卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

When I was working in the mountains of Lesotho, many moons ago, keeping in touch with people was a major undertaking. For example, my parents were concerned about my welfare - me being 17 at the time, and South Africa not being the most stable country then… and of course, this was before the time of cheap flights, so southern Africa was mentally much further away than it is in these days of mass air travel.

In order to speak to my folks, I had to wait for our truck to leave on its weekly supply run. Assuming that the bridges weren’t out, we would get to the nearest town, Hlotse (usually called Leribe), and then cross the border into the South African town of Ficksburg. I would have to go to the main post office, wait for the one official with an international line in her office to be free, go to her office to make a collect call to my parents, and then wait for them to call back. I could then talk, while the post office lady listened in. Luckily, she was very nice!

Getting a landline - or even a fax or telex - to our base up in the mountains was a dream - I have no idea whether or not they ever got one!

On another personal note, I remember the joy I experienced when I first got access to the internet back in 1994. Coming from a small country town, where information and knowledge were hard to come by. The Net changed all that. Suddenly, I was able to find things out without making a trip to the library in the nearest city; I was able to talk to people on the other side of the world who shared my interests.

The arrival of mobile telephony in developing countries is freeing hundreds of millions of people from the need to make the kind of trips that I had to make, and presenting them with the same kind of liberation that I experienced. What difference will it make to them?

I’m going to be looking at this a lot, particularly with reference to Africa and China. Pointers to more information are welcome!

First of all is this very interesting piece at worldchanging: Africa Calling - SND MNY 2 YR MBL. It’s a very good primer on how mobile banking via handphones is making life much easier for the poor, via services such as MTN Banking. It points out the similarity of this venture to similar successes in South Asia, and Bangladesh’s Grameen Phone in particular. This is the sort of thing that Niti is very interested in… Are there similar services in China? If so, who? If not, why not? What are the design needs for this kind of service? Watch this space for answers to these questions!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Africa, China, Development, Economy, Innovation, Mobile telephony, Telecommunications, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.