Smallpox and the Digital Divide

I'm off to WSIS tomorrow and expect to hear quite a lot of the usual platitudes and bullshine that comes up when people gather in large numbers to address the digital divide. we'll go on about "access" and "infrastructure" and "information economies" and so forth, and most of the time we will be talking past each other because we all mean slightly, sometimes radically, different things by those terms.

typical of the problem is this story from the the Financial Times. Cost seen as bigger internet problem than access

Cost and lack of education are bigger barriers to internet use than infrastructure constraints, the International Telecommunication Union said yesterday, in a report ahead of next week's Geneva summit on the information society.

Its latest World Telecommunication Development Report says that even in very poor countries urban populations increasingly have access to computers, for instance, through internet cafés.

An even higher proportion of the population, including many people in rural areas, has access to a telephone connection, thanks to the rapid expansion of mobile telephone networks, and thus potentially to some sort of internet service.

But a much lower proportion actually uses the internet or telephone, and the percentage of subscribers is fewer still. In South Africa, mobile networks cover 96 per cent of the population but only a third have phones.

In Mexico, 70 per cent of the population have access to the internet one way or another but only 10 per cent are internet users and just 2 per cent subscribe to an internet service.

"It's less and less the case that the constraint is infrastructure, and more and more that it's affordability and knowledge," Michael Minges, lead author of the ITU report, said yesterday.

In his personal view, competitive markets combined with government policies to promote internet access and use would have a greater impact in narrowing the "digital divide" than the digital solidarity fund developing countries are pushing to finance infrastructure investments, Mr Minges said.

The problem is in what we define as infrastructure. Very often we assume that it will be via something like an Internet cafe or learning centre, which incidentally serve quite well for many people. The problem is that there are not nearly enough of them because their financial structure is so capital intensive that they can't be ubiquitous, and the return on investment is so low that the charges are unsustainable or heavily subsidised. But the other factor is that "access" also includes how far you have to walk to get there, and whether or not you will even be allowed inside once you do.

My beef with so many of these approaches is that the digital divide exists not at the highest level, but at the last mile, where the real economic cost of gaining access and training, and the benefit returned by "being able to send email" is far too high for structural reasons. And that's where we need to learn from the Smallpos campaign.

Like ICT, the technology and research, the production and distribution systems for the eradication of smallpox were focused on two utterly essential deliverables.

1. 10cc of very high tech product had to be delivered down a 2 inch needle into the arms of every child on the planet until the smallpox virus had nowhere left to go and died out in the wild. 10cc, to every child. Exactly that
2. Once they had the genetic tool, it was their personal copy forever.

That is how we need to approach the breaching of the digital divide. Instead of trying to rebuild entire societies around the technology, we need to develop and deliver the technology in packages that are small enough, cheap enough and robust enough to make them available to every one of the world's children forever. We did it with smallpox, we can do it with communications tools. I have faith, we have plenty of smart people, we just aren't asking them to do the right things.

Don't believe it can be done? Check this out. Rickshaws connect India's poor

A regional mobile phone company in India is taking a novel approach to drive up business and help the poor at the same time. Shyam Telecom, which operates in the state of Rajasthan, has opted to take its phones to the people rather than wait for them to come to it.

The company has equipped a fleet of rickshaws with a mobile phone. Drivers pedal these mobile payphones throughout the state capital, Jaipur, and the surrounding countryside. The rickshaw drivers, numbering around 200, are largely drawn from those at the margins of society - the disabled and women.

"We realised that many of these people are below the poverty line," said Suneel Vohra, President of Shyam Telelink. "They are dependent on their families for a livelihood and treated very shabbily because of that."

The company came up with the idea of its mobile public calling office, dubbed Chalta Flirta PCO, as a solution. The hand-pedalled rickshaws are equipped with a battery, a billing machine and a printer.

Through these mobile payphones, some drivers are now able to support a family of five people, says the company.

Of the women drivers, Mr Vohra said: "We want them to be self sufficient, we want them to take pride in themselves and we want them to revel in the glory of being financially independent."

The drivers take a 20% on every call, earning between 6,000 (US$131) to 9,000 ($197) rupees per month.

The telecoms company charges nothing for the initial set-up costs despite the 75,000 rupee ($1,641) price of the tricycle and equipment.

The rickshaw drivers are free to go wherever there is business throughout the state. They can work to their own routine though the average shift is around eight hours.

People can also send text messages but, according to Mr Vohra, "People would much rather pick up the phone and make a call than send a text message."

"Over a period of time, they started being commercially very successful so two or three fixed wireless terminals, and one or two mobile handsets, were placed on the rickshaws," he explained.

So while the big guns try to solve this problem with massive projects and huge amounts of money, Shyam Telelink uses its brains first and thinks in terms of the communities it lives in. And behold

Win The operator gets traffic on its network
WinThe driver gets a commission
WinThe consumers get access to affordable calling

Damn, how did those poor people get so smart?