Avoiding Wasting Food and Human Potential with ICTs
Monday, June 22, 2015 at 10:36AM 
Creative use of information technology in the South is helping to address two very different kinds of waste – of food and of human and community potential.
In Ghana, a mobile phone-driven Internet marketplace is helping to improve efficiencies in farming and selling food. Another initiative is addressing the crisis in India’s villages by drawing on the diaspora of former villagers now living in urban environments around the world.
Finding ways to efficiently trade food is crucial to keeping hunger at bay and meeting the needs of growing populations. In a report earlier this year, the UN’s Environment Programme (UNEP) found that more than half of the world’s food is wasted or discarded.
“There is evidence … that the world could feed the entire projected population growth alone by becoming more efficient,” said Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director, at the launch of The Environmental Food Crisis: The Environment’s Role in Averting Future Food Crises.
Ghana is a country that has already gained a reputation as an IT leader in West Africa (www.ghanaictawards.com). Now a clever technology based in the capital, Accra, is using mobile phones to connect farmers and agricultural businesses and associations to the marketplace. By using SMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS) text messages, information from the field is gathered and collated. This can include tracking what is happening on the farm, how crops are surviving the weather, and the status of food inventories day-by-day. All the data is collected by the TradeNet website and displayed with prices and deadlines for buyers and sellers to get in touch with each other. This reduces the time and cost involved in gathering updates from thousands of people across the country.
Launched in 2007, the service recently won the Information Communication Technology innovations contest by the World Summit Award (WAS) (http://www.wsis-award.org/about/index.wbp) of the United Nations’ World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).
TradeNet is currently collating market data from 13 countries and proclaims itself the largest SMS-based market information service on the continent of Africa. It has more than 12,000 registered users and covers 500 individual markets.
The service’s full name is TradeNet: Market Information on your Mobile (http://www.tradenet.biz/?lang=en), and it tracks products like ground nuts, sesame, tomato, maize and white beans. It offers market information from Afghanistan , Benin , Burkina Faso , Cameroon , Cote d’Ivoire , Ghana , Madagascar , Mali , Mozambique , Nigeria , Sudan and Togo.
Founded by its chief executive officer Mark Davies, TradeNet is run out of the internet start-up incubator Busy Lab (http://www.busylab.com/) in Accra. Busy Lab specializes in building mobile web solutions for companies and projects involved in rural media and computing.
While in India, villages are in crisis: As India’s economy has boomed, its small towns and villages have withered. Home to the majority of the country’s population, they are suffering declining populations and high suicide rates. India’s urban slums are where people are going; they are growing 250 percent faster than the country’s population. Yet so many people share some past connection with the country’s 260,000 ailing villages.
And while the world has become a majority urban place, it is acknowledged the future for the environment and agriculture rests in the health of villages.
The social media website Mana Vuru (www.manavuru.com) seeks to connect people living in cities with the villages they were born in, or where their families came from. It is about restoring the broken connection with the village in order to enhance their future development.
As Mana Vuru declares: “Villages form the backbone of our economy. True progress, growth and prosperity can only be realized when villages become self-sustainable.”
The site points out that “most villages are suffering from crippling infrastructure and some even lack the basic amenities like electricity and fresh water. We believe that every person who migrated to greener pastures and attained success and wealth should feel some sort of moral responsibility and do their bit for their respective villages.”
A project of the Palette School of Multimedia (http://www.palettemultimedia.com/) in Hyderabad – one of India’s technology hubs – the site lets former village dwellers register and start meeting and connecting with fellow members of the diaspora. Together they can network to help the village address its development challenges.
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: August 2009
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
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Computer ‘Gold Farming’ Turning Virtual Reality into Real Profits
Friday, June 19, 2015 at 8:11AM
The rapid spread of the internet around the global South is bringing with it new forms of work. One of these trends is so-called “gold farming”: making money in the virtual world of computer gaming by trading in virtual money, prizes and goods for busy gamers who don’t have time to do it themselves. This work now employs 400,000 people – mostly men and mostly in China, but also elsewhere in the South, according to a new report.
