Africa as a continent, despite its extreme poverty, has opened itself up to novel development initiatives thanks to the prevalence of cell-phones throughout the population. Uganda, one of the poorest nations in the world with close to half of the population living on less than $1.25/day, is also home to 10 million cell phone owners. [...]
By Peter Frerichs in Chile
www.poletopoleconsulting.com
At this stage in the game everyone has an email address, right? I can’t remember the last person I encountered without one. So, taking this a step further, if you have email you are more than likely to have perused websites other than Gmail, yahoo, or hotmail. Yet, I come across [...]
By Rama Siva in India
The rural bank where I work in western India is frequently a scene of intense frustration. The cause is most often malfunctioning computers. Technology stirs more negative emotion among the bank’s staff than auditors do.
Most technology problems in the bank are simple enough to be fixed by people with basic training [...]
By Will Radecki in the Dominican Republic
I read with amazement this week that in Uganda, text messaging accounted for $39 million in revenues over the last two years. Ugandans sent 354 million SMS messages in 2008. It’s no surprise that SMS is popular in Africa. What’s surprising is that I’ve been living in the Dominican [...]
