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.
by Ayesha Zainudeen CellBazaar is a classifieds site in Bangladesh. Potential buyers and sellers can search for and post information on goods. If you compare CellBazaar to a developed marketplace like Amazon, Amazon covers the full range of a transaction. The search, payment, feedback, delivery. CellBazaar actually just focuses on the search.
Understanding the volatility of cash flow of poor people is important in assessing the mass appeal of Mobile Money. M transfers must be used to smoothen consumption and expense. We need to consider how a poor person who skips meals can use technology to avoid it. The urban poor live in congestion while another group lives in rural isolation. The estate poor are institutionally dependent i.
Harsha de Silva I’m looking at mobile payments from an economics angle. The idea here is to understand the volatility of cash flow of the poor. Then the prevalence of m-commerce to smoothen consumption. Then finally how to increase use of m-commerce solutions. As a logic for this, you’re looking at people with irregular income streams.
After reading the historical studies of telecom in the United State, my grad student said don’t pay too much attention to interconnection. The standard answer, what are the three priorities of regulation -interconnection, interconnection and interconnection. Now, later, I have to kind of say Divakar was right. This is such a radical statement that the guy from the FCC is cringing here. My example is Bangladesh.
Timothy Gonsalves Telecom networks are highly technical and public review is usually cursory. Recommendations primarily come from the industry. In broadband the metrics traditionally come from the industry and there’s a mismatch with the subscribers expectations. Regulators specify last mile access speed, the provider is concerned with the access node, but the subscriber is concerned with the speed of accessing the content server. Under the customer driven approach we’ve defined test metrics, and tested them against three different servers, repeated at different times of day, and different days.
Adam Smith said that the invisible hand rules the market. That may be true in a world of perfect competition but it doesn’t hold in the world we live in. Markets arise spontaneously from the institutional framework. There are three main transitions that happen when markets change or develop; Feudal to industrial, communist to post-communist, emerging to developed. Capacity must be built through creating efficient institutions.
Chair, Sherille Ismail: I’m with the FCC and here but here in a personal capacity, not representing the FCC. I’d like to start by quoting Adam Smith, who made the argument that there’s an invisible hand that rules markets.I don’t believe that’s true of the world we live in. It’s not enough to destroy what was before, it’s important to create something to new. Even if you take someone like Margaret Thatcher, a foremost champion of the free market, when she brought forth reforms she actually created 12 regulatory agencies.
This features excerpts from presentations by Rajat Kathuria, Per Hemlersen, and audience question. You can read more by following the live blog posts from that time. Rajat Kathuria On Indonesia Per Helmersen On Speaking To Decision Makers How can researchers speak to the corporate world? Question From Bill Melody On Prediction
In India 5% of gross revenue went into an (undisbursed) fund. This was for reaching the rural poor, but they were already being effectively reached by mobile. LIRNEasia found that many consumers were planning on buying a mobile for their rural connection. LIRNEasia made multiple, evidence-based policy interventions ranging from papers, presentations, Op-Ed articles, etc to rationalize this Universal Service Fund issue. Post policy change, we measured perception measures.
The presentation on mobile price benchmarking is available for download here. (PowerPoint). There is a considerable amount of data in the presentation and it may be more conducive to download on your personal laptop. The other presentations from this session are also available Alison Gillwald, RIA, South Africa – Gillwald LIRNEasia@5 2009 Helani Galpaya, LIRNEasia – Galpaya_MeasuringSectorPerformance