How Radio, Cellphones, Wireless Web are Empowering Developing Nations

This article supports the conviction that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are leading to general economic growth rather than other way around. The author provides evidence of this through descriptions of wireless, computers, and other innovations which are "leapfrogging" previous barriers to development in poor parts of the world.

Several examples illustrate her point: "In Robib, Cambodia, villagers are getting medical advice from the world's best doctors. Schoolchildren are seeing their country's most famous landmarks for the first time. And the village economy is taking off, fueled by the sale of its handmade silk scarves on the global market." Satellite networks are being used to link remote villages to urban markets as well as "bringing classroom education to communities too small or poor to support secondary
schools." "The Internet kiosks that access a global marketplace can also be used to access political information or organize

grassroots campaigns in emerging democracies."

This new perspective on ICT's has led development workers, governments, and businesses to seek out appropriate opportunities

for the developing world. Basic steps include determining which wireless innovations to use, which projects to pursue, and

which communities to engage. Samuel postulates that hardware, software and networks "have propelled developed economies out of

the industrial era and into the information age and are now promising to take the developing world directly from agrarian to

post-industrial development."

According to Samuel, innovations in technology are arriving to some villages by way of Internet-enabled motorcycles. Each

motorcycle is equipped with a transmitter that allows it to upload and download e-mail and data via Wi-Fi, as it passes by village computers. At the end of the day the motorcycles return to a hub where they upload the information received and the following morning e-mails are downloaded and data from the hub is taken out to the villages. As the author describes this is "a phenomenon that combines technology high and low in innovative ways, and is generating not only economic benefits but a new world of educational, social and political opportunities."

Samuel points out that societies that place a high value on education, like Vietnam, are at an advantage because they are better positioned to capitalise on ICT innovations. Samuel refers to Bangalore, India as a "best-case scenario" because it is a society which seized an opportunity by watching the Silicon Valley in the developed world. They mobilised their well-educated, technically competent English-speaking programmers into a large scale enterprise of call centres and high tech companies.

Samuel seeks to illustrate the point that countries which benefit from a "leapfrogging strategy" are characterised as having

"limited IT infrastructure, limited education access, and limited literacy rates." She also describes that many of the most

successful applications of technologies are often the ones that are relatively simple. For example, In Zambia, "a radio-based training system is now delivering primary education to out-of-school children, about a third of whom are orphans"; in Bolivia, a
rural radio station uses the Internet to answer questions from listeners, "like the farmer who wanted help dealing with a worm that was devouring his crops. Working online, the station found a Swedish expert who identified the worm, and broadcast the
information on pest control to the entire community."

Cellphones are characterised as one of the ICT leaders in leapfrog technology. The are considered a "common property resource" and are shared among an entire community or village. The author describes one of the "best-known" examples as Bangladesh's GrameenPhone, which has established a network of pay-per-use cellphones throughout the country. What this can help do for example, is "let farmers in Senegal double the price they get for their crops, and herders in Angola track their cattle via GPS. Video compact disks, a technology not in wide use in North America but a popular entertainment medium in southeast Asia, have become crucial educational tools.

The United Nations Summit is working to assist government, businesses and civil society organisations find ways to advance information and communications technology (ICT) in developing countries. This focus is part of the U.N.'s Millennium
Declaration, a 2000 agreement that contains commitments to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's population living on less than one U.S. dollar per day. According to the author, "ICTs can help in achieving all of these goals."