After Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning founder of Grameen Bank, began making microloans to women in poor countries so that they could buy revenue-producing assets like cows and goats, he was approached by a Bangladeshi expat living in the U.S. named Iqbal Quadir. Quadir posed a simple question to Yunus — If a woman can invest in a cow, why can’t she invest in a phone? — that led to the 1996 creation of Grameen Phone Ltd. and has since started the careers of more than 250,000 “phone ladies” in Bangladesh, which is considered one of the world’s poorest countries. Women use microcredit to buy specially designed cellphone kits costing about $150, each equipped with a long-lasting battery. They then set up shop as their village phone operator, charging a small commission for people to make and receive calls.

The endeavor has not only revolutionized communications in Bangladesh but also has proved to be wildly profitable: Grameen Phone is now Bangladesh’s largest telecom provider, with annual revenues of about $1 billion. Similar village-phone programs have sprung up in Rwanda, Uganda, Cameroon and Indonesia, among other places. “Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources,” says Quadir, who is now the director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at M.I.T. “One resource is time, another is opportunity. Let’s say you can walk over to five people who live in your immediate vicinity, that’s one thing. But if you’re connected to one million people, your possibilities are endless.”

It is definitely worth a read. Simple technology used by people for the applications that make sense to them – and everyone gains.

So, which is undeveloped country and where does the innovation originate from in this case? The question is, do the US companies involved know about the successful Grameen Phone operation and their joint venture with Telenor? Their shareholders should be asking this question and soon. For the reason why, read the post.

Mobile Gram in Bangladesh [Prev: Money... and cell-phones]

Dear FN,

Transfering small money through cell phone has already been an established method in Bangladesh. Specially northern part of the country. In the northern part, the daily labour are using this method to transfer their money from working place to their home. This method, popularly known as “Mobile Gram” is very helpful for them.

In the northeren part of the Bangladesh, the number of daily labour are huge and they usually moves to central part of the country for work. Before going different district and or other part of the district they usually make a deal with a local cell phone  operator. These operators are cell company’s authorize dealer who sale  talk time on behalf of the mobile operator. All the operator has this charging facility. The most pouplar one is Grameen Phone’s FlexiLoad. In the case, where such operator are not available, the person who wants to mobile gram make a deal with other cell phobe guy who has already an arrangement with a Flexiloader.

At the end of a day, the labour move to the cell operator in his working place  and charge an amount to  the cell number of his area’s  flexiLoader (or any other). Then he make a call to the receipient and inform him that he is the person who just charge 100/- taka (for example) talk-time to recipients cell. The guy, who has been charged has already received a sms from the cell company initimating the charge of talk time. Then the labour request the guy to provide cash to his benificiary (Usually his family member) the amount after deducting his service charge. The service charge depends on the amount transfer and ranges from 5-10 taka for each transaction.

Some of the parents now a days transfer money to his son/daughter who is studying in the university/college in other city. The same technique  is used. Howver, for this purpose there are another method where cell phone is used as identification tool.

The parents  (or the transmitter)  rush to a centre (Usually  the courier service, who also provdide money transfer)  and deposit money for his son (the recipient).  and give them son’s mobile number. Then he informed his son to collect the money from the courier company’s office in his town. The courier compnay, in the destination district, wait for the recipient. The recipient, while in the office, has to prove that he is the holder of the cell which number is provided in the recipient’s details.

There are some other application too. Ask me if you wants to hear more on it.

Regards

Munir Hasan
BdOSN

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