Tag Archives: Teleuse@BOP
CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7: call for abstracts and young scholar applications. Click here for details.
Initial findings from GSMA mWomen Research
The topline findings from the initial stage of the GSMA mWomen Research in India, Egypt, Papua New Guinea and Uganda were presented recently. It explored the Wants and Needs of BOP Women through a qualitative study. Some of the insights of ‘mobile as a tool’ are below. Mobile use by BOP women seem to be [...]
Thai media reports Teleuse@BOP4
It took a little time, but a comprehensive report on the Bangkok launch of teleuse@BOP4 results has been published in the Nation (Thailand). The survey found that Thai users spent more than any other nationality on mobile phones, $93 on average compared to $50 or less elsewhere. Most of the phones they bought had radio [...]
Coverage for Teleuse@BOP4 findings on more-than-voice service awareness
According to LBO’s second write up on our teleuse results, the higher awareness of health information services in Sri Lanka can be explained by two factors: the mismatch between supply and demand in the government health-services sector and the existence since around 2000 of e Channeling, a multi-modal service that allows people to make appointments [...]
Launch of Teleuse@BOP4 findings
LIRNEasia CEO, Rohan Samarajiva, presented the findings from the six-country study of teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid on 9th December 2011 in Bangkok, Thailand. The presentation took place on the first day of the CPRsouth conference to an audience of about 75 people that included senior-mid level academics and media personnel. Presentation slides [...]
Sri Lanka: Seven years after tsunami, lack of information and preparedness prevails
The government itself has found the early warning actions of the designated national authorities deficient and is talking of setting up workaround mechanisms. Nothing really new, other than sadness that seven years and large commitments of resources have not taken us much farther than we were back in 2004. What is even more worrisome is [...]
Nepali coverage of Teleuse@BOP4 emphasizes reasons for multi-SIM use
It is not every day that our research gets covered in the Nepali media. That makes it special, when we do get covered. When LIRNEasia started, we fully intended to work in Nepal, a South Asian country with great unrealized potential. We did too, in the first cycle. But even for us, the internal strife [...]
eAsia 2011 begins in Dhaka
It seemed like a launch and a coming out party combined. The launch was of Digital Bangladesh. The coming out was of Sajeeb Ahmed Wazed, the thinker behind Digital Bangladesh who also happens to be the grandson of Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal) Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and son of Shiekh Hasina, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. [...]
Technology Outlook from IBM Fellow Dr C. Mohan at WSO2Con 2011
I was privileged to listen to a presentation by Dr C Mohan on IBM’s collective wisdom on technology trends yesterday at the inaugural session of WSO2Con 2011. There were many, many fascinating nuggets, but what particularly struck me was the prediction of the importance of big public data sets. The very first post I made [...]
Informing policy from the demand side: Special issue of journal featuring LIRNEasia research
The spread of mobile telephony, especially among the poor, is one of the greatest public-policy successes of all time. Not because government officials went around identifying the deserving poor and handing them telephones manufactured in government factories, but because they focused on removing barriers to participation in the supply of communication services and allowed private [...]
Engel’s Law, telecom use, and the odd case of Sri Lankan food expenditures
A research article that will shortly be published in Information Technology and International Development got me thinking about Engel’s Law, which states that as income rises, the proportion of income spent on food falls, even if actual expenditure on food rises. The article is by Aileen Aguero, Harsha de Silva and Juhee Kang. It’s not [...]
Teleuse@BOP 4 results (preliminary) at Asia Pacific Business Forum
UN ESCAP hosted a whole week of events for the Asia Pacific business community in Bangkok last week. LIRNEasia was invited to speak on how ICTs can benefit small business. I focused on micro-enterprises of the type we see in our work, exemplified by Zayed Khan, the young grocer from Sonargoan so well profiled by [...]
Power of social networks
In the midst of writing a unifying introduction to a special issue of a journal on how the poor use the mobile phone, I came across this sentence on the web. “Ki raflé du ki amul yeeré wayé moy ki amul nit”, as a Senegalese proverb has it, “the poor person is not the one [...]
18 percent of Sri Lanka households have a computer, according to company estimates
This is an estimate from a consumer goods retailer that sells 500 laptops a month. When LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP results come out later this month we will be able to see what the numbers are at the bottom of the pyramid. Perhaps this was one of the questions asked in the census? We tried to propose [...]
The Golden Age of Behavioral Research (and the funding cuts that may take the shine off)
I co-taught an experimental graduate seminar with one of my colleagues at Ohio State University in the early nineties where we explored what policy could learn from research on how people actually behaved, thought and decided. I taught the first half of the seminar by deconstructing various policy and regulatory debates (dominated by lawyers and [...]
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