Now, Grameen is starting to use the less-power-hungry Android Ideos, built by Huawei and purchased through the local mobile operator, MTN Uganda.

It turns out that going with a smartphone rather than a feature phone was a good bet for other reasons. Grameen is hoping to make the project self-sustaining and has begun working with other agencies that see value in the network of knowledge workers. Organizations including the World Bank, Heifer International and others are paying Grameen for data that the knowledge workers collect by conducting surveys with villagers. Some organizations that are interested in such surveys have said they'd like to also collect location data and photographs, which is possible with smartphones.

Grameen uses the Open Data Kit tools, developed by researchers from the University of Washington, to create forms on the phones for collecting and sending data. The workers can input and store data on the phones even when they are out of range of a cellular network, and that information is uploaded once they move within range of the network.

In addition to collecting information for the surveys, the knowledge workers collect data about the people they talk to. That information is automatically uploaded to Salesforce. Daily, from her office in Seattle, Thorne views a Salesforce dashboard showing statistics about how many farmers the workers have talked to, what percentage of them are women, how many are considered very poor and what sources of income they have in their households.

The workers have interacted with 24,000 households so far, Thorne said. Seventy-five percent of farmers say they find the information offered by the knowledge workers to be very useful, and 80 percent said they acted on information they received at least once.