Lack of knowledge of social infrastructure like schools and hospitals makes it more costly when natural disasters strike, setting back recovery efforts, sometimes by months. And lack of data, in general, makes it harder — both in government and in the community — to argue for improved services or increased funding.

The answer? A good start would be scaling up the use of modern mapping technology with crowdsourcing. It’s just this potential that’s been the driving force behind a new partnership between the World Bank and Google. Under the agreement, the bank and its development partners — developing country governments and U.N. agencies — will be able to access Google Map Maker’s global mapping platform, allowing the collection, viewing, search and free access to data of geoinformation in over 150 countries and 60 languages.

Simply put, it means that up-to-date maps of social infrastructure used by nearly a billion people around the globe can be created using crowdsourcing tools, partnering with volunteer mappers using GPS enabled phones and other devices.

Success will hinge on using local expertise to break new ground — finding an active community of passionate citizen cartographers from civil society organizations, local governments, public service providers and universities who can plug in the data that makes its way to publicly available online maps.

The steps Mrs. Clinton announced on Thursday were modest in scale but important symbolically. While the United States is not yet considering lifting the sweeping sanctions that ban most imports from Myanmar, she said, Washington will no longer block the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from carrying out assessment programs, and will support the expansion of United Nations development grants for health care and small businesses in Myanmar.

Earlier this year, LIRNEasia won the contract to establish the PIRRC with initial funding from World Bank and relocated its Senior Policy Fellow M. Aslam Hayat to act as PIRRC’s founder director.

The distinguished guests included Regulators and representatives of Pacific Island Countries, Representatives of the World Bank, the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association, the International Telecommunications Union, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the Japan International Co-operation Agency as well as the Vice Chancellor and representatives of USP.

The launch was followed by two-day working session, where we discussed challenges of Broadband, Alternate Dispute Resolution/Alternate Regulatory Practices and how to use ICT indicators regulatory purposes.

PIRRC will collect key industry statistics and issue periodic reports on the state of the telecom sector in Pacific Island countries, develop information packages on priority regulatory topics including those where technical skills may be required in analyzing industry trends, provide advisory services in response to country requests and to identify additional sources of expertise and issue good practice statements on telecommunications policies, laws, implementing rules and regulatory instruments.

The event was covered in the Fiji Sun, the Fiji Times and on the Fiji Government Portal.

4.28 Equity and integration of marginalized groups have been more
effectively supported by Bank support for ICT policy and sector
reform than by operations specifically designed to achieve these goals.
ICT operations that supported reforms to introduce competition into the
sector, when successful in supporting those reforms, have had significant
impact, especially in access to cellular telephony services. This increase in
overall access has had a spill-over effect of providing access to the
underserved. Lower tariffs (especially in cellular telephony), falling
handset prices, and the expansion of prepaid cellular services are all
channels that facilitate access by the poor. One indicator of the poor
becoming part of the customer base of cellular telephony providers is the
monthly average revenue per user (ARPU), which declined from about
$20 in 2002 to about $5 in 2010 in developing countries.

In line with the axiom that all problems are easy if we can solve the hardest ones, LIRNEasia has been interested in the problems of regulation in micro states. This is where capacity issues are most challenging. Dilini Wijeweera calculated based on benchmarks that Bhutan, a country with a population of 690,000, cannot have a regulatory agency with more than 25-30 people. The developing countries in the Pacific, except two, are smaller than Bhutan. The solution to the problem of effectively regulating with a staff of less than 25 deserves the equivalent of the Nobel in our field.

That is why we bid for the contract to establish and run a regulatory resource center embedded in the University of the South Pacific to support the regulators in the Cook Islands (19,808 population), the Federated States of Micronesia (110,728), Fiji (849,218), Kiribati (98,045), Nauru (10,210), Niue (1,477), Palau (20,457), Papua New Guinea (6,732,159), Marshall Islands (62,041), Samoa (178,846), Solomon Islands (523,170), Tonga (103,976), Tuvalu (9,929), and Vanuatu (239,788).

The Center has two years of funding from the World Bank. During that short start-up period, we must make the Center so useful to the member countries that they will make it their own and be motivated to contribute to its revenues. This is terribly hard. It is one thing to partake of club goods (a subset of public goods that are excludable but are not rivalrous) when offered free, but quite another when a price is put on them. Within the economics perspective, the free-rider problem suggests that there will always be an outlier who will feel like taking the benefits without paying the fees. Within a political science frame, it will be the problem of collective governance that will pose the greatest threat. It is extremely rare for 14 countries to have a successful governance arrangement for anything. But the University of the South Pacific where we will be housed, is a collective enterprise and it works. We hope Pacific IRRC can be as, or more, successful.

