| Bridging the Digital Divide
By Lavina Melwani
Imagine a swamp as a theme park.
Can
the billions of poor people across the globe be transformed
from a problem to a viable consumer market? What are
a group of hi-tech entrepreneurs doing in the villages
and urban ghettos of the third world and what do smart
cards, digital technology and telecommunications have
to do with poverty?
For the answer to these questions, turn to Digital Partners
Institute (www.digitalpartners.org), a nonprofit organization
based in Seattle, Wash., with chapters in New York,
Silicon Valley, and New Delhi, India. It is the brainchild
of IT entrepreneurs who have got together with social
activists, foundations and corporations to use digital
economy to empower the poor.
The event that launched the organization’s program strategies
was a conference in November 1999, in partnership with
Seattle’s Technology Alliance, hosted by Bill Gates,
Sr. The event brought together executives of top Internet
companies like Microsoft, GTE, RealNetworks and WorldTel,
along with major international foundations such as Bill
& Melinda Gates, Rockefeller, and W.K. Kellogg and
institutions like the UN, World Bank and WTO to brainstorm
on alleviating poverty through hi-tech solutions.
The Executive Director of Digital Partners Global is
Akhtar Badshah, previously a Senior Vice President for
Strategic Planning for Nonprofits and Government Agencies
at Nimbal, an Internet strategy firm. He currently also
serves as an affiliate professor at the College of Architecture
and Urban Planning, University of Washington and is
a member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). Steven Rockefeller,
who is director of Grameen Foundation, is on the international
advisory committee of Digital Partners and is also the
chairman of the New York chapter.
Digital Partners has both mainstream Americans and Indian
Americans at the helm, ranging from the co-founders
Craig Smith and Justin Thumler, who are the research
director and managing director respectively to the senior
strategist Samir Bodas, a former Microsoft executive
who has also been a senior vice president of business
development at Imandi.
The board of directors, which is made up of high powered
academics and CEO’s both in the US and India, includes
Vijay Vashee, the General Manager at Microsoft and the
Chairman of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE)- Seattle Chapter,
and Naina Lal Kidwai, the Vice Chairman, JM Morgan Stanley,
India. Indeed, a wealth of movers and shakers has been
gathered on the international advisory board, the South
Asian, Mexico/Latin America boards and also on the leadership
forum.
The organization had its first New York
event at the Rockefeller Estate in 2000. Just last month
the New York chapter held its second gathering to get
people involved with the work in India, China, Latin
America and Africa. Ishwari Singh, President of Digital
Partners’ New York Chapter, is the Chief Strategist
for Trade.com and is a founding Board Member of The
Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) New York Chapter.
This event was held at the home of Vikram Gandhi, managing
director of Morgan Stanley, and his wife Meera, who
is on the board of Digital Partners. Interestingly enough,
their Manhattan townhouse was formerly the home of Eleanor
Roosevelt - and she certainly would have been delighted
by the discourse that pitted innovative solutions against
the problems of poverty. The audience that evening included
Ambassador Kamalesh Sharma, Steven and Kimberly Rockefeller,
and a room full of New York movers and shakers, and
the speaker was Prof. C.K. Prahalad, Harvey C. Fruehauf
Professor of Business Administration at the University
of Michigan, Graduate School of Business Administration.
Prahalad articulated many of these ideas in his thought
provoking talk. “How do you see a swamp and imagine
a theme park?” he asked the New Yorkers who had gathered
together that evening. “Poverty is obvious and opportunity
is not and we have to see an opportunity when all we
can see visibly is poverty.” He pointed out some strong
paradoxes: The poorest people in the world live in the
highest cost economies. Everything costs the poor more,
whether it is a loan or water trucked into the slums
- which is a hundred times more expensive than the water
supplied to the rich.
As Prahalad explained, the poor get no respect but they
represent a large dormant purchasing power: for instance,
in the villages of Bangladesh where the per capita income
is just $200 per year, the take from just one of the
village telephone stands is over $70 per week, on average.
