Computerworld: Seattle center develops tech for poor people
Village Phone is the project that turns primarily poor women in developing countries into entrepreneurs by offering them micro-loans to buy a cell phone that they let other villagers use for a fee.
Now that there are more than 220,000 Village Phone operators in Bangladesh and more in Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon and Indonesia, we know the poor have people to call, said Peter Bladin, founding director of the Grameen Technology Center and executive vice president for programs and regions at the Grameen Foundation.
Bladin helped prove that the Village Phone idea would work outside of Bangladesh, where Yunus founded the bank that gave the loans and was part owner in the mobile-phone company. Bladin heads the little-known Seattle-based Grameen Technology Center, an arm of the Grameen Foundation, which is the U.S. organization that raises money to support micro-finance around the world. …
… It turns out that some of the first calls made by customers of the original Village Phone operators were by farmers to relatives in market towns, asking them how much a product was selling for. Such farmers often lack the means to transport their crops to the market so they rely on middlemen, who buy the products from the farmers and deliver them, Bladin said. But if the farmer knows the price the product is going for at the market, he can often convince the middlemen to pay a fair price.
"When the opportunity cost is high, people are willing to use this technology," Bladin said. While the cost of that phone call might seem expensive relative to the user's income, if the call will result in more income, the user will pay for it. …
… "The next step is, what if you use the phones that are already out there to make information searchable through text? What if you digitized information or made it available to people, how would people use that to empower themselves?" he said. …
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