[governance] Article on Mashable on the Web and developing countries

[Fouad Bajwa]

As I raised this question as a panelist in the WSIS Forum 2009 and the
CSTD 2009......what are the ways to measure actual national benefit
and human development? For example, how many calls were made from cell
phones to the emergency service, crime reporting, terrorism threat
reporting, natural disaster notifications, relief operations, business
calls out of the country, inwards business calls, government to
citizen calls and vice versa etc..........there are a lot of undefined
indicators and benefit analysis that need to be carried out to
determine what has really happened...........in my country, mobile
telephony had caused a lot of chaos and loss of hundreds of human
lives...............we have to really determine this carefully and
ITU's claims usually come from a very surface level view.......not
much in depth grassroots level experiences...........and the research
samples cannot qualify for national populations.!!!

--- Fouad

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 11:16 AM, catherine <ecrire at catherine-roy.net> wrote:
> FYI:
>
> Why the Web Is Useless in Developing Countries – And How to Fix It
>
> Like many who study the struggles of developing countries, Steve Bratt has
> done the math on the potential of mobile phones. The United Nation’s
> International Telecommunication Union estimated that at the end of 2010
> there were 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide and that a
> full 90% of the world population now has access to a mobile network. In
> contrast, only about 2 billion people have Internet access.
>
> The high prevalence of mobile phones (even in developing countries,
> penetration rates were expected to reach 68% by the end of 2010) has led
> many non-profits to choose mobile networks as tools for positive change.
> Mobile banking in Kenya has helped farmers increase their incomes, 300,000
> people in Bangladesh signed up to learn English through their phones, and
> many consider mobile phones the key to developing nations.
>
> But Bratt, now the CEO of The World Wide Web Foundation, came up with a
> different hypothesis when he looked at the 3.3 billion-person gap between
> mobile phone users and Internet users. Theoretically, he thinks that the
> two numbers could one day even out as people use their phones to log onto
> the Internet.
>
> Read more:
>
> http://mashable.com/2011/02/04/web-developing-world
>
>
> --
> Catherine Roy
> http://www.catherine-roy.net
>
>
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-- 
Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
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