I recently ventured that "real simple reporting" could be the killer app for development 2.0. At that time, I had project reporting to donors in mind. But what about corporate social responsibility and sustainability reporting: Is there a role for web 2.0 there?
Simplicity, if we are to listen to the HBS folks, is what will drive the success of social media applications. They call for companies to develop "a dashboard of simplicity that is open to the whole Internet." As if heeding that call, Sun Microsystems recently launched a revamped version of OpenEco.org, a collaborative platform that allows companies to track their greenhouse gas emissions and, interestingly, develop a "top-level organization dashboard where users can track a broad spectrum of emission sources to provide a...
Nick Hughes, the head of Vodafone's international mobile payment solutions, recently gave a talk at CGAP about the company's work in Kenya, Afghanistan, and Tanzania. If I might sum up the talk in just a few words: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Less than two years ago, Vodafone initiated rolled out M-PESA, a mobile payments service in Kenya. M-Pesa now has some 4 million subscribers and 3,500 frontline agents. Nick made it pretty clear that this rapid uptake far exceeded any expectations that Vodafone had when they started offering this service.
The key to Vodafone's success? They focused entirely on offering a single service, and doing it well. M-PESA does not offer any banking services - no credit, no microloans, no savings. Rather, they simply offer a way to transfer money...
Some time ago I blogged about different connotations of the phrase "development 2.0."
A recent report by the US Chamber of Commerce, Development 2.0: Changing the Way Globalization Works adds yet another dimension to the debate (fellow PSD blogger Michael Jarvis contributed one chapter to the publication). The report focuses on the role of multinationals in emerging markets and argues that "development 2.0 is about blended value - finding ways to promote both social and economic development." Hybridization, partnerships and crossover planning are the strategies to be adopted in this emerging paradigm. The recently launched "e-co Hub" NGO Connect Africa seems like a good example of this approach at work.
Earlier this year, a Brooking Institution report on Global Development 2.0 also...
While mobile banking has recently been getting some high end exposure (see the recent posts on the Clinton Global Initiative), a recent conference sponsored by CGAP provided a welcome counterpoint by getting into the nitty gritty of actually implementing the m-banking model on the ground. Titled Banking on Mobiles: Why, How, for Whom?, the conference really should have been called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (per the subtitle of the Powerpoint presentation). Why? Because a number of obstacles still remain to widespread adoption of this technology, even though presenters Kabir Kumar and Ignacio Mas are enthusiastic about our ability to overcome those obstacles.
Kumar and Mas placed m-banking in its appropriate context - it is part of the wider world of branchless banking, which...
Brian Richardson wasn't the only one talking about mobile banking at the Clinton Global Initiative. Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO of CGAP, also made an appearance (Hat tip: Jim Rosenberg). Video of her talk can be seen here - first appearance is around 27:30. And here's a little excerpt:In fact, the real Achilles heel all along has not been risk, it's been transaction costs, the costs of making tiny little transactions in remote areas to poor people, the tiny transactions that they need. So we figured if you can use cell phones or technology to reduce the cost, which it does, by 5, 10, 50-fold by using cell phones, then we could actually reach the most remote and poor people that we couldn't reach with the normal bricks-and-mortar branches....
Speaking of mobile banking (see the previous post), it might be useful to see just what mobile coverage looks like in South Africa. Fortunately, the UNDP provides heat maps with exactly this data. Here is one from 2000 (which also appears in an earlier post called UNDP discovers the private sector):
Compare that to a similar map with data for 2006 (below the fold):
Six years saw some notable improvements: Western Cape, NOrth-West, the Free State, and Kwazulu-Natal all moved into a higher category of cell phone coverage. While South Africa hasn't achieved universal coverage, it's certainly moving in the right direction, which is promising for the extension of mobile banking services....