Sri Lanka’s state-run postal service lost 3.0 billion rupees in 2010 up 22 percent from a year earlier, while revenues fell 6.8 percent to 4.3 billion rupees amid lower letter usage.

Data released by the Central Bank shows that expenses rose 3.1 percent to 7,330 million rupees in 2010. Revenues had fallen despite efforts to get into banking services and sell pre-paid phone cards.

Letters per inhabitant fell to 17 in 2010 from 21 in 2009, according to data released by the Central Bank.

Sri Lanka’s telecom use has been rising in recent years, and in 2010, telephones exceeded the population. Availability of phones and email use can reduce the demand for letters.

I said as much in 2007. But the Minister who was receptive to the idea, ceased to be in charge of the subject. And nothing happened. Next time we look, the losses may be more than what the post office brings in.

Charles Kenny, an economist whose work we have been following for some time, has written a new book called Getting Better, dealing with this problem. Here is an excerpt from the review:

Among the seven major regions into which the World Bank divides the planet, life expectancy has grown more since 1980 in the Middle East and North Africa than anywhere else (12.2 years). South Asia has had the second biggest gain (9.6 years), Latin America (8.9 years) is third and East Asia fourth (8.1 years). Yemen — the latest political hot spot — has closed almost its entire longevity gap with India since just 1990, for example. Liberia has closed nearly half its gap with India over the same span.

The main reason is that health and well-being are cheaper than they used to be. Africa and large parts of Asia and Latin America remain abjectly poor. But they can often still afford antibiotics, immunizations and clean water. So even as African countries have fallen further behind economically, some have begun to catch up in other areas.

Just as important, their citizens, who are better educated than their ancestors and have far better access to information, often have the political power to demand better basic services. Compared with past decades, vastly more people today live under a political system that at least resembles democracy. It was only 40 years ago that women in Switzerland — Switzerland! — could not vote.

Of course, that still leaves the puzzle of what causes the good outcome. Bangladesh has achieved good outcomes in telecom. The cause is a business model, we have concluded. All that government has done is removed barrier to participation by the private sector, even if imperfectly. Is there such a causal mechanism outlined in Kenny’s book? One would have to read it to find out.

The end result was a USD 71 million plus World Bank soft loan to help repair 32 of the most endangered dams. If not for that initiative, one wonders whether things would be worse than today, where we are suffering the effects of multiple small tanks breached, but all the big ones safe, so far.

I wrote about the need to pay more attention to dam safety and maintenance, after the first flood of 2011.

The Dam Safety Project only covers 32 of the 350 large and medium dams; the 12,000 small dams that were the causes of most of the damage in 2011 are outside its scope. They are under the authority of the Department of Agrarian Services, under a different ministry.

There is no systematic effort to assess their safety and to remedy the problems, if any, even as of today. One hopes attention will be paid as a result of the most recent disaster.

Why are all the human-made reservoirs that dot this country not under a single Ministry? What is the rationale for a Mahaveli Ministry, decades after the accelerated construction program was completed? Why is the Department of Agrarian Services, a creature of Philip Gunawardene’s reforms of 1958, still alive and kicking five decades after those forgotten socialist experiments? Why is it in charge of the neglect of village irrigation?

It is heartening to see that the government is taking action to expand the scope of its dam safety work:

Sri Lanka will expand its dam safety program to cover more large reservoirs and will ask for additional funding from the World Bank following recent floods, officials said.

D C S Alakanda, who heads Sri Lanka’s Dam Safety and Water Resources Planning Project said the talks with World Bank to expand the project will begin next week.

The current project funded with a 7,500 million rupee interest free credit from the World Bank covers 32 out of 80 large reservoirs deemed to be most in need of rebuilding or having their safety improved.

Irrigation minister Nimal Siripala de Silva said most of the large dams in the country except for some built in the last three decades were made out of packed earth and they had a life of around 50 years.

The report went on to quote me and refer to LIRNEasia’s 2005 work, but that is not the main point. Everyone who cares about the lives and livelihoods of people who live in the shadow of Sri Lanka’s thousands of reservoirs should support the government and its international donors in their efforts to establish a sustainable system of dam safety and maintenance.

We see a similar trend in the global development landscape, with developing countries assuming important roles alongside traditional development partners. These new partners are contributing not only aid, but more importantly are becoming major trading partners and sources of investment and knowledge. Their experiences matter.