Contrary to popular belief, even distribution access
to the poor is highly accessible since they are concentrated
so tightly together. In Rio, for instance, the concentration
of people is 35,000 people per sq. kilometer. Says Prahalad,
“There is no other market like that in the world. With
an average earning power of $500 per annum, 2 million
people add up to $1 billion of opportunity in six square
kilometers.”
It is this forgotten market that Digital Partners wants
to serve, by harnessing digital technology to enfranchise
the poor who are shut out of an information-driven world
economy. It has created a new venture capital fund model,
a “social venture fund,” to invest in and incubate new
initiatives designed by IT and social entrepreneurs
to solve the problems of poverty.
Recently the organization gave out the Most Promising
Social Enterprise (MPSE) Awards - 2002. An international
committee of 11 high-tech and social entrepreneurs in
collaboration with the Indo-US Knowledge Trade Initiative
of the US-India Business Council, selected the ten Most
Promising Social Enterprises in Africa, Latin America,
and India.
These award winners are working with teams of IT professionals
from Digital Partners’ Brain Trust and graduate students
from MIT’s Media Lab and Sloan School, the University
of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs and the
Business School, The American Graduate School of International
Management (Thunderbird), the University of California
San Diego’s Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation,
and Northwest University’s Kellogg School of Management.
The estimated cash value of the assistance provided
through the laboratory is valued at more than $250,000.
The award winners include SEWA (Self Employed Women’s
Association) for designing customized software for village-based
micro enterprises, opening access to global markets,
and providing computer training for rural women and
their children in India; n-Logue Communications for
using wireless technology to provide low-cost voice
and internet access to the remote villages of India;
Katha Information and eCommerce School for using IT
to provide quality education in the slums of India;
Drishtee provides e-governance to rural India.
Other award winners are Mitra Mandal for creating a
model “e-cooperative” designed to expand computer-based
learning/earning opportunities particularly for women,
children, and seniors; Indian Society of Agribusiness
Professionals which uses IT to enhance rural farm incomes
in India through the establishment of an Agri-knowledge
network and Agri-clinics; The Indian National Trust
for the Welfare of Tribals is using IT to support the
development of medicinal plant resources as sustainable
cash crops for farmers in India.
All these organizations are using technology to change
the lives of the poor. In fact in Hyderabad there is
experimentation with smart card technology, which does
not exist even in the U.S. Digital Partners’ South Asia
Initiative is the first in a global effort that is being
adapted to Africa, China, and Latin America.
Digital Partners and the World Affairs Council-Seattle
are also collaborating to launch the Global Classmates
Initiative to both bring technology to classrooms in
developing countries, linking schools in the U.S. with
sch-ools in developing countries. Everyone talks of
a brain drain, but this organization has activated a
brain trust of movers and shakers working together to
find creative technology-driven solutions to poverty.
This new thinking, which is being adopted in many business
schools, asserts that the poor are not a problem and
with innovative IT solutions can be a viable part of
global markets.
As Prahalad observed, “We have to rethink our highly
socialized assumptions about how the world works. We
should not be talking about a digital divide but about
digital dividend, for the moment you talk about digital
divide, you start focusing on what can’t be done. Dividend
forces us to think about what can be done and how we
can do it.”
Now the challenge is to raise funds for the many new
projects that Digital Partners is supporting in the
developing world, and the organization is targeting
entrepreneurs in hi-tech and financial industries. Says
Badshah, “We believe that they are cut from the same
cloth as the social entrepreneurs who work with the
poor, because they both have a similar kind of education,
and thereby there is a nice relationship between the
two and they speak and understand the same language.”
The organizations is launching a membership drive to
get New Yorkers involved and a big fundraising initiative
is targeted for January to raise money to support projects
in India, for which a business plan is being developed.
“We are one planet,” says Meera Gandhi. “And I hope
by our efforts the process of global unity to bridge
the digital divide will continue.”
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