Today is Blog Action Day, an annual nonprofit event that “aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day.” Last year the theme was the environment. This year the theme is world poverty (something I could use as a snarky lift-off comment on the coming recession, but I’ll resist that this point).
The real point is that, even in a bad recession in the Western World, we will rarely really understand true poverty. Such as what it is like to have to walk 5 miles to a well to fetch water every day. Or to see most of your children die young through malnutrition. My father, now retired, was a research scientist (actually he still goes into his London university lab to say hi – he just can’t keep away from the work). All his life he has been researching a vaccine for Malaria, a disease which kills between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The causes of Malaria are complex, everything from the standing water mosquitos breed in, to the mosquito carrier itself, to the massive complexity of the disease, which seems to morph at every stage of its life-cycle, making a vaccine near impossible to develop.
But it’s clear that one of the greatest weapons we have against poverty is education. If you can educate someone to use a mosquito net, you will have already improved the chances of their family surviving, thus broken the cycle of poverty which keeps every new generation from developing. And that’s where the technology industry can help. Already, the mobile phone has proved its worth in creating a sort of trading platform for African farmers and Indian fisherman to check prices at the local village markets for their produce. Mere SMS is a powerful thing. But that’s not enough. You can’t really read articles and browser the Web on a mobile, or educate children. So the efforts of Nicholas Negroponte to create a cheap laptop (under $100) for children in developing countries has been one of the great projects of our time. It’s such a pity that some people inside Microsoft and Intel appeared, according to some, to have done their best to stop it ever happening. Thankfully, that is not the official line of those organisations, and I hope they remedy their well-intentioned words with ever more action.
At TechCrunch, we generally think information is most powerful when it lives in the “Cloud”, hence the project to create a cheap cloud computer tablet for under $200. That’s not a project for children in poverty specifically, but since the whole idea is open source, the ideas could be applied anywhere.
Personally I was heartened by the Simputer project in India a few years ago. A handheld device like a mobile on an open platform. It may well be the case that Google’s Android ends up being the cheap, open operating system which could drive simple web tablets for developing countries as well as mobiles.
But for now it looks like the mobile phone is very much going to be the single most important piece of tech in developing countries going forward. You can use it to message and talk and it can be charged from a car battery. WiFi is no real use across the vast distances in Africa, and WiMax is still a pipe-dream. A few years ago the StarSight project looked like it was poised to WiFi-up Africa, though it seems not to have made much dent as yet.
Anyway, if you want to blog about poverty today, then why not register your blog and do something.
This is a great article – it hight lights some major, often overlooked points in how technology can bring bring communities together in battling poverty. “Banker To The Poor” illustrates this very well too, in the introduction of mobiles into the poorest rural regions India. If nothing else over the next five years, we may loose alot of home comforts but the advance of technology will give people the power to help build wealthier communities for a more durable future.
Entirely agree. Here in Cameroon you could solve 80% of its problems overnight by simply sorting out the roads – they are so bad that any kind of trade and travel between regions is so difficult as not to be worthwhile.
That leaves the mobile phone – and despite the relative poverty everyone has one. You can buy credit for it anywhere – starting from just a few pence worth.
“Today over 3 billion of the world’s 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why, as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn. These are places where for many, it’s the first time they have the ability to communicate personally and conveniently over distances – without having to worry whether someone can overhear the topic of their conversation – communicate with whom they want, when they want. It makes new businesses viable and creates markets where there was none. For many it’s the first time they can provide a stable fixed point of reference to the outside world – a phone number, which in turn creates a new form of identity that in turn enables everything from rudimentary banking to commerce. And not least – each new feature on or accessible through the mobile phone brings new modes of use – unencumbered by my, and probably your entrenched (and increasingly outdated) notions of entertainment, the ‘right’ way to capture and share experiences, the internet. If you work or study in the mobile space and you’re expected to innovate, these are places that bring fresh thinking and new perspectives.”
Small objects travel further, faster: Jan Chipchase in receiver magazine
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/small-objects-travel-further-faster
Great post. Im a massive fan of looking at how technology fills a ‘need’ in a completely different way to how we perceive/use it in the western world.
Some great fodder here on mobile phone usage at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’
https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/blogs/isdyahoofellow/category/mobile/
It’s worth reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat. He sets out some ideas alot like this and provide some incredible anecdotal and statistical evidence for this, there is a particularly good example of Kodak both making life a little easier in developing countries and enhancing its own business from that book that always sticks with me (it’s too long to explain here.)