FT.com / Home UK / UK - ‘Mobiles can close the digital divide’
By Alan Cane
Published: March 19 2008 02:00
Dawn Haig-Thomas, director of the GSM Association Development Fund, betrays an uncharacteristic impatience with an uncomprehending public.
“It amazes me that people still don’t understand the impact of mobile technologies on the developing world. I am still asked at dinner parties: ‘Why do Africans need mobile phones?’. This is an area where we need good education and public relations,” she says.
She has been head of the London-based organisation since a few months after its creation in October 2005: “It was just me for the first four months.”
It had about $1m in the kitty and a handful of projects on the go. Now it has an annual budget of €2.5m and has completed 19 projects in 11 countries in Africa and Asia, many of them with the potential to be deployed in developing areas elsewhere.
The Development Fund is the mobile phone industry’s principal contribution to closing the “digital divide”, the gap between technologically advanced countries and developing nations.
“The Fund looks specifically at how mobile phones can be used in social, economic and environmental development,” she says. “We are about action, about running pilot projects that hopefully will lead to commercial scale-ups. We are about catalysing markets and incubating ideas.”
The need for such an organisation is clear. The importance of mobile phones and the internet to growth in developing countries was underlined only last month by a United Nations report confirming that technology drives innovation and helps create financial structures that encourage entrepreneurship.
And Ms Haig-Thomas makes it clear that her organisation is neither a charity nor a traditional example of corporate social responsibility - although she accepts the mobile phone industry has a social responsibility to help bridge the digital divide.
“A key principle of the Development Fund is that doing good is good business. We believe there is a sweet spot where initiatives are good for both profit and social welfare and that is the space we play in,” she says.
A graduate in politics and history from Manchester University, Ms Haig-Thomas is by no means a traditional technologist. She says her greatest satisfaction comes from seeing people use technology for the first time and realising how it could enrich their lives: a mother using a web camera to keep contact with her children working many miles away; an individual realising he or she does not have to travel expensively into town to fill in a form or apply for a job.
After studying international business at Manchester Business School, she worked for the consultancy Accenture for nine years, where she honed her digital skills, programming in C++ and configuring systems.
She explains: “While I would say I’m not a technologist, other people would say I am because of that background. I have a grasp of IT and IT systems and how they can be used.
“Once you have that background, you understand the limits and the breadth of technology and you are not scared of it.”
During her time with Accenture, she worked on projects for companies in the retail, travel and transportation sectors before being attracted to the idea of working for Accenture development partnerships, a non-profit arm of the company.
Consultants take a 50 per cent cut in salary to transfer into the group and are assigned an overseas posting with a charity or development agency.
Ms Haig-Thomas was sent to India to work with Sewa (self-employed women’s association), a non-governmental organisation, examining how women producers in the state of Gujarat could sell their goods for higher prices via the internet.
She lived in the state capital, Ahmedabad, for five months and found it an inspiring experience. “This really seized my imagination,” she says. “It was 2003 and they had had drought, earthquakes, cyclones and riots. It was fascinating to see how people can sustain themselves using technology despite environmental or political catastrophes.”
But a 50 per cent cut in salary? “Interesting work is my main driver; I’m not incentivised by money,” she says. “The output of the project was the establishment of a company in Mumbai that is now trading with the Scandinavian retailer Ikea and the UK chain Marks and Spencer. We got $7m funding from the Indian government, so it was very successful.”
Returning to London, she again worked for Accenture before the Development Fund job came up. How did she approach the challenge of leading such an organisation?
“This wasn’t another project, this was a legal entity in its own right, so we had to look at everything right down to the strategy, where we were today and where we wanted to be after one year and after five years.
“There is huge scope in mobile, so we did an analysis of where we believed we could add the most value. There was a lot of relationship-building with mobile operators and vendors. I went to visit the World Bank and the UN and did a lot of networking.”
The Fund was financed in the first place by the US group Motorola, which was persuaded to hand over some of the profits from its success in winning the contract to develop a $30 handset for the developing world. The GSM provides running costs and Ms Haig-Thomas reports directly to Rob Conway, the chief executive.
The GSM’s objective in establishing the Fund, of course, is to catalyse markets that will ultimately benefit its members.
She points to the success of community information centres in Bangladesh as an example of the Fund in action.
It is based on the example of Grameenphone’s “village phone” project, where a local entrepreneur sets up a business around a single phone in a village where the inhabitants are too poor to own their own.
The Fund, working with Grameenphone, established bases in remote villages where people can pay small sums for access to the internet, the data being carried the last mile wirelessly.
Sixteen bases were established as a trial; within four months it had proved so successful that it has now been scaled up to 560 bases and the example has been replicated in Pakistan and South Africa.
A key concern for the Fund, however, is power - or the lack of it. Without electricity it is impossible to run base stations or charge handsets, so the Fund has been experimenting with wind and solar power and biofuels.
In Namibia, for example, an experiment in conjunction with Motorola involving wind and solar energy produced so much power that ways of feeding the excess back to the village are being sought.
“It is a hot, hot area,” Ms Haig-Thomas says. “The one area in which I get the most inquiries from operators globally is alternative energy.
“It’s the problem everybody is facing. There are 3bn people connected to the networks; how do we get to the next 3bn?”
Solar cells, wind turbines and fermentation are somewhat removed from the GSMA’s usual interests in networking protocols and bit rates.
They are just three more technologies Ms Haig-Thomas will have to master in her campaign to show why Africans need mobile phones.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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