Technology Salon

We looked at the role of mobiles in youth financial inclusion at our March 11th Technology Salon in New York City. Tim Nourse, Making Cents; Peter Goldstein, Intermedia; and Jamie Zimmerman, Bankable Frontier Associates; joined as lead discussants. Though mobile financial services are seen by many as inevitable, some Salon participants felt that, like in…

According to the latest GSMA statistics, nearly 50% of people own a mobile phone in the developing world and almost 70% have access to mobile phones. With mobile access increasing daily, opportunities to use mobiles in development initiatives continue to grow and expand. The area of Mobiles for Development (M4D) has attracted investment from all…

Ten years ago, leveraging information and communication technology for development was all about getting people an email address. Today, there is an explosion in access to ICT thanks to mobile technologies – the CEO of Ericsson recently predicted, 92% of the world’s inhabitants will live in an area with mobile reception coverage by 2018 (see…

At the recent Technology Salon on African-Led Mobile Innovation in Congo Brazzaville, we welcomed Verone Mankou, the head of VMK, a company in Congo Brazzaville that designs and produces the Way-C Tablet and the Elikia smart phone. The event was graciously hosted by ThoughtWorks, and Verone’s US trip was organized by Senam Beheton of EtriLabs.

At the first Technology Salon in London, we had a very thoughtful discussion on the implications of gender in using mobile technologies to stimulate social and economic development.

The very first Tech Salon to take place in London on Wednesday 20 March occurred just three days after the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced that connecting women to ICTs would become a focal point of the post-2015 development agenda.

The March NYC Technology Salon offered an opportunity to discuss how mobile technology can transform workforce development and to hear how mobile is improving the reach and impact of existing initiatives working with girls and young women.

At the recent Technology Salon on “How Can We Get Beyond Access and Really Empower Women and Girls with Mobiles?” we had a room full of thought leaders and decision makers in the gender and mobiles space debating how women and girls can be truly empowered through mobile technology.

Let us be honest with ourselves. Most of the shiny, flashy new technology is not designed for the developing world we care about. Technology is designed for the rich Hardware designers in rich countries are turning out super light laptops and tablets of glass to impress their rich peers. Software developers are creating apps for…

You might think that the topic of collecting data via mobile devices would be a rather dry discussion of data management and statistical methodology. You would be very, very wrong. The Technology Salon all but came to blows as we wrestled with privacy issues, total costs of ownership, and other elephants in the room. When…

Open your wallet right now. Most likely, you have a debit card, a credit card, a health insurance card, and access to the massive financial infrastructure that these three cards represent. The ability to store, save, use, and borrow money anywhere in almost limitless fashion, without worry about amount, theft, or even making change. Add…

Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA are all the rage in International development these days, but what do they really mean for the national development of countries we attempt to help? Menekse Gencer of mPay Connect will lead us in a discussion of mobile financial services, the full gamut of finance that is now…

Access to information has been part of the development discussion since the Internet arrived. Previously, many saw community telecenters as the way to bring technology to the developing world. Yet telecenters are not sustainable without donor funding and the concept of public access hasn’t kept pace with advancing technology.

I am Charles Kenny, and I spent part of yesterday at a United Nations Foundation meeting with Dr Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID.

There was a lot of discussion of development applications using mobile phones (m-development) and how to do them better – things like interoperability and collecting models in an ‘m-app marketplace.’ And there was the usual back-and-forth between those who wanted to see more transformative projects where IT reformed whole agencies and ministries and those who thought that way madness (or at least obscene overruns) lay.

But I thought the most interesting discussion was around learning from experience -particularly in an area where technology is evolving rapidly, so a robust evaluation may not be completed before the project itself looks as dated as an integrated rural development scheme or a structural adjustment loan. The randomized trial result suggesting limited evidence of educational spillovers from a distribution program of Nintendo 64’s might not carry too much weight for those wanting to hand out Wiis as part of a youth fitness program.

Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting, put forth a startling proposition in a previous Technology Salon. She described a new ICT4D paradigm: Women + Mobile Phones + mServices = Economic Development. She believes that combining the traditional role of women in the family and the power of services delivered through the mobile phone (mServices)…

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…

As part of this month’s Educational Technology Debate on mEducation initiatives, the Technology Salon will be looking at ways to apply mobile phones in education, and scale them across organizations with an mEducation Alliance.