Turning the Cellphone into an Antipoverty Vaccine

Abstract

Information and communications technologies have yet to impact more than 4 billion poor and illiterate people who are still deprived of the basic means of economic, social and health betterment. The potential role of cellphone based services as an effective tool of economic emancipation and social improvement is highlighted in this paper. The time has come to harness the adoption of cell phone by the poor in a top-down systemic way. This will require rollout of cellphone based “citizen services platform” to enable the masses of poor people to reach unprecedented levels of achievement through “just-in-time” information-&-decision-&-action on the economic, social, education, health and, yes, political fronts, thus achieving a Connected Opportunities (Mobile) Revolution similar to what has been done with the Green Revolution in the 50’s. To achieve such goals, it will be necessary to develop new classes of service and employ different modalities for userservice interaction. It will be necessary to use inexpensive and readily available services to overcome illiteracy and avoiding the expensively complex web-based type approaches. Naturally, the services will have to offer several classes of user interfaces, in order to satisfy different types of users (and devices) and allow for evolution in step with the dynamic evolution of population.