economic development

Grameen Foundation's Village Phone program has long been touted as the poster child for using mobiles in the economic empowerment of poor women. The program gives villagers in Bangladesh-- and now in several other countries -- access to microcredit to buy a mobile phone that can then be rented to other villagers who do not have a mobile of their own.

Much has been written about Village Phones in the media and in research reports, often describing in glowing terms the economic impact and gain in social status that the women in the program have achieved. Yet, most of these studies are fairly old at this point, predating the exponential growth of mobiles around the world.

Now questions are being raised in some mainstream media about whether renting out minutes on mobile phones is economically beneficial to the so-called village phone operators -- at a time when mobiles have become so much more ubiquitous, even in remote rural areas.

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MobEA V - Mobile Web in the Developing World in Banff, Canada on May 8th 2007, co-located with WWW2007 conference is accepting papers.

Here is the official scoop; note the civil society applications!

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Aim and Scope

We are in the midst of a mobile revolution. Mobile Web Initiative spearheaded by W3C is making a strong stand on how to realize the vision of pervasive mobile computing. Services provided have to be adapted to the users’ wants and needs. To do this, we need to go beyond technology, and understand the human-centric aspects of mobile computing. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in emerging innovative applications for mobile users in the developing world. W3C has started a number of initiatives along the direction of Mobile Web Best Practices, Device Description Working Group, Device Independence Working Group and others.

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An amazing article yet again on mobiles in Africa by the BBC.  Paul Mason in his two-part series writes about the economic impact of mobile phones, but more importantly, about how mobiles are transforming local politics.

"With one in three adults carrying a cellphone in Kenya, mobile telephony is having an economic and social impact whose is hard to grasp if you are used to living in a country with good roads, democracy and the internet. In five years the number of mobiles in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million - while the number of landlines remains at about 300,000, mostly in government offices. I decided to make a journey through Kenya to gauge the impact on the ground: the plan was to go from Mombasa via Nairobi to Lake Victoria following the mobile network map - contrasting life on the network to life off it."

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