TIME EUROPE
JANUARY 31, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 4
PAGE ONE | TWO
A Great Leap
Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh has long promoted local business activity through the Grameen Bank, which he founded in 1976 to provide small loans to poor Bangladeshi women seeking to set up their own businesses. Having lent more than $2 billion to 2.3 million borrowers, Yunus has recently turned his attention to alleviating poverty through information technology. A branch of the bank, GrameenPhone, provides mobile telephone service to 1,114 villages through loans to local operators. Yunus now has a more ambitious plan. "Information technology has become the order of the day, it will change the way we do things," he told Time. "Somebody needs to push this technology to help the poor. That is what I want to do." He proposes an International Center for Information Technology to Eliminate Global Poverty. Yunus is hoping that interested parties can come together in a "virtual" center to tackle poverty issues. "I want to mobilize resources and bring people together so that people at the frontier of technology can actually communicate with those who live in poverty."
A number of companies and agencies in the developed world have already set to work trying to bring the benefits of the new technologies to developing countries. Acacia, a Canadian government-sponsored initiative, was founded in 1997 with the aim of narrowing the North-South gap. With annual funding of about $4.5 million, it has promoted telecom projects in Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa. "Our approach," says Acacia project officer Grant Thomas, "is based on the understanding that rural marginalized communities can benefit from technology, but only if it is introduced in a comprehensive manner. That means not just dropping computers into communities that may be struggling to feed themselves, but ensuring that [government] policies are moving in a direction that will support the sustainability of investments in rural communities."
Even as the U.S. and other Western governments are trimming direct foreign aid, private companies and international agencies are stepping forward. The usaid Leland Initiative is a public-private sector collaboration that has invested $15 million over five years to increase Internet connectivity in 20 African countries. The World Bank is funding virtual universities that link underfunded and ill-equipped African campuses to faculty databases and library systems around the world. George Soros' Open Society Institute has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing Internet services in Central and Eastern Europe and Africa. The efforts of such institutions, along with the initiatives of local entrepreneurs and governments, have produced numerous success stories. Some examples:
TELEPHONES
Mobile phones and other wireless technologies have greatly reduced the need to lay down a costly telecom infrastructure. In Caracas, Venezuela, where half of the city's 5 million population lives in non-wired slums, cell phones with pay-as-you-go cards have provided service to many residents for the first time. In Africa, the use of mobiles is growing by 50% a year. Modular, solar-powered satellite phone booths developed by Iridium and Motorola provide a service to remote areas in 80 different countries. In India, engineers from Chennai's Indian Institute of Technology have set up an initiative called TeNet to develop cheaper alternative technologies that, they hope, will eventually provide 200 million wireless telephone and Internet connections throughout the country.
The London-based telecom WorldTel has invested $100 million to create 1 million wireless local loop (W.L.L.) lines--which avoids the costly and labor-intensive laying of underground cables--in Mexico, and another $50 million in a similar joint-venture project in Azerbaijan. Other W.L.L. projects are underway in Zimbabwe, Peru, Tanzania, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Hailing information technology as "a great social leveler," WorldTel Chairman and CEO Sam Pitroda laments that "there is still a huge information gap between the developed and developing worlds." In many parts of the planet, it's likely to stay that way. Companies like WorldTel shun areas that are not capable of providing a 20-25% return on equity, or that present political risks.
INTERNET
The price of a PC has limited private Internet use to a privileged élite in developing countries. But increasingly, businesses and schools are getting people online. Acacia has set up telecenters providing public telephone, fax, computer and Internet services in five African countries. Cyber post offices in Ghana offer e-mail service for the price of a letter, and cybercafés have popped up like mushrooms in some of the larger cities.
Typical is the Cyberbao in Douala, Cameroon, where young women queue up to search for European husbands on the Net, while students read online books and local entrepreneurs seek potential business partners. But the $5 hourly price is steep in a country whose annual per capita income is only $620--which illustrates one of the main impediments to wider Internet access: even where links do exist, they are often too costly. Competition would bring the prices down, but in many countries telecom monopolies make Internet use prohibitively expensive. As a percentage of per capita income, Internet users in India pay 308 times more than Americans, Kenyans 413 times and Armenians, 485 times.
EDUCATION
This is perhaps the most promising example of how information technology can promote advancement. The African Virtual University links 24 African campuses to classrooms and libraries worldwide, and will soon grant degrees in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering. South Africa's SchoolNet program, also set up by Acacia along with the parastatal company Telekom, has linked 1,035 schools to the Net, while the government's Distance Education program brings multimedia teaching to rural schools. "There is no problem getting students in to use the facilities," says SchoolNet's technical director Stephen Marquard. "Even during their holidays they are lining up for the experience in getting through to the Internet."
TELEMEDICINE
Information technologies are improving health care in many countries by linking isolated patients to medical specialists, helping to train local doctors and providing them with Internet access to medical journals and databases. For the past year or so, a team of Brussels-based doctors has been running teaching programs for surgeons in Senegal via video linkups between classrooms and operating centers. "If I have to go there and teach, it gets expensive," says Dr. Guy-Bernard Cadière, of Brussels' Saint Pierre Hospital. "This way it costs practically nothing--some ISDN lines and a couple of hours' phone time." When doctors at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon were facing an Ebola virus outbreak in 1996, they were able to identify the disease and receive specialized information and advice on it via an online computer network called HealthNet, which serves some 5,000 healthcare workers in 40 developing countries.
It remains to be seen whether the sum of such case histories can add up to the kind of widespread economic growth needed to narrow the wealth gap. That will not happen without the support of local governments, many of which remain suspicious of a phenomenon they cannot control. Even though substantial funding may be beyond their reach, developing nations will have to do their part by adopting supportive regulatory policies, eliminating telecoms monopolies and lowering tariffs on computer equipment. In addition, the private companies that are bringing the new technologies to the world's impoverished regions must look beyond the profit motive to see that it is in their interest, and the world's, to heal the divides that destabilize the planet and diminish our common humanity. Finally, the local populations themselves will have to find ways to adapt information technologies to their own cultures and societies so that they work for them and reflect who they are rather than turning them into cookie-cutter citizens of the dot.com universe. Accomplishing all that will require a great leap indeed. But consider the alternative.
With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing, Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town, Saritha Rai/Bangalore, Simon Robinson/Nairobi, Christine Whitehouse/London and Leigh Anne Williams/Toronto
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