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.

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. In all, perhaps one in seven Bangladeshis owns a phone, and ownership is expected to reach as high as one in three in a year or so.

Ten years ago, Begum provided the sole telephone in Patira and the surrounding area, the only connection for nearly 10,000 people. Today, she must vie with 284 other Village Phone operators nearby, plus all the cell phones her neighbors have bought for themselves as prices have come down.

As a result, Begum’s phone rentals these days bring in monthly profits of only $22. “If I didn’t have so many other businesses,” she told me, “I couldn’t afford to be in this one.” Says her loan officer, Salim Khan, general manager of a Grameen Bank branch: “She is fortunate that she began when she did. Today, poor women who go into the phone business stay poor.” Read more.

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.

Ten percent of revenues from every call go to Amnesty’s human rights fund without charging extra to the consumers. That means whenever Amnesty Wireless customers dial, they help free prisoners of conscience, end capital punishment and support rights for women around the world.

“Cell phones have made the world more mobile. Now there’s a cell phone that makes the world more free,” said Working Assets CEO Laura Scher.

“Both our organisations believe that universal recognition of universal human rights is an attainable goal. And with an effective, convenient service like Amnesty Wireless, it’s now more attainable than ever.”

“Our members want to do all they can to support human rights,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “But they’re also busy people. Amnesty Wireless makes it easier for them to make a difference every day.”

Amnesty Wireless members who want to do even more can find in each month’s bill the Citizen Action alerts containing urgent human-rights issues that need their support.

They can choose to send a well-argued letter to a targeted decision-maker. Or make a call from their cell phone and speak out for their beliefs.

Members can make up to 30 minutes of such calls each month — absolutely free. The Amnesty Wireless customers also pay nothing while calling within the network.

New customers monthly pay $29.99 and gets an LG225 camera phone, 200 minutes of free talk time, unlimited nights and weekends, voicemail, an earpiece, a car charger and free home delivery without activation fees.

Amnesty Wireless will even buy out subscribers’ current cell-phone subscriptions with up to a $175 credit.

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 talking about the 2,500 unknown tele-development projects claimed by the ITU, or its under-subscribed Digital Solidarity Fund.
ITU secretary-general Yoshio Utsumi sniffed that rich western nations, who elected not to write checks to his fund, suffered from a "limited" understanding of the divide. That’s one way of looking at it. Or it may be that governments these days are wary of throwing public monies at the UN. Or perhaps rather than kick in cash for "solidarity", donors prefer to fund real solutions.
Addressing the divide
One is the expansion of the village phone program pioneered by Grameen Telecom in . The concept has trialed successfully in and the main instigator, the Grameen Foundation , has picked up Nokia as a technology supporter.
There had been skepticism about how well the village phone concept would port to other markets beyond its home in . Supposedly ‘s high population density and homogeneity made it exceptional among developing nations.
Not so. The Ugandan trial has set up village phones in 2,800 villages, each serving 500 to 1,000 people. Another pilot is underway in , and Grameen is also exploring possibilities in the and.
The village phone is another application of the micro-finance concept pioneered by Professor Muhammad Yunus. Grameen Phone, a JV between Telenor and the non-profit Grameen Telecom, has put a phone service into 165,000 Bangladeshi villages, each yielding an ARPU higher than that of the average business user on the network.
The powerful thing about the Grameen approach is it’s not charity. Typically, one person – always a woman – in each village is given funding to buy a phone business, typically with a loan of about $180. She gets a phone, antenna, access to wholesale airtime rates, marketing collateral, and training. In turn she earns income by selling airtime to other villagers.
"Village phone is not selling a phone, it’s selling a business opportunity. We give them the opportunity to create an ICT-based business," said David Keogh, deputy director at the Grameen Foundation ‘s Grameen Technology Center.
While Nokia is backing the village phone, rival Ericsson has hooked up with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to improve rural mobile coverage.
Johan Bergendahl, Ericsson’s head of marketing, says one of the hard things was to get local operators on board. "It was difficult to encourage those operators sitting in cities with pretty good coverage" to take it seriously, he said. But under the model devised, operators can come in on a "pay as you grow" basis, eliminating most of the risk.
Skeptics might believe that the interest of Nokia and Ercisson is less about bridging the divide than setting themselves up for fresh orders of networks and handsets. Well, I should hope so.
It’s surely much healthier to treat the world’s under-privileged as customers or potential business partners than as hapless poor who need our charity and sympathy.
And if multinational vendors can do well while doing good, that is better than throwing taxpayer dollars on dubious charity projects and nebulous feel-good funds.