Hello… how do the poor use their phones? By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service
Dhaka, April 30 (IANS) It’s a billion dollar question: how do the poor of the planet use their mobile phones? A South Asian study conducted in India and Sri Lanka that looks at telecom users with monthly incomes of less than $100 says that over half the respondents do not even own the phone they use.
Read more at DailyIndia.com Click here to access the main Shoestrings study
LIRNEasia CEO Helani Galpaya was a featured speaker at the World Press Freedom Day 2025 South Asia Regional Conference, held on May 4, 2025, in Nepal. Joining the event virtually, she contributed to the opening policy dialogue – press freedom in the AI era: a regional lens wide-ranging discussion which explored how AI intersects with democratic values, legal frameworks, and freedom of expression in South Asia.
Aslam Hayat (Senior Policy Fellow LIRNEasia, Country Researcher for Pakistan), and Pranesh Prakash (Policy Fellow LIRNEasia, Co-Principal Investigator), drew on research carried out under LIRNEasia’s ‘Harnessing Data for Democratic Development in South and Southeast Asia’ project to discuss aspects of data governance in Pakistan and other countries. This was part of a forum hosted by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Pakistan, under the theme, “Public-Private Dialogue (PPD) on Data Governance in Pakistan.
Pinpointing where poverty is most severe and tracking its changes over time is crucial for helping communities effectively. However, traditional benchmarks like household surveys and national censuses often fall short—they’re expensive, slow, and infrequent.
4 Comments
goswami
There is more coverage of the Shoestring study in Norwegian! Somebody actually took the trouble of translating it from English and adding more content.
http://forbruker.no/digital/nyheter/mobil/article1300724.ece
zzainudeen
Fred Noronha’s article also appeared in the Times of India on April 30 2006.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1510698,curpg-1.cms
Sriganesh Lokanathan
Fred Norhonha’s article also appeared in the following:
http://www.teluguportal.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3151
http://www.dailyindia.com/show/21674.php/Hello_how_do_the_poor_use_their_phones
http://www.newkerala.com/news2.php?action=fullnews&id=51022
zzainudeen
More…
From jamming community radio to lowering telephony costs…
Fredrick Noronha
http://www.apc.org/english/news/index.shtml?x=5038217
This article summarises the issues discussed at the conference