Mobile banking keeps getting more and more publicity, as it should. Brian Richardson, the CEO of WIZZIT, made an appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative last week. You can see video of Richardson's appearance here. The video below provides a bit of background on WIZZIT, an organization that has received support from the IFC. For earlier PSD blog coverage of mobile banking, see here and here. CGAP also just held a conference on Banking on Mobiles: Why, How, for Whom?, more on which in a later post....
In the last couple of years, microcredit has managed to get a sexy reputation, for better and for worse. The attention helps to bring large dollops of funding, but at the same time raises expectations higher than can ever be met. Development initiatives of this type probably go through something similar to Gartner's hype cycle for technological breakthroughs, with a peak, a trough, and a leveling off:
Microcredit is probably past its peak of inflated expectations. Microinsurance, though, may be one its way up - now that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has thrown its weight behind microinsurance, attention is sure to grow. The Gates Foundation recently awarded a grant to the International Labor Organization to establish a Microinsurance Innovation Facility - in cooperation...
Last week saw an interesting videoconference at the World Bank on aid effectiveness and e-government (here are the schedule of events and a blog post from the new e-Development blog.) The event was a joint effort of GTZ and the World Bank e-Development Thematic Group. I'll spare you a summary of the introductory remarks other than to note that many of the speakers stressed the importance of e-government in reaching the goals set out by the Paris Declaration and recently evaluated and reiterated at the 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Affectiveness. Anyone who left after just these remarks would have learned little - the meat of the videoconference came when speakers from government agencies talked about their own on-the-ground attempts to utilize e-government. Most interesting among these was...
While telemedicine is nothing new, improvements in telecommunications are creating the possibility of previously unthinkable innovations. The text message, as I've commented before, is becoming widely available in the developing world, and many organizations have taken note. A non-profit called One World launched a help service for questions on HIV in Kenya a few years ago. But researchers at the University of California - Los Angeles are proposing a truly heroic advance in the use of cell phones. The UCLA researchers propose using cell phones to diagnose diseases like HIV through a novel imaging technique (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). According to the article:Ozcan envisions people one day being able to draw a blood sample into a chip the size of a quarter, which could then be inserted...
The most recent Economist has a piece on mobile phones in the developing world - The meek shall inherit the earth - that hits on a lot of topics discussed on the PSD blog (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). It talks up the potential value of mobile phones in the developing world while warning about some of the technological barriers that still face mobile technologies: "walled gardens", overlapping efforts, sustainability, etc. The thing that amazes me, though, and that seems to get missed in much of the media coverage, is the extent to which trust plays a role in the use of these technologies, particularly m-banking. Here's the Economist's description of m-banking:A case in point is M-PESA, a mobile-payment service introduced by Safaricom Kenya, a mobile operator, in 2007. It allows...
Google just released its own browser, Chrome, to compete with Internet Explorer. Daniel Altman on the International Herald Tribune blog argues that it may just turn out to be the developing world's browser. Now, Google has just announced it is supporting the development of a system of satellites to provide internet access to regions without fast fiber networks. Apparently, the bottom of the pyramid can be targeted from outerspace......
Looking back at this post on E-government - another chance to leapfrog?, I now realize I may have gotten it wrong. The real opportunity for some governments is not to develop more participatory and easy-to-use websites. Whatever solutions a government comes up with - even one as cool as Estonia's TOM that allows citizens to comment on laws and propose new legislation - will quickly become outdated by the development of new and better internet tools. Why not get the public sector out of the business of creating end-user internet solutions and instead get the private sector to do it?
At least, that's the proposal offered in a new paper in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology called Government Data and the Invisible Hand (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). While David Robinson et al. focus on...
While we may not be ready to announce victory in the digital war on poverty, there are definitely battles that are being won. And the most recent battle is that over text messaging. Cell phones have spread like wildfire across Africa and many other parts of the world. But these are basic handsets - no internet access, no videos, no maps. These phones do, however, have short message service (SMS), aka text messaging. And while the capacity to send 160 characters by phone may not be a revolution, it is definitely having a positive impact.
