Today I delivered the keynote at well attended workshop on how the Telecom Sector could contribute to Digital Bangladesh. It was organized by the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute. Attendees included the Ministers of Post and Telecom, ICT and Information. The Chair of BTRC and the Secretary of the Ministry of ICT, a key actor in Bangladesh’s e gov activities, spoke. The government envisions a Digital Bangladesh that makes the full potential of the Internet available to its people, but appears unclear about how they will be connected.
There has been a lot of press on an Intel funded research report on ICTs and gender. Before we get too excited, it may be worth looking at their data collection. 1800 face to face interview and 400 telephone interview for a ‘global report’ which covers three countries. The rest all based on World Bank/ITU data… very self-congratulatory panel of State Department, UN and ITU broadband commission… no acknowledgement of problems of supply side data or of the existing demand side data in the global south. .
Several Canadian and Sri Lankan organizations held a workshop in Peradeniya on Oct. 15 to provide an introduction to and basic training in the use of free and open source software (FOSS) to enable agricultural community groups and individuals to implement and use easily-accessible tools for communication, information collection, knowledge sharing, data visualization, and interactive mapping. Participants were introduced to four Free and Open Source software platforms that are in wide use around the world: FrontlineSMS and FrontlineSMS:Radio for text messaging, Freedom Fone for creating small scale interactive voice response systems with telephones, and Ushahidi for creating and curating interactive maps with geo located reports from mobile devices (i.e., crowdmapping).
Right now disaster awareness is high. A cyclone was heading toward Sri Lanka’s Northeast Coast but has apparently veered off toward the Indian East Coast. Flooding has started in different parts of the country, trees are falling, transport has been affected. Of course, people are very aware of Hurricane Sandy and the US East Coast because of the power of international media. I found myself also monitoring Hawai’i a few days ago, because they were expecting a tsunami there (it came, but at insignificant wave heights).
Increasingly, we are finding that it is impossible to talk about ICTs, without also talking about electricity. Interesting new development on that front is reported by NYT. EBay plans to use about six million watts of power generated on-site by fuel cells, which are a substantially cleaner and more efficient source of energy than coal, in its new data center in South Jordan, Utah. The company also operates PayPal, the online payment service, out of the South Jordan site. Bloom Energy, a private company in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Claude S. Fischer wrote one of the most important books on teleuse, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, University of California Press. (1992). I’ve owned the book for years; recommended it to many. He knows what he’s talking about.
The findings of the potato study conducted in Bangladesh under LIRNEasia’s 2010-2012 research cycle were shared with stakeholders in Dhaka on 10 April 2012. The dissemination workshop was attended by high level representatives from the government agencies such as Bangladeshi Agriculture Research Institute, Agriculture Information Service (AIS) of Ministry of Agriculture, Bangladesh, large scale exporters, processors and cold storage providers from the private sector. The stakeholders engaged in a productive exchange after the study findings were presented. The issues discussed included the availability and utilisation of cold storage, the quality of the potato seeds available in Bangladesh and suitability of some of the potato varieties grown for processing and exporting. The discussion of cold storage brought about further issues such as the under-utilisation (40%) of the cold storage available in some storage spaces, in spite of excessive demand in others.
LIRNEasia‘s agricultural supply chain work from our current 2010-2012 research cycle was shared with the media at a dissemination event in Bangkok, Thailand. The event was intended to highlight some of the findings from the meta-study of ICT interventions in Thailand conducted for LIRNEasia by Deunden Nikomborirak. Presentations by the speakers are included below. Rohan Samarajiva, PhD., Chair & CEO, LIRNEasia Innovation for inclusive & efficient agricultural supply chains Nipon Poapongsakorn, PhD, President, Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI) Supply Chain Management in Thailand Deunden Nikomborirak, PhD, TDRI Towards a Knowledge-based Economy: Case studies of the use of ICTs in enhancing agricultural value chains in Thailand Nilusha Kapugama, LIRNEasia Lessons from the supply chain studies in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka Sriganesh Lokanathan, LIRNEasia Overcoming the Smallholder Quality Penalty
ICT infrastructure in the former conflict areas in the North and East of Sri Lanka is not far behind the rest of the country. One can get a mobile signal almost everywhere; 3G is available in parts of the Northern and Eastern province and even ADSL in Jaffna. But access differs. The latest 2009/10 household income and expenditure survey revealed that household access to basic amenities, including communication (TV, radio, phone) in these two provinces was the lowest in the country. Yet our Teleuse@BOP4 survey reveals that amongst the poor, usage is not very different.
