The quotes listed below all come from the article Digital Quality of Life (2008, Atkinson & Castro)
In the economic realm, IT is bringing cell phones to rural areas of India that enable farmers to get marketplace information in real-time (p. 160)
Mobile communications can restructure businesses in developing countries by economizing services, enabling businesses to make “just in time” transactions and deliveries (p. 161)
By providing a better picture of the market, cell phones can also limit the human cost of food shortages. During Niger’s 2005 food crisis, prices were 20 percent higher in famine areas than in areas where food was plentiful.If this information was readily available to farmers there would have been a stronger incentive to get food to the areas with the most suffering, significantly reducing the loss of life. (p. 161)
IT also enables people without access to banking services to exchange money. In particular, many people who live in remote areas in developing countries may have to travel hours to the nearest town to get to a bank.
(p. 162)
This lack of accessibility, coupled with extremely low incomes (perhaps less than a dollar a day), means that many people in developing countries may not have a bank account. Without the ability to save or transfer money, they must physically transfer payments to family members or to purchase goods or services from vendors outside their villages. Wireless communications bridge this gap by allowing people to send small payments via mobile phones.
The World Resources Institute predicts that banking over mobile wireless communications will bring into the formal economy huge numbers of people who were previously excluded.
In Kenya, for example, a partnership between Vodafone and Safaricom, Ltd., recently created a service called “M-Pesa” (which means, “mobile money”) that allows people to send money using a network of mobile phones. The sender pays cash to an agent in one location, who then sends a code number via a text message to another agent located where the person who is receiving the cash lives; the second agent then makes the payment to the intended recipient.26
This service has proven extremely popular, with 6,000 new subscribers signing up each day.The M-Pesa program had hoped to add 200,000 customers in its first year, but that many customers signed up in just a single month.A year later, the number of customers reached 1.6 million, and Vodafone is expanding the service to Tanzania and India. (p. 162)
Health care professionals in these countries’ capital cities analyze the data and send responses and other information back to the local health care workers, thereby helping to educate them and improve the services they provide. (p. 165)
IT is helping to improve health care in developing countries. In Uganda and Mozambique, for example, since 2003, the AED-Satellite Center for Health Information and Technology has distributed 600 personal digital assistants (PDAs) to health care workers, who use them to collect public health data, which they upload to a central server.
An equally compelling example of IT’s use in improving health care is what cell phones are doing to reduce the infant mortality rate in Mali. In rural Africa, most cases of infant mortality are from diseases that are easily treated but are not detected. A new project called Pesinet provides cell phones to trained women in rural villages, who then transfer medical information on the village’s infant population to trained medical professionals. The simple monitoring process can significantly improve infant health. When a similar program was run in Saint-Louis, Senegal, for example, the infant mortality rate dropped from 120 infant deaths per 1,000 births to eight deaths per 1,000 births. Beyond yielding the astonishing medical outcomes, the infant health project is surprising cheap, costing around $1 per child per month. (p. 166)
In South Africa, for example, nurses dealing with skin diseases are given laptops and webcams and are remotely assisted by dermatologists from all over the world. (p. 166)
One of the most disheartening health care challenges in the developing world is the number of deaths caused from curable diseases such as tuberculosis (TB). In many instances, despite the availability of medicine, TB patients still die because they do not take the medication as regimented. To tackle the problem, doctors in Cape Town came up with a simple but extremely effective idea—text message TB patients reminding them to take their medication. The medical team estimated 71 percent of their patients had access to cell phones and after the pilot study only one treatment failure was reported out of 138 patients. Currently, the South African government is working to expand the text-messaging reminder program nationwide to HIV patients. (p.166)
More encouraging has been the mass increase in cell phone usage. In 2004, for example, sub-Saharan Africa had only 5–8 million Internet users but 52 million mobile phone users. (p. 167)
A third obstacle to IT use in developing countries is the lack of access to digital technology. The Internet has the potential to transform the lives of people in the developing world. Yet, although the number of Internet users in developing countries has steadily increased—from about one Internet user per 1,000 people in 1993 to 73 Internet users per 1,000 in 2003, significant gaps in access to the Internet remain.
cost is a roadblock to the use of IT in the developing world… On the other hand, the declining cost of computing power is enabling manufacturers to build cheaper handsets and personal computers, bringing them for the first time within reach of some of the world’s poorest citizens. This is the goal pursued by Nicolas P. Negroponte, who created the One Laptop Per Child oundation (OLPC) to offer personal computers for as little as $100. Unfortunately, purchases of the OLPC laptop computers have fallen short of OLPC’s goal of $1 million… Nevertheless, a positive outcome of the OLPC program has been to spur other companies to compete to produce inexpensive laptops—Intel’s “Classmate” offered for around $250, Acer’s laptop for $350, and the Indian company called Novatium Solutions’ basic “NetPC” for about $80.
Perhaps most impressive is the Indian government’s announcement in May 2007 that it was supporting the development of a laptop that could sell for as little as $10.(p. 167)