Yet for too long prescriptions have flowed one way. A new multi-polar economy requires multi-polar knowledge.

With the end of the outdated concept of a Third World, the First World must open itself to competition in ideas and experience.

The flow of knowledge is no longer North to South, West to East, rich to poor.

Rising economies bring new approaches and solutions. We see that as India advises Africa on dairy farming; as China learns from Africa about effective community-driven development approaches in Ghana and Nigeria; as the United States learns from China about high-speed railways; and the Chief Economist of the World Bank, for the first time in our 66 year history, comes from a developing country: Justin Yifu Lin — a student of the University of Beijing and the University of Chicago.

The entire speech is worth reading. It provides an overview of how development economics evolved and ends with a section on “open data, open knowledge, open solutions,” again, terms that should not be unfamiliar those working with LIRNEasia, and with IDRC, our principal funding partner.

Happy new year and thanks to my good friend Deepak Maheshwari for sending me good reading for the new year.

Given the policy was almost fully formulated, I decided to focus on performance indicators, a subject I was working on for both UNCTAD and one which had preoccupied me since the time I was a regulator. It is also a subject that LIRNEasia has developed considerable expertise in. My guess was correct. Decisions had been made on the policy instruments that would be used and the ends that were desired, but not on how to figure out whether the policy instruments were working or not. Brazil_May10.

I first raised the standard criticisms about “teledensity” and such, where the failure of the ITU to recognize the qualitative change from a government-dominated monopoly service to a vibrant competitive industry had led to continuing reliance on supply-side data that came through multiple steps (operators to regulatory agency to ministry to ITU) with all the attendant delays and errors, had resulted in a mess. The flaws in the data increased from fixed lines to mobile to Internet, with massive problems caused by non-standard definitions and flawed data collection. For example, no one knows what an active SIM is, despite their numbers being bandied around. Broadband lacks common definition and in some cases, arbitrary multipliers have been used (10 in the case of Indonesia) to arrive at numbers of Internet users.

I then moved on to discuss the work I had done with Haymar Win Tun of the LKY School at National U of Singapore, where we had organized the countries covered by the ERI, NRI, IDI and KEI by deciles. Here too the end results were problematic because they drew from the same poisoned wells of UN system indicator databases, but at least they recognized factors other than ICTs. The inclusion of other indicators in the mix diluted the errors in the ITU databases, though perhaps introducing additional errors. Haymar and I argue that it was more defensible to simply talk about deciles and not about positions in a ranked list because the existence of input errors makes the small differences between countries insignificant.

Brazil was in the third decile from the top in KEI and IDI, which posed the question as to what target they should adopt. Advancing a decile at the top of a league table is a lot more difficult than doing so at the bottom. To advance to the next decile, Brazil would have to displace an OECD country and or city-states such as Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore. The sense of the room seemed to be that they would like to set the country an ambitious target. It would be nice indeed for a BRIC to take out a European country. I pointed out that Cypress and the Slovak Republic seemed doable and that Greece, which was currently two deciles ahead was also vulnerable.

We discussed the ways in which the target could be achieved, including unpacking the indices to identify the subcomponents most amenable to increase and then concentrating policy attention on them. The value of relying on demand-side data that would allow the questions most pertinent to Brazil’s broadband policy was underlined, even if this meant that comparability and benchmarking would suffer.

Given the heavy reliance on subsidies and other interventions, I asked whether it would not be better to let market forces operate by allowing greater entry, thereby triggering a shift to the Budget Telecom Network Model. I wondered why Brazil was consistently at the bottom of the rankings in terms of Nokia’s mobile and mobile data TCO tables and why billion of USD were lying unspent in the Brazil Universal Service Fund. If these problems could be resolved there would be less need for subsidies, I said. I also pointed out the need to ensure cost-oriented and non-discriminatory access to fat pipes, not only within Brazil, but also under the sea. Unless these input prices declined, there was no point in lowering retail data and voice prices, which would only result in congestion and poor QoS. Without lower retail prices more people would not get connected and use would not increase.

Svet Tintchev, World Bank expert on the telecom industry in developing countries, says, “The first ones who put in electricity generators in rural areas are the telecom operators … in a way, their leverage goes beyond pure telecom service.” Tintchev calls the local telecom companies “the economic enablers in Somalia”. Four main telecom companies now operate in Somalia and, despite competing for customers, they have cooperated with each other to maintain their networks and set prices to ensure that competition doesn’t become too cutthroat. Horseed Media writes quoting Wall Street Journal.