Jim Witkin, writing at Triple Pundit, discusses one of the most interesting efforts to apply this technology to the developing world (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). Kiwanja.net, a non-profit, has developed a program called FrontlineSMS that allows NGOs to...
The debate continues over at Creative Capitalism, the blog/book-to-be spurred by Bill Gates's speech at Davos. Meanwhile, Gates gives a hint at just how to create Creative Capitalism - get universities involved. At a forum in Hong Kong, Gates argued that universities need to team up with industry to drive innovation. More resources on university-industry collaboration are available here. ...
Perhaps in contrast to my post on the digital war on poverty, I just noticed an interesting article on the website of AED - the Academy for Educational Development. They are using a technology called the African Access Point (AAP) in combination with personal digital assistants (PDAs). From the article:...to increase connectivity, AED is employing a new technology, called the African Access Point, or AAP. This technology links inexpensive PDAs to a computer hundreds or even thousands of miles away using an existing wireless telecommunications network.Health clinic workers in Uganda and Mozambique are using PDAs to gather information. Using infrared technology, they “beam” the data to a centrally located AAP, which sends the information on to a server in the capital city. Each time a...
Jeffrey Sachs, ever the optimist, has announced victory - or something very near it - in the digital war on poverty. Writing yesterday in the Guardian, Sachs had this to say:Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation, especially rural isolation. But mobile phones and wireless internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time...There are now more than 3.3 billion subscribers in the world, roughly one for every two people on the planet.Perhaps I am a Luddite, but Sach's article brings to mind Rousseau's Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (available in English translation here). Rousseau expresses a certain skepticism about the benefits of technology that has been echoed...
Much has been made of the example of some developing countries leapfrogging the adoption of outdated technologies, for example with the adoption of mobile banking. One has to wonder whether that could be the case with e-government, at least for a handful of countries. A new report out from Brookings reports on Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008 (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). The author ranks governments around the world on the quality of their outreach through websites, tabulating things like online information, electronic services, and disability access. While OECD countries are well-represented among the highest ranked, a number of other contenders made it into the top 20, e.g. Brazil, Dominica, Malaysia, and Ghana. In fact, these countries...
The Financial Times reports today that US credit card defaults prove a boon to India. According to the article:Firstsource, an Indian business process outsourcing company that handles credit recovery for most of the top five US banks and half of the top 10 credit card issuers, said it was increasing staff numbers to win business from growing credit card defaults in both national markets. "There is more demand for that service. If I could add 100 people today, overnight, I would do it," said Ananda Mukerji, Firstsource chief executive, in an interview with the Financial Times...Mr Mukerji said: "There are more credit card outstandings being defaulted on today than there were a year back, so that's a growth opportunity for us."If I were asked to devise a way to increase protectionist...
Giulio Quaggiotto pointed me to this article by Ken Banks on Mobile Phones and the Digitial Divide, which takes a somewhat sobering look at the limits of mobile technology in the developing world. Here's the money quote:In the West, when we talk of mobiles helping close the digital divide, many people make a huge assumption about the technologies available to users in developing countries. We look at the mobile through rose-tinted glasses from the top of our ivory towers, through a Western prism or the lens of a 3G iPhone.The reality is that one of the most common phones found in the developing world is the Nokia 1100. It's sturdy and serviceable, but provides little beyond voice and SMS services. According to Banks, handset manufacturers see further opportunity at the bottom of the...
I've just run across a spate of items on the development of ICT in Africa; although it could just be coincidence, I suspect there's been a growing interest in this topic in the development community.
First off, Africa Telecom News has just come out with an Africa Mobile Factbook (Hat tip: White African). The report is free - well, if you discount the time needed to take a required survey - but the factbook offers up some interesting statistics. Figure 1 (below) shows that mobile penetration has grown markedly, and they're predicting continuing growth in this sector. White African also points out much of this development is local: "Most of the mobile operators are home-grown. In 2005, the continent’s seven largest investors controlled 53% of the African mobile market."...
