Monthly Archives: December, 2009
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
Grameen Phone at the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
- Sulatnur Reza, GrameenPhone, Bangladesh The BOP are the people that make up the base of the pyramid. Therefore i like to refer to them as the base of the pyramid and not the bottom. At 5.3. bn people, its a huge potential market. In Bangladesh we have 150 mn people. Quite substantial. A lot [...]
Tim Kelly Of World Bank On Bottom Of Pyramid
I want to talk about not the demand side so much as the supply side. How we’re going to reach BOP users, and how much it will cost, and whether private sector can do this. If you look at the side, you can see that more than 3/4 of mobile users are from developing countries. [...]
Potential for mobile 2.0 services at the BOP
In a study conducted among 579 million people in emerging Asia it was discovered that people are reluctant to use these services because they seem too complicated. Most people tend to download ringtones etc from their PCs and then transfer them to their mobiles. Cost is also a factor that limits Mobile 2.0 applications from [...]
Understanding the Bottom of the Pyramid
Understanding people at the bottom of the pyramid and targeting them in a business and telecom sense is important. Communication and information produce positive benefits to poor people, and there is evidence to prove this. But there are also negatives to this. Communication info can communicate to economic well being. It also contributes substantially to [...]
Stuart Weinstein From Pacific Tsunami Warning System
I think cell broadcasting is a good technology for reaching that last mile. We’re not very good at getting up to speed in the States. They probably figured they’d have time to incorporate cell technology into the existing warning systems. They haven’t, but perhaps becuase they don’t feel it’s as urgent. I’m glad Nuwan brought [...]
Rohan Samarajiva On Tsunami Warning In Maldives
The projects that Nuwan worked on were on first responder warning. Our first foray into public warning was in the Maldives. You can see from the Maldives, there’s very good mobile coverage. At the peak tourists amount to 1/5th of the population. In the Maldives there was great property damage in the Malidives. Cell broadcasting [...]
Reuters Market Light, For Farmers
We are the first highly personalized professional information service for farmers. RML has over 170,000 subscribers across 12,000 villages. By one estimate RML might have reached up to a million farmers. This is because farmers don’t consumer the information by themselves but share it with 8-12 other farmers. They say that it’s information, and it [...]
Contribution of policy research is the avoidance of bad decisions
More coverage on LBO of the proceedings of the LIRNEasia@5 conference: “The biggest contribution from research is not what is adopted, but what is adopted,” says Bill Melody, founding director of World Dialog on Regulation for Network Economies. “Harmful policies that are avoided with the information generated from research.” R K Arnold the head of [...]
Agriculture: National Spot Exchange, India
Anjani Sinha, MD National Spot Exchange, India: National Spot Exchange’s objective is to reduce cost of intermediaries and enable farmers to sell directly to consumers. When the farmer harvests they can bring produce to our warehouse. A receipt is issued to him. He can then sell immediately to us, and electronic negotiation will happen. Buyers [...]
AgInfo to AgStrategy – The role of information in making agriculture markets more efficient
For any market to succeed it needs to be efficient. Transaction costs in this part of the world in agri markets are very high. It is the information search cost that has caused this. ICT must step in here and reduce the cost of obtaining information; allowing farmers to have more access to information and [...]
Using ICTs For Agricultural Strategy
This panel comes at a stage where LIRNEasia is trying to go beyond the passive use of ICTs to how ICTs can be used for welfare. What I’m going to start with is to ask Sriganesh to set the context for this particular session. Sriganesh: What the rural poor is looking for is reliable and [...]
Knowledge Based Economies
Partha Mukhopadhyay: Four broad issues I think we could think through. This whole concept of knowledge-based economies Is the classification of indicators, drivers sensible and what would you put in there Where is LIRNEasia’s work most suited What would be specific sectors that make sense (IT, agriculture) Robin Mansell: Early volumes made the case that change [...]
Day 2 Photos
Dinidu de Alwis has uploaded a quality set of the Day Two photos to Flickr. As day two ends you can view a slideshow of the selection here. They include headshots of pretty much all the speakers. The photos from all days are and will remain available in the LIRNEasia@5 collection on Flickr.
Bill Melody Introducing Regulator Panel
Bill Melody: As Rohan has said, this is the last event of the day. The real question is does policy research do anything besides keep policy researchers busy. We recognize that policy research is also done for the wider community, including industry, NGOs, academics and others to inform and build support for evidence based policy. [...]
Ashok Jhunjhunwala’s questions on M-commerce viability
AJ: If mobile trasactions have a huge role to play in smoothening the income of the bottom of the pyramid some form of loan is required at a cost below microfinance. How do you do risk assessment? Harsha de Silva: You have hit the nail on the head. This is where the revolution will take [...]
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