Working out of internet centres where they can get access to high-speed or broadband internet connections, “gold farmers” use the global trade in virtual goods for online computer games in the same way stockbrokers trade shares on the world’s stock exchanges. The trade operates similarly to the stock market, with prices fluctuating based on demand and changing by the minute.
And as the report discovered, this trade is acting as a gateway into the world of information technology employment, where computer-literate young men are able to earn an income they could not have done otherwise.
It is a trade that can provide gold farmers with US $145 a month in income. They are often given free food and accommodation to do it, and many have few other economic choices.
“You can probably think of two models,” said the report’s author, Professor Richard Heeks of Manchester University’s Development Informatics Group. “They could play as an individual at a local cybercafe doing their own in-game farming and then selling to one of the trading sites (that buy from farmers at one price, then sell on to player-buyers at a higher price). Or they could be organized into a small/medium enterprise by an owner, all working together in a room full of computers.”
There is a dark side to gold farming too: there have been reports of youths forced to gold farm by gangs who make them work 12 hour days. Crime gangs sometimes become involved and scams proliferate.
Heeks says the downside is the result of governmental ignorance. “The main problem is a lack of understanding about ICT and ICT enterprise generally in some governments in developing countries and in particular a relative lack of understanding about the spread and implications of computer games.”
Supporters see gold farming as a flourishing Southern economy that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and exposes participants both to information technology skills and the wide horizons of the virtual computing world. Its defenders say it shows that those who dismiss the expansion of IT infrastructure as a waste of time are missing the emerging economic opportunities it is creating.
Heeks said we still know too little about this fast-evolving sector, but that “gold farming does seem to be providing income/livelihood for young men who would otherwise be unemployed. There are claims that it has helped mop up youths who had otherwise been involved in crime, but we don’t yet know how generalized such claims are.”
The number of players engaged in online gaming has grown by 80 percent per year, and Heeks sees the rise in gold farming as linked to a bigger trend: “in both North and South, we will spend increasing amounts of work and leisure time in cyberspace. Couple that with the growing penetration of ICTs into developing countries, including into poor communities, and there will be growing opportunities for this kind of ‘virtual outsourcing.'”
Currently, more than 300 million people worldwide have access to the internet through fast broadband connections (mostly in developed countries, although this is changing quickly), and more than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people are online.
China is working hard to capture the economic power of the internet. The country’s economic boom has helped create an affluent urban middle class clamouring for the social aspects of internet access like chat rooms, while the government has been driving the roll-out of internet access in rural areas.
The country’s largest Cyber Park is under construction in Wujin New and High-tech Development Zone of Changzhou. It will be a technology incubator, a research and development centre, and a place for small and medium-sized enterprises to innovate.
China’s most ambitious digital media industry development is the Beijing Cyber Recreation District (CRD), a collection of digital media academies and company incubators spread over 100 square kilometres, creating the world’s largest virtual world development. It is already home to more than 200 game and multimedia content producers in western Beijing.
And even in Africa, where broadband penetration rates are very poor, countries are now looking to the mobile phone companies to provide their populations with access to the internet, as they struggle to find a place at the digital table.
Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean strategically close to Africa and better known for tourism and luxury hotels, wants to become the world’s “cyber island”, and Africa’s e-gateway. Armed with the first 3G network in Africa (the third generation of mobile phone technology – offering high-speed internet access and video telephony), Mauritius is moving fast to make good on this advantage. And it is even moving to the next level of mobile-phone speed, High-speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA) – allowing even greater quantities of information to be exchanged.
Mauritius joins a select few countries, including Japan and South Korea, at the forefront of access to 3G. Wireless – or wi-fi – computer access is available in three-quarters of the island.
