Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.
LIRNEasia lead economist Harsha de Silva recently had the honor of hosting 2006 Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus on his weekly television show; Biz1st: In- Focus, which runs on MTV and Shakthi TV in Sri Lanka.
A five minute cut on the discussion, where Professor Yunus discusses how a “digital genie” will appear from the “Aladdin’s lamp” [the mobile phone] to empower the poor, has been linked below.
Grameen’s famous Village Phone Program lifted thousands out of poverty– and helped Muhammad Yunus win the Nobel Peace Prize. The problem: It’s not working anymore.
According to Grameen Telecom, the GrameenPhone affiliate that manages the program, profits per operator have been declining for years and in 2006 averaged less than $70. “The program is not dead,” says its manager, Mazharul Hannan, chief of technical services at Grameen Telecom, “but it is no longer a way out of poverty.”
The reason is simple: Technology and GrameenPhone itself have made the village phone obsolete. Access to cell phones has expanded rapidly across Bangladesh, as in other developing nations. GrameenPhone, largest of the nation’s six cellular providers, has more than 13 million subscribers, with yearly revenues of nearly $700 million.…
Dhaka, March 23 (bdnews24.com) — Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus stunned the world by unveiling a poverty alleviation initiative using mobile phone on March 26, 1997.
He buys bulk minutes from Grameenphone’s GSM mobile network and resells among the microcredit borrowers in Bangladesh.
The industry now recognises such business model as Mobile Virtual Network Operator or MVNO. Yunus and Grameen shared the Nobel Peace Price in 2006.
Ten years later on March 21, 2007, another Nobel Peace laureate, the Amnesty International’s USA chapter, unveiled similar high-tech philanthropic initiative called “Amnesty Wireless”.
This MVNO is a joint venture between Amnesty International and Working Asset. It buys bulk airtime from the Sprint CDMA network and resells mobile phone services among Amnesty Wireless customers at competitive rates.
Dec 23, 2005, By: Robert Clark, Wireless Asia
http://www.telecomasia.net/telecomasia/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=274336
The UN summit in Tunis last month did not turn out to be the showdown expected between the and the rest of the world.
That particular non-event, and the anti-social behavior of ’s police, took the headlines, such as they were. By the end, journalists were reduced to counting the number of delegates (19,400), sessions (316) and participating organizations (264).
It is worth recalling that one of the key missions of the grandly-named World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was to figure out ways of narrowing the digital divide.
And despite the grandstanding, WSIS did leave behind a few small straws of progress for the three billion citizens on planet earth who don’t have access to modern communications. I’m not…
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