Is a mobile phone more useful than a bag of mealie?

The World Resources Institute recently published a study which found that even very poor families invest a significant amount of money in information-communication technology (ICT). The main purchases are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards.
The report from the Washington-based environmental research group found that even as a family’s income grows – from say $1 to $4 per day – their spending on ICT increases faster than any other category, including health, education and housing.
"It’s really quite striking," says Al Hammond, the principal author of the report entitled The Next Four Billion'. "What people are voting for, as soon as they have more money, and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.
What these revolutionary findings seem to say is that our notions of how to help the poor and address environmental problems in developing countries – as well as in the lower-income communities of the developed world – are very wrong. If people value access to information and connectivity as much as the study indicates, then what we should be providing is precisely that: access to the internet, mobile phone infrastructure, and low-cost computing platforms (such as the $100 laptop).
With these technologies people can take control of their lives, and find their own innovative solutions to poverty and pollution. This is very much in line with some highly innovative projects in the slums of Cairo. Here NGO Solar CITIES is building solar water heaters and biogas generators almost entirely out of recycled materials and garbage – things like discarded butter tins, plastic barrels and metal.
At the same time, they are training local residents to design and build affordable renewable energy systems themselves.
There are opportunities all over the world for information technology to enable people to help themselves and their environment.
Grameen Bank, which provides credit to the poorest Bangladeshis, famously got into the mobile phone business and is now one of the largest carriers in its country. Rural Bangladeshi farmers use their phones to find out what their goods are selling for, so they only make the long trip to market when they know they'll receive a good price. Mulhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microcredit in 2006, has long argued that access to credit should be a fundamental human right. Why? Because he has shown over the last 30 years that a small, affordable loan unleashes the entrepreneurial power of the poor, and starts them on a path toward financial stability.
From the evidence laid before us, should access to information not also be a fundamental human right? Availability of information may be the only way to begin closing the astoundingly unjust gap between the millions struggling to cook or heat their water and the billions cooking the plant by spewing out greenhouse gases.
After all, isn’t one of the signs of democracy a free press? Imagine if the governments of repressive regimes were unable to block access to the internet. Would not their people, with the knowledge of the rights they are being denied, reject such rule? Given access to the right tools there is every reason to believe the world’s poor could solve many poverty and pollution issues for themselves.
In stark contrast the developed world is awash in information technology. Is it not time some of our gadgets are designed with social justice in mind? Already, there are green iPhone and Facebook applications. Google Earth can be used to track environmental degradation. And the $100 laptop is opening up new worlds to increasing numbers of children. But more can be done.
The unbelievable technological advancement enjoyed by wealthy countries is unprecedented in human history. But technology has always been the driving force behind social change, from stone tools to better irrigation techniques to gunpowder. Yet today the missing link to a more equitable world is not a lack of technologies, but rather a lack of access to information about those technologies where they are most urgently needed. – Huffington Post.com