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: September 2008
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
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China, David South, broadband, computers, connections, digital, gold farming, internet, markets, online, trade, virtual in David South Consulting, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions, Global South-South Development Expo, Southern Innovator Magazine, UNDP, UNDP Innovator Stories, UNOSSC Dabbawallahs Use Web and Text to Make Lunch on Time
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 at 11:38AM
The developing world’s rapidly growing cities are bringing with them whole new ways of living and working. One rapidly expanding category of citizen is the office worker. A symbol of growing prosperity, the office worker also tends to be a time-poor person who often must commute large distances between home and workplace.
These long commutes mean that many workers have lost the old ability to go home for lunch. This has led to an expanding new field of business: catering to all these office workers’ appetites.
Every morning Mumbai’s legendary dabbawallahs (it means “box-carrier” or “lunchpail man”) fan out across the city to collect freshly prepared lunches from people’s homes and restaurants. They then efficiently use the transport network to quickly deliver lunches to the customers’ workplaces. Once just for the elite, the dabbawallah lunch has become the norm for Mumbai’s middle class office workers. Lunches are packed into small, metal tiffin boxes, ingeniously organized so each component of the meal is sealed in its own section and kept warm.
With a plethora of religious and cultural practices, Indians are particular about what they eat. In Mumbai there are 200,000 office workers receiving cooked lunches every day delivered straight to their desks. This is done by an army of 5,000 dabbawallahs. While their delivery accuracy was already impressive – only six deliveries in a million go astray – they realized they had to adapt to the city’s rapid changes. In addition to their network using trains, hand-carts and bicycles to get the lunches to desks, they have turned to the internet and mobile phone SMS text messaging to take orders.
It is a 125-year old industry that has grown at the rate of five to ten per cent a year and all are paid the same no matter what their function in the business.
With foreign direct investment into developing countries surging – according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), it rose by 12 per cent from 2005 to 2006 – the number of office workers is on the rise too.
The trend is especially pronounced in India, which is on track to overtake the United Kingdom as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2010, according to investment bankers Goldman Sachs.
India’s cities are booming. Mumbai is one of the top five global megacities as well as the world’s most crowded metropolis. The dabbawallahs are an excellent example of how a business can move with the times.
A key component in India’s new-found success has been a willingness to do things better and become more efficient; the key to this is often information technology. The new technology for the dabbawllahs has been built for them by software engineer Manish Tripathi – he has even been adopted as an honorary tiffinwallah.
“When people move to Mumbai for work, and need a lunchbox carrier, who do they ask?” he said. “They ask their friends, or their neighbour. Now, they just need to go to the website and they can find out how to get in touch with us. They can also get in touch with us via SMS.”
The move online has been a great success said Tripathi: “We get 10 to 15 enquiries more a day via SMS and the website.”
Raghunath Medge from the dabawallahs cooperative said they are also making money by selling advertising on table mats. They have also turned to being a health service: they distribute health advice, beginning with this year’s World AIDS Day. An “AIDS kit”, comprising a car calendar and fliers on testing and counseling tied neatly with a red ribbon, was distributed ahead of World AIDS Day December 1.
“The kit was attached to empty lunch boxes and delivered to about 100,000 clients’ homes,” said Raghunath Megde,
Targeting hungry office workers is a goldmine for others too: in Saigon, Vietnam, the Ben Thann restaurant capitalised on its proximity to an area with a fast-growing office worker population to increase its profits. “Since our restaurant began serving lunch for office workers our business has increased by 60 per cent. This increase in number of guests enjoying the new menu was the main reason for Ben Thanh’s decision to introduce a buffet lunch,” said Nguyen Thi Thu Thao, deputy manager of Ben Thanh Restaurant.
In the past, the dabawallahs were visited by Prince Charles and British entrepreneur multimillionaire Richard Branson, to study their working methods. It looks like this next round of innovation will equally grab the world’s attention.
