A panel discussion at the Guardian's Activate 2010 summit illustrated how simple, cheap technology, adapted to the local context, is helping to lift people out of poverty.
It seems improbable that in parts of the world where there is little sanitation or electricity and the largely illiterate population are subsistence farmers that mobile phones and computer technology are being received with great enthusiasm.
It seems equally improbable that maize and the media would be discussed at the same forum, but that is exactly what happened during the developing world panel session at the Guardian's Activate 2010 summit yesterday afternoon.
The five panellists came from disparate backgrounds, but all shared one common aim: to use technology to change the lives of some of the world's poorest people.
All the speakers conveyed the incredible hardship of human life in the different parts of the world in which they worked – from the struggles of smallholder farmers in rural Kenya to the victims of the Haiti earthquake – but illustrated how simple, cheap technologies, adapted to the local context, are helping to lift people out of poverty.
Whether through KickStart's low-cost irrigation pumps, capital education reform pioneered by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the work of Question Box to provide easy-access information or even the pioneering use of mobile technology by large corporations, such as Vodafone and Thomson Reuters, technology is helping to challenge the status quo for the poor.
Reuters provided "better, actionable information" through Market Light, a commodities information trading tool for farmers in India, which has attracted 200,000 farmers in 15,000 villages across 10 states in the last two and a half years.
Rose Shuman, founder of Question Box, reiterated the value of information and explained how her company was "leveraging human infrastructure" to provide information to communities in India and Uganda, where people were not only illiterate but encountered other language and technical barriers.
David Cavallo, vice-president of OLPC, acknowledged the role of universal primary education in poverty reduction, but said it was preparing children for an unknown future, using obsolete tools. Technology has a role everywhere, he said, but added that in places like Rwanda or Haiti technology provided a way to boost the "learning environment beyond where you can take it with incremental changes."
Cavallo explained that the biggest impact technology had on people's lives was social. Children in favelas in Brazil who received laptops not only had an improved sense of self-worth (which reduced absenteeism from school), but they started to teach their parents to read. In Uruguay, access to computers became a catalyst for e-governance.
But technology as a driver of development has its limits. The Comic Relief/Vodafone RedAlert partnership may have enabled £2m to be raised in 90 seconds through SMS fundraising, but after all the interfacing, tweeting and poking, it still seems that infrastructure (road linkages, storage facilities, a good legal system and access to finance) and the will of people to look beyond themselves and their own networks are still vital for development to happen.
What was also clear was that all these ideas must be financially viable to be sustainable: KickStart moved the production of their human powered pressure irrigation pumps from Africa to China because, as Nick Moon, its co-founder explained: "It is cheaper to ship from China to Africa than from Africa to Africa."
The obstacles to realising technology's potential may be considerable, but the resounding conclusion is that technology is a force for good. As David Craig, chief strategy officer of Thomson Reuters said at the end of his talk: "The world might be a tough place, but information can make it better."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/katine-chronicles-blog/2010/jul/02/technology-development
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