Innovations Magazine on the Bottom of the Pyramid: Mobilizing Markets

Innovations Magazine: Technology | Governance | Globalization

The print edition of Innovations recent publication “Mobilizing Markets” (Winter 2009) is available for free. Thanks for the tip on Mobilzing Markets from Putting Humanity First

Here are a couple notable quotes from Thomas Kalil:

• Mobiles are not a panacea for all problems & there is a lot of hype
• Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs may well be right when he concludes that “the cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development.”2
• There are now 3.3 billion people using mobile phones,a number that is projected to grow to 5.2 billion by 2011.
• The cost of handsets is now down to $15 in some developing countries, and researchers are exploring the possibility of$5 to $10 handsets.
• People can share phones, use multiple SIM cards on the same phone, and purchase a very small number ofprepaid minutes.People also lower their charges by hanging up before the person they are calling answers their phone. This may send some pre-negotiated message,such as “pick me up now.”
• Carriers are also deploying more advanced networks capable of sending and receiving data at higher speeds. As people gain access to high-speed data services on a mobile device,they also gain access to more ofthe global Internet’s resources.
This means that people and businesses in developing countries will have access to the capabilities of“cloud computing”(computing,data storage,and software available over the Internet) that is being created by companies such as Google, IBM, and Amazon.
• Some researchers believe that people will use voice commands and speech-to-text translation to navigate the Internet.

He further points to multiple applications for mobile phones in health and development:

• In these countries, community health workers (CHWs) play a critical role in the diagnosis,treatment,and prevention of disease. Unfortunately,CHWs receive little training and have high staff turnover. Researchers from the University of Washington and University ofCalifornia Berkeley are developing software dubbed CommCare to increase the effectiveness of CHWs. CommCare will help CHWs screen members of the local community for illnesses such as TB or malaria, provide advice on issues such as family planning and safe drinking water,and register births or deaths that have occurred since their last visit.The software will also help
CHWs plan their day by generating automatic reminder notices for follow-up visits.
• A project that grew out of a University of California Berkeley undergraduate course in bioengineering and is now supported by the Blum Center for Developing Economies and Microsoft is designed to address this. Faculty and student researchers have developed an attachment for cell phones that can take high-resolution images of blood smears, infected skin, or crop blight, and transmit the
images to experts anywhere in the world. They are also developing software that can automatically analyze those images, which might allow an unskilled health worker to immediately provide a diagnosis for a disease such as TB.6
• A nonprofit organization, DataDyne, has created EpiSurveyor, open source software for mobile data collection.Typically,this software is developed by expensive IT consultants from developed countries. EpiSurveyor allows public health officials to create their own surveys and install the resulting electronic forms on PDAs and smart phones. Many patients with infectious diseases fail to consistently take their medication, which results in lower cure rates and the emergence ofdrug resistant strains ofthe
disease. This is a major problem for tuberculosis, which requires more than six months of treatment. The recommended practice is to directly observe patients taking their medicine, but this places a considerable burden on public health sys-
tems in developing countries with a high incidence on TB.
• Dr.David Green ofCape Town,South Africa,has developed a simple and cost-effective approach to solve this problem. He enters the names of all of his TB patients in a database, and a computer automatically sends them a personalized text message reminding them to take their medication. When his patients complained that the messages were boring, he created a database ofjokes and lifestyle tips that he changes on a daily basis. This reduces the workload ofthe public health staffin Cape Town,and allows them to focus on the patients with the poorest rates of compliance.8

This looks to be only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the development gains from mobile technologies and applications. You can read more about advances in mobile technologies in development here.

Thomas Kalil is the Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at the University of California Berkeley. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Previously Kalil served as the Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Technology and Economic Policy, and the Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council.