Low Cost Information Access Devices

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Comment by Jeff Buderer on April 11, 2009 at 2:51pm

So we can see from the material that there is a concern about EU competitiveness as well as to ensure development. My thought though is to remove the illusion of altruism (that aid and development is all about altruism may be part of the problem that keeps a large part of development corrupt and ineffective) and to be blunt about this. If we are to talk about an social enterprise approach, we need to say: yes it is not simply about helping Africa, but rather focused on key goals that go beyond ICT4D or even the MDGs:
1) Develop an effective and comprehensive strategy for helping Africa to help itself, that we can learn from in the process and apply globally;
2) Develop compelling business relationships to ensure a relationship of mutual respect between African nations and the EU;
3) Consider that the geopolitical reality that the Somalia lawlessness cannot allowed to become the norm in Africa;
4) Encourage development policies that starts to truly overcome the past stain of colonialism as part of a healing process;
5) Promote a model of sustainable development that can minimize the unsustainable utilization of natural resources, while facilitating basic growth needs in Africa.

Xolian notes that low cost and high quality are not the same things. Essential he is right in the sense that an Apple Macbook is always going to be better than an eeePC (Recently Apple's Steve Jobs brushed aside the challenge from Netbooks saying that Apple is already positioned well in this market with the iPhone and that you cannot make a good computer as cheap as Asus, Acer and others are doing).

I think the competitiveness factor is already there in the sense that the cost of living is lower in Africa. However, oddly this is distorted and has in many urban centers people spending a lot of money for basic staples (more than one would expect to even in say a rich country). Obviously the reason for the steep rise in food was speculation, and the local middlemen were able to drive up prices, "shorting" risk factor the emerging markets that has unreliable food supplies. Thus this illuminates a key problem and that is, that countries need to balance investment in tech with other sectors such as health care, poverty eradication, electrical and food production.

So I would go deeper and so what we need to do is not only show how people can develop low cost solutions (so it is not just learning from competitors overseas and mainly in Asia and Europe) but also seeing their current blindspots (which is that current growth can continue business as usual without regard to the environment or authentic human needs for a better life beyond as defined by how much stuff they have) and leapfrogging over their current economic approaches and invest in sustainable development using ICT as the leverage point.

Indeed the real advantage the EU/European has and needs to be capitalized on, is that they are more anchored in a balanced approach to economic development matters (considering that a healthy society is not based completely on making money and being competitive) than say the US and that they are in a better financial position in the US. However some people in USA (Libertarian Republicans) may have a point when using the label "Old Europe" to refer to Europeans are often very resistant to the kind of regulatory freedom that gives local people more leeway to determine their own destiny.

If I was a big name respected global consultant, I would advise the EU to stop worrying about the market for low cost computers in Emerging Markets and rather focus on facilitating a global sustainable development process through IT consulting that is based on some of its own successes while also looking into the future and seeing that regionalism and not nationalism or even supranationalism is the key and decisive factor in building a empowered and ecologically and socially sustainable humanity.

Developed nations need to stop focusing on creating jobs and economic growth as an end in itself and do what comes naturally at this stage of the development game: Domestically focus on providing the infrastructure and training to adapt rapidly to challenges, think holistically and develop more innovations that help communities to become prosperous and self-reliant through the effective and sustainable use of local resources, while focusing the global economy on the sharing of information and ideas and culture.

These are areas where these advanced industrialized societies such as the EU already have well trained labor forces and can start to develop a real strategy to compete with Silicon Valley and Asian tech centers, by focusing first on how to do this locally and regionally in say Europe or wherever. Complementing this development model would be an investment in starting the seeds of similar approaches in Africa and other regions as part of a leapfrogging approach to reduce development costs, while increasing the sustainability and reliability of infrastructure and services.

Rather than Ghana's or Nigeria's India's Silicon Valley, what I see is something focused more along the lines of what the UK architect Norman Foster is proposing with the Dubai government in the name of Masdar City - a 60,000 person EcoCity development focused on green living and green technologies.

The future of development in the tech sector is not with producing hardware (or even software for that matter), but in developing a comprehensive approach to real. meaningful sustainable development.

In looking at successful business models such as IBM's, we see an evolution that is moving away from a focus on hardware jobs (the evolution has been as follows):

1) Hardware;
2) Software;
3) Consulting Services

Countries and corporations that see this pattern and effectively and aggressively invest in change management strategies to position themselves to offer the kinds of consultant services that will be needed to help people remain economically viable in the 21st century - will the ones that remain competitive and will be the global leaders in the development process.

