May 2007 Edition
Vidya Viswanathan
New Delhi
SUBHI and Hilmi Quraishi are brothers who run an e-learning company
called ZMQ Software. Named after the initials of their father, the company
has a 27-member team and had a turnover of about Rs 7 crore this year. The
Quraishis can now afford new offices at Manesar, a city on the Delhi-Jaipur
Highway. They are busy moving their offices from Pitampura in Delhi to
Manesar. Meanwhile, all meetings are being held in cafes. The Quraishis arrive
at the United Coffee House in Connaught Place and Hilmi, the chief learning
technology officer, is sporting a fine bead badge. It is white and has a red ribbon.
The bead ribbon was made in Kibera, a slum with a population of three million
in Nairobi where he has just spent three days. Around 75 per cent of
Nairobi lives in slums. Nearly 60 per cent are infected with HIV. ZMQ has built
a football game and a quiz into which are woven messages about HIV/AIDS. “We
tested our games there. When they first played the game, they had vague
knowledge. At the end of three days, after playing the game repeatedly, 40 per
cent of the people had got 80 per cent of the message,” says Hilmi.
Hilmi and Subhi have spent three years experimenting with the dissemination
of social messages through gaming. The company’s business is producing
e-learning material and 80 per cent of their turnover comes from this source.
They create well researched e-learning material for five universities across the
world: University of Texas Arlington, Aligarh MuslimUniversity, Malaysian
University, Institute of Mauritius and University of Doha in Qatar.
The Quraishis, however, are convinced thatmobile phones are the technology
of the future. “A rickshawallah has one. He uses it as a radio and a TV. This
will be the mediumthrough which people will access most infotainment and
education. Personal computers will become a development platform,”says
Subhi Quraishi, the CEO of ZMQ. The company spends a lot of time buildinggaming and content for mobiles even thoughtheir current revenue from this
source is less than a crore.
The Quraishis do not spend any money in marketing their services.Instead
they spend 20 per cent of all their net profits in their non-profit initiative called
www.house-of-learning.org. The idea is todevelop state-of-the-art gaming and
content on Indian themes and for social marketing across the world. “This idea
of giving backcomes from our father who was a socialist by thought,” explains
Hilmi. “He was a professor in Delhi University and an expert in West Asian
studies. Our mother has also retired from Delhi University. She is a sociologist
turned political scientist and is an expert onKenya, Tanganyika and Uganda.
She can speak Swahili,” he points out. The Quraishi family traces its origin
back to 400 years inDelhi;their grandfather taught in the Madarsa Husseiniya.
The Quraishis first started developing content on AIDS in 2004. The brothers were reading an article written by Nelson Mandela in 2003.They realised the grimness of the situation and the effect of HIV/AIDs on the economies of African countries.“We read thatcorporates in South Africa did not face up to AIDS initially, and suffered later because their employees could not deliver due to illness.We then realised to our alarm that India has 5.3 million infected people, and our economy could be affected drastically ifcompanies did not come forward and put in an effort to prevent the spread,” explains Subhi. ZMQ then did a small pilot project along with CARE. It made a short film called ‘Save your village’ with a game and distributed it to some schools in Uttar Pradesh. They were not happy with the outcome. They felt that working with partners at the conception stage hindered them. The partners did not understandgaming and wanted linear content. So the Quraishis went ahead and developed four games under an initiative calledfreedomfromhiv.in. They took a year to research and develop. Hilmi did all the initial research on the content himself. Their contentwas validated by UNAIDs and NACO. “I run an e-forum. We put them on to experts based on their need. For example, If they wantexpertise on pediatric HIV, I know exactly whom to contact,” says Mohammed Rafique of UNAIDS. There was also a mobile versionofthe games. The four mobile games targeted different mindsets and psychology of mobile users.
The first game was SafetyCricket. The second was Ribbon Chase, an arcade game where the player is the red ribbon and he has to deliver messages todifferent cities in the world, while the HIV virus is chasing him. This was targeted at focused gamers. The third game was an easy-to-anoeuvre game. Dove, the traditional symbol of peace and love, flies from village to village, collects condoms and red ribbons, anddistributes them to villagers according to their specific needs and demands. The fourth game was a quiz in the format of KaunBanega Crorepati. The mobile version of the games was given away to mobile content aggregators across the world free of cost.Reliance put it up in its R-World portal free of cost. It also did not charge for downloads or communications cost. Since it was free of cost, the mobile operators did not give ZMQ statistics on downloads, but the brothers from the informal information collected from theoperators estimate that there are nine million downloads across the world. However, they did not do any study on the learning impactof these games.“We were the first operator in India and possibly the world to attempt theinclusion of social messages. Weappreciated ZMQ’s effort and we put it up for free. We have 170 million customers and we have to reach that last guy there. This is onour charter and the HIV/AIDs games were a good experiment,” says Krishna Dhruba, business development and marketing head ofValue-Added Services at Reliance Infocom.
The telecom company had earlier also hosted Mobile Mahatma, an interactive film and agame on Mahatma Gandhi launched by ZMQ on the eve of Gandhi Jayanti in 2005. “They had recreated the scene at the SabarmatiAshram and we carried the game and created publicity. The download of both these games was average. Social messaginghas to become a lot more sophisticated,” he adds. After that effort ZMQ worked with the John Hopkins Research Centre in Mumbai to create games for the youth in Maharashtra. The centre has distributed the games very well but the impact has not beenmeasured. ZMQ also collected all the creative material developed by children as part of a programme run by non-profit PLAN anddeveloped games based on those characters. Now the software company is a step further. They are developing games for Africausing football as the theme. Their second product will be modeled on Bantumi, a game similar to checkers popular in East Africa.They are now going to work in six African countries including Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia alongwith the Dutch non-profit Hivos. Hivos is funding and helping them capture backend data on how many times the games wereplayed by each player and their knowledge before and after playing the game. So this time they will measure the impact of thegames. ZMQ got noticed for all these innovations by the Global Business Council (GBC) on HIV/AIDS awareness. GBC is a councilwith 220 large corporate members including the Tatas and Ranbaxy from India. GBC and the German development agency GTZhave now funded them to develop a monitoring and evaluation tool.
A part of this will be an e-learning tool for corporate managers tounderstand the problems and issues around HIV/AIDS. “If a large corporate like the Indian Railways wants to get its management team to understand how the spread of HIV/AIDS could affect its employees and what measures they should undertake in different partsof the country, this could help. In some places they may need an information centre and in yet another place they may have to set uptreatment centres,” says Subhi. They are also building a tool which is being piloted in Delhi and Kenya for health centres to monitor patients with chronic illness. It will first be used for AIDs and then for all chronic ailments. While the brothers have spent nearly Rs 50 lakh, including manpower resources from the company, this is not the only social initiative that they are working on. They are convinced that the mobile phone will become a medium for learning in the future and are proactively developing content and working on distribution. In 2004, ZMQ decided to develop content on Gandhi. “He was the most powerful personality of our time globally. His methods areuniversal and could be used in situations like Iraq. In a physical war, the bully wins. In a mind game, the rules are different,” says Subhi. Now they are working with the Khemka Foundation to give away this content to schools as part of their leadership developmentprogramme. “This is their first year. They will develop content on other Indian leaders,” says Subhi.
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