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: December 2007
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
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Record-breaking Wireless Internet to Help Rural Areas
Monday, June 15, 2015 at 11:55AM 
Many initiatives seek to bring inexpensive access to the Internet to rural and remote regions around the world. One of the most successful ways to rapidly expand access is to offer wireless Internet so that anyone can use a laptop computer, a PC or a mobile phone to quickly access the Net. Access to wireless Internet is being rolled out in cities around the world with so-called ‘hot spots’, but the thornier issue of improving access in rural or remote regions could get better, thanks to a Venezuelan team.
The rapid expansion of mobile phones has done much to reduce the digital divide in Africa, for example, where the number has grown from just 15 million in 2000 to more than 160 million by the end of 2006, according to the International Telecommunications Union. This rapid growth has paid off: Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Gabon and Cote d’Ivoire are in the top ten gainers of the Digital Opportunity Index, 2004-2006 (http://www.itu.int). The proliferation of Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones combined with the spread of inexpensive wireless access has the potential to close the digital divide between rural and urban areas.
The issue of inequality in access to the Internet has stark consequences for global economic development. Already, according to the World Information Society Report 2007, “Europe has achieved the largest overall gain in digital opportunity over the last two years, followed by the Americas… Asia and Africa have witnessed smaller gains in digital opportunity. The implications for the digital divide are clear: digital opportunity is becoming more sharply divided by region, not less.”
As the Digital Divide campaign learned, it is more important to keep in mind “Internet kiosks or rental of cell phones and other devices hold great promise for the poor. But shared use is a complement to a strategy that involves giving each person their own wireless device. Eventually, the price of such devices will be low enough so that everyone can have their own device.”
A Venezuelan team led by Ermanno Pietrosemoli, president of the Latin American networking association Escuela Latinoamericana de Redes, has broken the world record for unamplified broadcasting of a Wi-Fi (wireless Internet) signal. The signal was broadcast in June from two mountains 282 kilometres apart in the Venezuelan Andes. Importantly, they did this using equipment costing only just over US $360, while producing a signal strong enough to send video messages. The former record was 220 kilometres set in 2005.
The consequence of this achievement for entrepreneurs is important: It means inexpensive wireless signals can now reach further into remote and rural regions for a small investment.
“We we’re able to transmit voice and video with both,” said Professor Pietrosemoli. “280 kilometres is pushing the envelope, but the same technique can be used at distances of some 150 kilometres by people with some basic training provided there is uninterrupted line of sight between the end points. This usually means shooting from hills or using them as repeater points. For distances up to 80 kilometres, towers can be used to provide connectivity even in flat land”
Pietrosemoli is willing to train people in the techniques he has developed for transmitting wireless over large distances (https://wireless.ictp.it or www.eslareed.org.ve).
The advantages of this approach include cost and simplicity. The more commercial WiMax technology costs more and is usually installed by large companies. Pietrosemoli’s technique is for people who lack those technical and financial advantages.
“I have been installing wireless networks for some 20 years,” he continued, “and reckon that wireless is the only viable alternative to ameliorate the digital divide in developing countries. For rural areas, the challenge is to use as little repeater sites as possible, as each repeater adds costs, delay and powering issues.”
Pietrosemoli said the only other obstacle to setting these networks up is the availability of unlicensed radio frequency spectrum in the 2,4 and 5 Ghz bands. The International Telecommunications Union has recommended that countries make these free for the use of data networks, but some countries are still blocking this.
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: July 2007
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Follow @SouthSouth1
Like this story? Here is a dirty secret: this website is packed with stories about global South innovators. We spent 7 years researching and documenting these stories around the world. We interviewed the innovators to learn from them and we visited them to see how they did it. Why not use the Search bar at the top and tap in a topic and see what stories come up? As for my work, I have been involved with start-ups and media ventures since the early 1990s. While most tech entrepreneurs were either still in their nappies in the 1990s (or just a drunken night away from being conceived in the 2000s), I was developing content for this new thing they called the "Internet". In the years since I have learned a great deal about innovation and digital and have shared these insights in the stories on this website as well as in the 5 issues of Southern Innovator magazine. So, stick around and read some more!
