Interview with Melanie Edwards, Founder and President of MobileMetrix.


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Melanie Edwards is founder and CEO of MobileMetrix, a social venture linking underserved communities in developing countries to critical resources while raising global visibility about their reality. 

MobileMetrix trains and employs local youth to collect demographic information door-to-door in their communities, using Palm handheld devices. Data focus on health, education, housing and employment.  Empowered with data that profiles their own reality, communities are able to interact and negotiate with outside agents (local governments, NGOs, private enterprises) wishing to distribute critical products and services within their community.

Melanie’s idea was inspired by traveling through developing countries and seeing needs that could be met simply with technologies. While she shies away from calling herself a social entrepreneur, Melanie does think MobileMetrix has the potential to shift systems and achieve lasting, meaningful change – for example, offering a bottom-up approach to data gathering and offering community youth an employment alternative to drug trafficking. The planned revenue sources are governments, foundations, and the private sector, such as banks that will use the technology to track micro loans, or telecommunications and pharmaceutical firms that want to do business with the poor.

When asked whether her Peace Corps experience inspired her decision to pursue social entrepreneurship, she told of the decades-spanning relationship she forged with her host family in Togo, with whom she lived in a remote village for almost two years.  The son in that family, Yawo, was 15 when she first met him. His curiosity and love of life impressed Melanie. He went on to attend the only University in Togo. As a professor there, Yawo protested the abuses of the country’s dictatorship by photographing and filing reports with Amnesty International and the UN. As a result, he had to flee the dictatorship in Togo, leaving his wife and children behind, in 2005. Yawo re-connected with Melanie, who was able to return the favor, hosting him on her sofa for over a year. After securing political asylum in the U.S., he now works at the University of California at Berkeley and continues to fight for social justice in his homeland.

Her advice to those who would become social entrepreneurs is simple: Get on-the-ground experience by living and working among the people you want to serve. Get nuts-and-bolts business skills, because those skills can move mountains. And finally, don't give up.

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