Yesterday, LIRNEasia launched UNCTAD’s Information Economy Report 2010: ICTs, Enterprises and Poverty Alleviation in Sri Lanka at a well-attended news conferences in Colombo. The first of the news reports, from LBO, is excerpted below:
Use of mobile phones has helped Sri Lankan farmers get better prices for their produce and the technology can help reduce poverty, according to a new United Nations study, officials said.
“There is an informational dimension to poverty – poor people need lots of information for their livelihoods such as on market prices, inputs, weather,” said Sriganesh Lokanathan of LIRNEasia, a think tank which helped prepare the report by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
A study done by LIRNEasia on small farmers in Dambulla, an agricultural centre in central Sri Lanka, found that 11 percent of their cost of production goes towards information search, “quite a high percentage,” Lokanathan said.
“Information communications technologies (ICTs) have a role in trying to bridge this information gap,” he told a news conference held to launch the UNCTAD report called ‘Information Economy Report 2010: ICTs, Enterprise and Poverty Alleviation’.
Given the emphasis placed on least developed countries in the Report (not all applicable to Sri Lanka), LIRNEasia supplemented the report’s findings with those from its own research, especially on entrepreneurship and the information costs in agriculture. The presentations were preceded by a video produced as part of Teleuse@BOP3 in 2009.
LIRNEasia accepted UNCTAD’s request to launch the Report in Sri Lanka because of the congruence of its message and that of the Report: ICTs, especially mobiles, can put money in the pockets of poor people and greatly contribute to pulling them out of poverty. The event also saw the re-emergence of two tag lines that were developed at the time of LIRNEasia’s launch in 2004: “Money in the pocket; hope in the heart” and “Pro-market; pro-poor.”
The link to the Report is here.
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