Technology Salon

On the occasion of the 2010 mHealth Summit, please join the United Nations Foundation, the Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, and the mHealth Alliance for a luncheon discussion of the forthcoming report: Health Information as Health Care: The Role of Mobile in Unlocking Health Data This report examines the ecosystem of patient-related health information, tracing data…

What do you think is the single most important issue at the intersection fo technology and development? Recently, the twin issues of sustainability and scale have come to the forefront in many conversations, with both peaking in October in several forums:

Is it only about money?

• Sustainability: This month’s Educational Technology Debate is focusing on ICT4E sustainability and at an IADB meeting, virtually everything that USAID does was suggested to be unsustainable.
• Scale: I was recently reminded that while there is an incredibly vibrant mobile phone industry, after 15 years of PDA and mobile phone pilots there are few, if any, sustained mobile technology development projects that are more than 5 years old, continued after funding ended, and scaled beyond pilots.

But what do we mean by “sustainability” and “scale” in ICT4D?

Now here’s the real issue. What might be our shared definition of both “sustainability” and “scale” with information and communication technology programs in international development?