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David South, Innovations, UNOSSC, bandwidth, data, digital, innovator, internet, rural, wi-fi, wireless in Agenda 21, Data, David South Consulting, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions, Digital, GSSD Expo, Global South-South Development Expo, ICT4D, Internet, Media, Poor, Solutions, Southern Innovator Magazine, UN Innovator Stories, UNDP, UNDP Innovator Stories, UNOSSC, United Nations, Wireless Kiva: New Gateway of Loans for the Poor
Monday, June 15, 2015 at 11:27AM 
The rise of social networking websites has created new opportunities for the poor to gain access to much needed credit. Kiva.org is pioneering a new way for entrepreneurs in the South to obtain for their businesses unsecured, no-interest financing from lenders worldwide. By just a click of the mouse a person anywhere in the world can lend as little as US $25 or more to aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries.
Kiva, which means “agreement” or “unity” in Swahili, was founded by Matthew and Jessica Flannery after time spent in East Africa. They built upon the idea of Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Mohammud Yunus’ Grameen Bank but took it a step further by tapping into the resources of the web. It works by allowing potential lenders to search for an entrepreneur via the website. Each entrepreneur’s business idea is explained, a photo of the entrepreneur is posted and the amount of the loan they require and how much they have raised so far are clearly displayed. It is then a simple matter of the lenders using their credit cards to make a loan online. Kiva then transfers all the funds to their local partners (microfinance institutions) which, in turn, disburse the loans to each business. All entrepreneurs are screened for their trustworthiness and the viability of their business. Loans are usually between 6 to 12 months and lenders receive regular email journal updates from the business they sponsor. Gradually, the loan is paid back and the lender is returned the full value of the loan.
The process is so simple that one may ask, “Does this really work?” Take the story of Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times who recently accounted his experience with Kiva.org in his New York Times Op-Ed piece, “You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor”. Through Kiva.org he chose two entrepreneurs, a baker and an owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan and lent them US $25 each instantly making himself a business partner with total strangers. He recently visited Afghanistan to see their progress and found two thriving businesses. Mr. Abdul Satar, the baker, borrowed a total of US $425 from a variety of lenders, Nicholas being one of them, and was able to open a second bakery with four employees. Mr. Abdul Saboor who runs a small TV repair shop now has a second shop with two new employees.
By harnessing a user friendly website to make instant cash loans, Kiva has come up with one of the simplest and most direct ways to help poor entrepreneurs who need start up capital. It was first tried out in Uganda about a year ago where partnerships were forged with local microfinance institutions that examined and evaluated each business before they were posted on the website. It has now attracted close to 18,000 lenders contributing an average of US $82.
“I believe the real solutions to poverty alleviation hinge on bringing capitalism and business to areas where there wasn’t business or where it wasn’t efficient,” co-founder Matthew Flannery told the New York Times. “This doesn’t have to be charity. You can partner with someone who’s halfway around the world.”
By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions
Published: April 2007
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Follow @SouthSouth1
Like this story? Here is a dirty secret: this website is packed with stories about global South innovators. We spent 7 years researching and documenting these stories around the world. We interviewed the innovators to learn from them and we visited them to see how they did it. Why not use the Search bar at the top and tap in a topic and see what stories come up? As for my work, I have been involved with start-ups and media ventures since the early 1990s. While most tech entrepreneurs were either still in their nappies in the 1990s (or just a drunken night away from being conceived in the 2000s), I was developing content for this new thing they called the "Internet". In the years since I have learned a great deal about innovation and digital and have shared these insights in the stories on this website as well as in the 5 issues of Southern Innovator magazine. So, stick around and read some more!
Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=T2V2VMuJuQEC&dq=development+challenges+april+2007&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsapril2007issue
Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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