If you haven't seen it yet, you should really check out HealthMap, a website created to aggregate health-related news and produce heat maps of potential disease outbreaks. HealthMap's creators - researchers associated with Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School - just released an open access article describing the motivation behind HealthMap and the promise it holds: The goal of HealthMap is to deliver real-time intelligence on a broad range of emerging infectious diseases for a diverse audience, from public health officials to international travelers...Ultimately, the use of news media and other nontraditional sources of surveillance data can facilitate early outbreak detection, increase public awareness of disesase outbreaks prior to their formal recognition, and provide...
Past PSD bloggers have pointed to the growing use of mobile phones to facilitate financial services (see past posts on a workshop on IT and financial services and on regulatory issues related to mobile financial services). These posts suggest that masses of previously underbanked individuals are taking advantage of these services. Until now, this phenomenon has been largely confined to relatively peaceful countries like the Philippines and South Africa. According to a blurb in today???s Financial Times, however, mobile phone financial services (subscription required) may be moving into new terrain. According to Karim Khoja, the chief executive of an Afghan mobile phone company, a partnership he has formed could ???leapfrog the banking system in the same way as we leapfrogged wires in the...
Word today that Western Union, the global money transfer service, is increasing its profile in the United States when it comes to selling new ways to send and receive money. This is just the latest in a series of steps Western Union has taken to get more involved in mobile services, which have grown exponentially in places like the Philippines and Kenya but have been less quick to catch on in markets where banking services are well-developed, such as the United States. The service will initially seek to reach Latino immigrants who are among the 40 million people in the US who lack access to basic banking services. How will it work? The Wall Street Journal explains:To use the service, people go to one of RadioShack's more than 4,000 stores and sign up for a Trumpet prepaid phone, which is...
Daniel Annerose, CEO of Manobi, an African mobile data services company, and José Alfredo Rizek, executive director of Indotel, the Dominican Republic's telecoms regulator, joined in a telecommunications services debate hosted by the WTO (video available).
They discussed the 10th anniversary of the Basic Telecommunications services deal and its implications for governments, consumers, businesses, and for development....
"Eventually there will be more cell phone users than people who read and write," says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google in a recent article by the Washington Post. The article has some interesting facts about how cell phone technology grew so fast since its creation that no one could predict the magnitude of this expansion.
There's a particularly interesting an anecdote about how Mckinsey & Co., the consulting firm, in 1980 underestimated what the size of the cell phone market would be in the year 2000. Its number was not even 1 percent of the actual market size....
The importance of cell phones for isolated communities and different applications of mobile technology have been the subjects of much debate.
A new paper suggests that an increase in competition policy in sub-Saharan Africa, to at least the same level as that of the best-performing countries in the region, could almost double overall cell phone coverage. However, the authors highlight that more targeted work would need to be done to eliminate the digital divided between rural and relatively dense areas....
We already know that cell phone technology has enabled lots of people in remote areas to access bank accounts and government services. But here is a new one: a recent paper creates a model that predicts that cell phones in Niger lead to a reduction in price dispersion. This would be true since cell phones enable grain traders to perform searches for better prices in areas where it would otherwise be too costly to search.
Interested? Register online for a discussion with the author held by the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C....
This new book from Brookings, which I just ordered, promises to be a very interesting reading....
A new CGAP/DFID paper addresses the policy implications of branchless banking. Regulating Transformational Branchless Banking: Mobile Phones and Other Technology to Increase Access to Finance is based on assessments of policy and regulation in seven key countries, including interviews with more than 500 people from governments, the private sector, and international organizations in Brazil, India, Kenya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia and South Africa.
While much of the current buzz is around mobile phones, other branchless banking applications are gaining traction as well. Brazil's increase in access to finance has been accomplished largely through the more than 95,000 banking "correspondents"—local merchants and post offices that act as agents for banks, equipped with card-swipe...