We heard, back in 2005, that the Pakistan Telecom Authority and the Nigerian Communication Commission had calculated how much direct and indirect employment had been created by the telecom industries. Further inquiries revealed that the methods used were suspect and that the studies would not float under rigorous review. The difficulties are exemplified by the prepaid card value chain, where a whole series of resellers are involved in selling value and almost none are engaged solely with mobile. Now the NYT reports an attempt by Apple to quantify its job creation within the US. Apple has made its first attempt to quantify how many American jobs can be credited to the sale of its iPads and other products, a group that includes the Apple engineers who design the devices and the drivers who deliver them — even the people who build the trucks that get them there.
At LIRNEasia, we’ve been getting more and more interested in cities, for various reasons. Now it looks like Ericsson has given us an interesting new way of thinking about cities and ICTs: a new Index. Assessing the effects and benefits of ICT maturity within a city framework brings several opportunities. Firstly, cities represent a more universally comparable context than the more commonly used nation- based frameworks. Comparing London and Shanghai makes more sense than comparing the UK and China.
Our agri value chain work starts from the agriculture side and hopes to end up with solutions that include ICTs is some form. This is not that easy. This fascinating article about how venture capital is focusing on ICT applications gives some excellent ideas. His firm has invested in RelayRides and other start-ups that stretch the definition of clean tech investing. They include the Climate Corporation, for extreme weather insurance; Clean Power Finance, which runs an online marketplace for financing residential solar panels; and Transphorm, which makes tools that reduce power loss when electricity is converted in data centers or industrial motors.
It’s always a challenge to decipher the special language of evaluation reports, but this para in the recent evaluation report on the ICT activities of the World Bank does seem like an indictment of universal service programs. 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.
We haven’t written much about energy here, but increasingly one cannot discuss development or even ICTs without factoring in energy availability and costs. Global energy demand will increase 53 percent from 2008 through 2035, with China and India accounting for half of the growth, the United States Department of Energy said on Monday. China and India will consume 31 percent of the world’s energy by 2035, up from 21 percent in 2008, the department’s International Energy Outlook projected. In 2035, Chinese energy demand will exceed that of the United States by 68 percent, it said. Report.
This is not exactly BOP applications, but the spirit is the same. In our current research on how ICTs can help bridge information and knowledge gaps in agricultural value chains, we would like to come up with practical suggestions through which suppliers can make their customers happier and both can improve their financial condition, and who knows, even become happier human beings (I have been spending time in Bhutan, as you can see). The excerpt comes from a longer story. “It’s not true anymore that only the Procter & Gambles of the world can afford to do this,” he said. “You don’t have to run a wave of $100,000 focus groups across the country to learn things anymore.
Some of the actionable research done by LIRNEasia, were highlighted at an event organized by the Bhutan Infocomm and Media Authority (BICMA), in Thimphu on 9 May 2011. One of the areas of research presented was Agriculture. According to the World Bank, nearly half the labour force in Bhutan is engaged in Agriculture, however as in most South Asia countries, the sector’s contribution to GDP is less than proportional. LIRNEasia’s research on agriculture has highlighted the importance of access to accurate, timely and actionable information improved the efficiency of the agriculture value chains. The presentation looked at the services available for delivering information to farmers in South Asia.