– Sulatnur Reza, GrameenPhone, Bangladesh The BOP are the people that make up the base of the pyramid. Therefore i like to refer to them as the base of the pyramid and not the bottom. At 5.3. bn people, its a huge potential market.
I want to talk about not the demand side so much as the supply side. How we’re going to reach BOP users, and how much it will cost, and whether private sector can do this. If you look at the side, you can see that more than 3/4 of mobile users are from developing countries. Some developing countries are beginning to leapfrog OECD counterparts. The level of economic development is not necessarily a good predictor of how a country will do.
In a study conducted among 579 million people in emerging Asia it was discovered that people are reluctant to use these services because they seem too complicated. Most people tend to download ringtones etc from their PCs and then transfer them to their mobiles. Cost is also a factor that limits Mobile 2.0 applications from being used on a mass scale. Prerequisites such as ‘more than voice’ mobile phones exist.
Understanding people at the bottom of the pyramid and targeting them in a business and telecom sense is important. Communication and information produce positive benefits to poor people, and there is evidence to prove this. But there are also negatives to this. Communication info can communicate to economic well being. It also contributes substantially to people’s personal well being and to capability building and human development.
I think cell broadcasting is a good technology for reaching that last mile. We’re not very good at getting up to speed in the States. They probably figured they’d have time to incorporate cell technology into the existing warning systems. They haven’t, but perhaps becuase they don’t feel it’s as urgent. I’m glad Nuwan brought up this problem with regards to the mass media.
The projects that Nuwan worked on were on first responder warning. Our first foray into public warning was in the Maldives. You can see from the Maldives, there’s very good mobile coverage. At the peak tourists amount to 1/5th of the population. In the Maldives there was great property damage in the Malidives.
We are the first highly personalized professional information service for farmers. RML has over 170,000 subscribers across 12,000 villages. By one estimate RML might have reached up to a million farmers. This is because farmers don’t consumer the information by themselves but share it with 8-12 other farmers. They say that it’s information, and it gives me a different status in the village (to share).
More coverage on LBO of the proceedings of the LIRNEasia@5 conference: “The biggest contribution from research is not what is adopted, but what is adopted,” says Bill Melody, founding director of World Dialog on Regulation for Network Economies. “Harmful policies that are avoided with the information generated from research.” R K Arnold the head of the executive secretariat of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India says all its recommendation is based on extensive but decisions are not “We used a (LirneAsia) research on a tax and the government reduced the tax. In infrastructure sharing we drawn heavily on your research,” Arnold said. “But whether the decision makers use it at the top depends on a very fluid situation.
Anjani Sinha, MD National Spot Exchange, India: National Spot Exchange’s objective is to reduce cost of intermediaries and enable farmers to sell directly to consumers. When the farmer harvests they can bring produce to our warehouse. A receipt is issued to him. He can then sell immediately to us, and electronic negotiation will happen. Buyers anywhere in the country can see the price and bid.
For any market to succeed it needs to be efficient. Transaction costs in this part of the world in agri markets are very high. It is the information search cost that has caused this. ICT must step in here and reduce the cost of obtaining information; allowing farmers to have more access to information and ultimately enable farmers to participate more actively in market activity. Many attempts have been made at reducing the info search cost.
This panel comes at a stage where LIRNEasia is trying to go beyond the passive use of ICTs to how ICTs can be used for welfare. What I’m going to start with is to ask Sriganesh to set the context for this particular session. Sriganesh: What the rural poor is looking for is reliable and good quality information. What they care about is enhancing their livelihoods. They’re looking for locally driven content in local languages, demand driven more than push.
Partha Mukhopadhyay: Four broad issues I think we could think through. This whole concept of knowledge-based economies Is the classification of indicators, drivers sensible and what would you put in there Where is LIRNEasia’s work most suited What would be specific sectors that make sense (IT, agriculture) Robin Mansell: Early volumes made the case that change is not just technology but related to humans and people. A 1999 quote – ‘knowledge is like light, weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere.’ This was a very top down economist view. All one had to do was count investments in these areas.
Dinidu de Alwis has uploaded a quality set of the Day Two photos to Flickr. As day two ends you can view a slideshow of the selection here. They include headshots of pretty much all the speakers. The photos from all days are and will remain available in the LIRNEasia@5 collection on Flickr.
Bill Melody: As Rohan has said, this is the last event of the day. The real question is does policy research do anything besides keep policy researchers busy. We recognize that policy research is also done for the wider community, including industry, NGOs, academics and others to inform and build support for evidence based policy. We are constantly asked to show that research affects policy. However, you generally find that policy makers and regulators go through their own decision making process and tracing the affect of research is not easy.
AJ: If mobile trasactions have a huge role to play in smoothening the income of the bottom of the pyramid some form of loan is required at a cost below microfinance. How do you do risk assessment? Harsha de Silva: You have hit the nail on the head. This is where the revolution will take place in financial inclusion. What we may see is poor people maintaining a marginal account in the bank with a set OD limit.
Chirag Jain, GupShup, India The platform is, to begin with, Yahoo Groups on SMS. All you had to do was create a group, invite your friends and communicate them. The difference was that we sat between and subsidized the cost with advertising. We were able to insert contextual advertising and targeted advertising. The platform is now offering itself to enterprises as a fantastic mobile CRM application.