Proceedings of the International Multiconference on ISBN 978-83-60810-22-4 Computer Science and Information Technology, pp. 383 – 389 ISSN 1896-7094 Abstract—Africa is the fastest growing mobile phone mar- ket in the world. The portfolio of available mobile phone ap- plications that impact the populations of the continent is how- ever limited in number and scope. Future African graduates will be the main vectors for the development of mobile appli- cations. In this paper we present a model of teaching mobile application development for social changes emphasizing software engineering practices. The innovation is that students develop and deploy applications for people of their local communities. This model has been used suc- cessfully in Senegal. Applications for craft workers and young children have been developed. Findings, lessons learned and guidelines for instructors interested in simi- lar initiatives are presented. I. INTRODUCTION FRICA is the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. Mobile phones can create lots of opportuni- ties for the continent – expected, unexpected and far beyond imagination. The literature showcases many examples led by NGOs in geo-politics, education, health care and agricul- ture [6,7,10,13,12,17]. In the for-profit sector, initiatives in banking and marketing implemented via the use of SMS and short codes are also becoming common practices. But for the time being, the impact of mobile phones is still re- stricted. Access to Internet via mobile phones is not a reality due to limited telecommunication infrastructures, pricing and the use of basic phones. The portfolio of available mo- bile phone applications addressing the real needs of a di- verse African population is limited in number and scope. Current initiatives in mobile technology for social changes did not scale and are hardly sustainable due to obstacles linked with the issues of the large distribution of mobile ap- plications and the difficulty to find skilled people on the ground to take ownership of the effort. It is worth mention- ing that most of the initiatives focusing on mobile technolo- gy in Africa – at the educational, non-profit and for-profit levels - are mostly taking place in English-speaking rather than French-speaking countries. So a large part of Africa is still not affected the way it could and should. A A fundamental question to be asked is: Who will develop the mobile phone applications that will have a social impact on the populations of Africa? We believe that current and future African students will have to play this crucial role. Who else better than them know the reality of the daily lives of African people? They will need to be prepared appropri- ately as software developers, software engineers and en- trepreneurs in mobile technology. Local African companies specialized in mobile begin to surface and cannot find the right workforce coming out of the African universities. The gap between university training and industry demands in this new and promising area of Computer Science can be filled out quickly if addressed timely and appropriately. Developing mobile applications is a challenging endeav- or where technological and software engineering knowledge and creativity are crucial. Mobile applications are deployed on devices that all come with different specifications (e.g., size, memory, input systems, mobile connectivity options, and APIs). The difficulties are increased considering that fact that one standard replaces the next in the industry. These restrictions and constraints require developers to be imaginative and have deep knowledge in hardware and telecommunications on top of software development pro- cesses, design, programming, user interaction design, and quality assurance. Java ME is the leading programming language for development of mobile phones with 80% of Java-enabled phones. Applications can also be developed in Java FX, Python, C, C++, Objective C, Flash Lite, and JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Development environments for Java ME include the Sun Wireless Took Kit, NetBeans, and the EclipeME plugin within Eclipse. User interaction deter- mines considerably the adoption of rejection of mobile ap- plications. Based on the difficulties of creating similar and engaging user experience on various devices, user interface libraries have been created. Frameworks such as LWUIT (LightWeight UI Toolkit) (https://lwuit.dev.java.net ) and KUIX (Kalmeo User Inter face eXtensions) (http://www. kalmeo.org/projects/kuix) augment the standard low-level and high-level user interfaces APIs of Java ME. In this paper , we describe a model of teaching mobile application development for social changes that is influ- 383 A Model for Teaching Mobile Application Development for Social Changes: Implementation and Lessons Learned in Senegal Christelle Scharff Pace University, New York City, NY, USA Email: cscharff@pace.edu Anita Wasilewska, Jennifer Wong Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA Email: {anita, jwong}@cs.sunys- b.edu} Mamadou Bousso Ibrahima Ndiaye Cheikh Sarr Université de Thiès, Thiès, Sene- gal Email: {mamadoubousso, ibndi- aye}@gmail.com, csarr1979@hot- mail.com