ITC Limited, an Indian company that is one of the largest buyers of soyabeans, felt it was paying over the odds, but was unable to monitor the traders closely. Starting in October 2000 it began to introduce a network of internet kiosks, called e-choupal, in villages in Madhya Pradesh. (Choupal means “village gathering place” in Hindi.) By the end of 2004 a total of 1,704 kiosks had been set up, each of which served its host village and four others within a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius. The kiosks displayed the minimum and maximum price paid for soyabeans at 60 mandis, updated once a day, along with agricultural information and weather forecasts. ITC also posted the price it was prepared to pay for soyabeans of a particular quality bought direct from farmers at 45 “hubs” (mostly in the same towns as mandis). By setting up the kiosks, ITC enabled farmers to check that the prices being offered at their local mandi were in line with prices elsewhere. It also gave them the option to sell direct.

Bean there, done that
To evaluate the impact all of this had on prices, Ms Goyal used historical data from mandis and the locations and installation dates of the kiosks. She found that the presence of kiosks in a district was associated with an instant and persistent increase of 1.7% in the average price paid at mandis in that district. As expected, the availability of price information increased the level of competition between the traders, raising prices and reducing the variation in prices between nearby mandis. Farmers’ profits increased by 33%, and the cultivation of soyabeans increased by an average of 19% in districts with kiosks. And by buying some produce direct, ITC reduced its costs, which paid for the kiosks.

Full participation in the global Internet Economy requires electronic connectivity of considerable complexity. Today, due to a worldwide wave of liberalization and technological and business innovations in the mobile space, much of the world is electronically connected, albeit not at the levels that would fully support participation in the global Internet Economy. Yet, many millions of poor people are engaging in tasks normally associated with the Internet such as information retrieval, payments and remote computing using relatively simple mobiles. Understanding the business model that enabled impressive gains in voice connectivity as well as the beginnings of more-than-voice applications over mobiles is important not only because widespread broadband access among the poor is likely to be achieved by extending this model but because it would be the basis of coherent and efficacious policy and regulatory responses…

This is an excerpt from a background report by Rohan Samarajiva, to be presented at “Policy coherence in the application of information and communication technologies for development,” a joint workshop organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Information for Development Program (infoDev) / World Bank from 10-11 September 2009 in Paris. The report has been published in the OECD’s Development Dimension series:  “ICTs for Development: Improving policy coherence.”

The looks may deceive, but this is a radio station. Prabhavi Community Radio - the first Internet community radio in Sri Lanka comes from Prabhavi Resources Center, Weranketagoda, Ampara – the post-conflict district in Eastern province (8 hours travel from Colombo). It operates from a Nenasala, one of the 500 odd telecenters funded by the World Bank under e-Sri Lanka program. A brainchild of Ajith Karunarathne, it runs as a nonprofit venture entirely by volunteers Asiri (red shirt, first photo) and his team.

Strangely, this radio station connects to Internet thru a 128 kbps pipe. That is all available, though both major broadband providers claim they cover the Ampara town – 15 km away. The link is from not any of them. The unidirectional antenna – in a 15 m tall tower – is directed not towards Ampara but far ways Batticaloa – probably the nearest hub.

Nelan Dayarathne, the current manager of the center (inset) has no complaints. Yes, sometimes the link fails when it rains heavily, but otherwise it is adequate to link the station to the net simultaneously providing the rest of the telecenter services. Perhaps the low sharing increases throughput – a phenomenon observed in testing the links of the same operator in Colombo. Please wait AT-Tester will tell us in due course – in the next phase of LIRNEasia’s broadband benchmarking project.

Ambuluwawa, about 1,100 m above sea level, is probably the highest point in the vicinity of Gampola. Not surprisingly, all telecom operators exploit the geography. Transmission stations/towers encircle the summit. (See above) That is what one calls infrastructure.

Just 10 km away, Sirimalwatte Ananda thero, a young and energetic Buddhist monk, runs a Nenasala, a telecenter established under the World Bank funded e-Sri Lanka program. He is not content with the Internet facilities. He pays Rs. 11,250 (about USD 100) per month for a 128 kbps link of inconsistent speed. This is twice more what a user in Colombo pay for her, not 128 k but 2 Mbps link – from the same operator.

Use simple maths. Ananda thero pays THIRTY TWO (32) times more per kbps than a user in Colombo. Why such a large gap? Don’t tell me lack of infrastructure is the culprit.