struggles over the last decade created a need to engage with audiences situated on the margins of the information society. By taking advantage of both text and voice functions, Freedom Fone provides a means to reach communities that do not have access to other media and remain under-heard because of literacy and language barriers.

While internet in Zimbabwe has become more accessible, it is still available only to a minority, urban-based audience. Mobile phone usage on the other hand has grown exponentially with over 50% of the population - including many who live out in remote rural areas - currently subscribed to mobile networks.

Freedom Fone has proved to be a practical communications tool for small to medium sized organisations working in a number of different sectors from community radio, agricultural development, education or health programmes, to elections monitoring or emergency relief operations. Freedom Fone makes it easy to interact on an information-on-demand basis with offline audiences that speak multiple languages and may struggle to read or write.

Your story

This book was written by our community to help you identify how Freedom Fone can help you and how to implement it to meet your needs.

To help you understand how Freedom Fone could help you, have a look at these sections - Real World Examples features documentation of Freedom Fone in action and Other Possible Scenarios includes some hypothetical examples written by people working in those sectors.

If you have an idea about how Freedom Fone could help you or a new and exciting way to use it we would love to help you bring this to fruition! Feel free to contact the team via email at info@freedomfone.org or call us on +2634776056