Such innovative players in the global economy will (as the early adopters do now) provide services to a range of actors with approaches ranging from the traditional top down to the cutting edge bottom up in sectors/client groups such as:
* Institutional - learning institutions and think tanks need to adapt to the new changes and offer training that is relevant to the new work force needs that are emerging;
* Community - communities have new advantages over the urban large scale approaches that the top down likes the most thanks to the P2P movement. However the P2P movement is still fractured and disorganized which limits it potential impact by orders of magnitude;
* Regional - A term bioregionalism has emerged with the understanding that modern thinking has gone awry by moving us away from common sense understandings about our relationship and dependence on our continued survival on this planet. Key to this concept is the idea of Relocalization not through protectionism so much as by leapfrogging existing top down approaches to develop more compelling and COMPETITIVE local economic development strategies to promote a more community centered approach that considers local culture and ecological systems.
* Corporate - Corporations need to know how to invest in this new economic environment. Right now corporate social responsibility has grown into a hip buzzword. Yet we are not sure of its substantive significance in terms of truly changing public or more precisely corporation policies on a large global scale. It is obvious however, that ICT has a key role to play in developing systems to track corporate actions and their impact on the ecology and society on a global level and make sure that corporations and held accountable as global actors;
* Nation-state - Those invested heavily in this sector probably have the most to lose in this new environment (2nd are the corporations) and yet resisting the inevitable winds of change only worsen the predicament of this sector just as with the corporate sector. Governments at the federal can embrace the end of the era of big government solutions and prolong their viability by supporting massive investments in community empowerment services and the physical infrastructure to enable that process.

The bottom line to all this is that the economy and society are changing and most in the mainstream are still not grasping the deeper driver of the recent collapse of the world's financial sector. Many Europeans want to blame the problem on US/Wall Street without see their role in the process. The perception among many is that top down people who run our economy are out of touch with the needs at the bottom of society (aka the grassroots) as well more pragmatically in terms of how to effectively run a global economy (this is a major change that is the real factor that will if not addressed will undermine the legitimacy of the power elite).

The global financial crisis can be an opportunity if we come together at global level to find a solution. The key realization in this process of coming together is that it must be based on the clear understanding that the most effective way to make humanity sustainable (considering that we were "sustainable just a few hundred years ago"), is to focus on finding more solutions at the local level - especially with regards to effective development in Africa (towards more Made in Africa solutions such as an upcoming conference called Maker Faire Africa).

Innovative groups (including forward thinking governments, institutions, regions and corporations as well as even at the community scale), by investing in "Holistic ICT" approaches can create synergistic feedback loops that provide multiple benefits solving several problems at once. Most importantly, they will if they figure out how to do this effectively and consistently, will remain viable at the organizational level for many years to come.

An example of a Holistic ICT approach to development, might include a program that while training students on ICT, gives them hands-on experiences on how to build a model sustainable ICT driven social enterprise that in the process promotes Appropriate Technologies , while lifting people out of poverty in the communities they operate out of. A more practical example of what I am talking about is Appropedia, which as a wiki both links people and networks together while also sharing practical actions/technologies and approaches people can take in promoting a more grassroots model/P2P of human technological development.

Our focus thus should be pragmatically driven in that if we don't get the bottom half of humanity on board the modernization experiment; that it runs of the risk of failure or collapse - and that kind of global capitalism is in no one's long term interest.

So the burning question is: how to address basic human needs for a good and prosperous life without bankrupting the ecology of the planet and what is ICT's role in the process?

Comment by Xolani Nkosi on March 17, 2009 at 11:41am

I agree, but the fact that these devices are called 'Low Cost' simply means users cannot realistically expect the same quality. The most important thing is to have more services and applications that are easy to use in these parts of the world (especially in Africa), where not only affordability but literacy equally remains a real challenge. In Africa, Governments need to learn from overseas competitors who have prioritised ICT markets and successfully improved their economic development. More investments by governments and other stakeholders in these low cost information access devices can only be seen as another step forward and another solution to issues of education, training, cost and affordability.

Comment by EL HADJI MAMAN LAMINOU on March 16, 2009 at 5:03pm

One thing to be taking into account when addressing on low cost information devices issue is to get in the same time high quality and low cost devices. As we want to get the benefic of low cost braodband access, we need indeed high quality devices at the end user point. Otherwise, low cost braodband acces would be useless in term of huge advantage of time gained, and vis versa. So attention has to be paid on the quality of the low device. I think, the quality issue is one of the problem of the $ 100 laptop which can only be used for training, but not for business. To foster development, the device has to be not only cheep, and affordable but also it has to be of high quality. This can be done base on the economy scale.