And we did.  Strangely enough, I learned more from one off-print lying on a table than the entire whole conference on the subject that brought me to Davos.  The second author happens to be  a friend of mine teaching at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, but that was not why.

It was just a very good review of the massive scientific literature coming out of the analysis of the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami addressing a central policy question about whether we should pour limited resources into growing mangroves and other “barriers” along the coasts or whether we should allocate them to solve the hard problems of early warning and preparedness.  The answer, like most answers in the policy world, was not unequivocally this or that.  It leaned on the early warning side, much to my satisfaction, but also pointed out that without paying attention to the coastal environments, the people whose lives are saved by early warning and preparedness will have no livelihoods.  I had been kind of skeptical about the mangrove story, so it was gratifying to see meta-analysis of masses of research fully support the gut conclusion.

But still, the main conclusion was dead-on with the holistic approach always impressed upon the team by Dr Vinya Ariyaratne, based on the Sarvodaya philosophy.  We at LIRNEasia have a comparative advantage with early warning and it will truly save lives if properly implemented, but we have to keep the larger context in mind.  Otherwise, the people whose lives are saved will rot in government camps with no livelihoods to go back to.

But anyway, that was not the only thing that happened in Davos.  We conducted a session on the project that attracted a quality audience, even if the quantity left much to be desired.  We got on the ISDR radar screen.  If this results in the broader dissemination of our research, the trip would have been well worth it (apologies to the beautiful mountains of Davos).

Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gatess Vision – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog

Last week Mr. Gates called on the executives of the largest corporations to add social entrepreneurship to their agenda, a leopard-spot-altering exercise at best. However, in challenging his compatriots, one of the experiments he overlooked was Mr. Yunus’s stunning success at Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, an effort he has pioneered during the past decade in partnership with Telenor, a Norwegian wireless carrier.

Intended as an experiment to extend wireless communications networks to the world’s poorest people, the program has become a remarkable success on multiple levels. Not only did it create a class of “phone ladies” who brought wealth into village communities, it has grown quickly enough and been profitable enough that Mr. Yunus said this week in Davos that Telenor had decided to break its original promise to his organization and refused to turn over control to allow the program to be run on a not-for-profit basis.

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Can you just drop technology in, without addressing the overall institutional setting?     

At Davos, the Squabble Resumes on How to Wire the Third World – New York Times

Separately at the meeting on Saturday, John Gage, the chief researcher at Sun Microsystems, proposed an industry plan to deploy advanced data networks in developing economies with contributions of engineering staff time of 1 percent.

Mr. Gage, who headed the NetDay project for connecting American schools to the Internet, said that rural areas in the developing world would cost as little as a $1,000 a kilometer, compared with $1 million to deploy a network over the same distance in New York City.

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: January 30, 2006

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 29 — It sounds like a project that just about any technology-minded executive could get behind: distributing durable, cheap laptop computers in the developing world to help education. But in the year since Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, unveiled his prototype for a $100 laptop, he has found himself wrestling with Microsoft and the politics of software.

Mr. Negroponte has made significant progress, but he has also catalyzed the debate over the role of computing in poor nations — and ruffled a few feathers. He failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on including its Windows software in the laptop, leading Microsoft executives to start discussing what they say is a less expensive alternative: turning a specially configured cellular phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard.

Continued here.