Freedom Fone is a free and open source telephony platform. It provides an easy way to create interactive information services with audiences that may only have access to mobile phones. Given the constrained media landscape in Zimbabwe, Kubatana has been developing innovative communication strategies to aggregate and share critical information. They use a number of traditional and non-traditional media strategies to engage with a growing community of activists and civil society practitioners to create awareness and inspire social justice.
To increase their outreach to the 90% of Zimbabweans who do not have Internet access, Freedom Fone was created to take advantage of the growing number of mobile phone users. Despite rapidly evolving trends in new media and communication technologies, there is a growing need to engage with communities who do not have access to Interent and may still be dis-empowered because of literacy and language barriers. Freedom Fone was developed as a priority voice-based communications platform to interact with offline audiences in any language. All they need is a mobile connection. The technology has been developed as a free and open source project that aims to service a growing community of users across the world.