TED India Conference: “The Future Beckons”

The inspirational, energy-filled, and fun TED conference is heading to India this year.  From November 4-7, 2009, TEDIndia will take place in Mysore and bring together speakers and delegates that are reinventing India.  The huge success of TED makes its arrival in India even more exciting.  At TC-I, we covered a few TED talks here, here, and here.

A little background on the TED conference:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Attendees have called it “the ultimate brain spa” and “a four-day journey into the future.” The diverse audience — CEOs, scientists, creatives, and philanthropists — is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, Jane Goodall, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono.

The India conference will answer questions like:

• Which local innovations are destined for global impact?
• Who are the young thinkers and doers capable of shaping the future?
• Can there be economic advancement without environmental destruction?
• Can a pluralistic democracy survive in the face of rising fundamentalism?
• Can we make money and be good? Really?
• What should we learn – or fear? — from China’s investment in Africa?
• Do we have enough water for everyone?
• How do we keep our youth challenged and our aged healthy?
• How can anti-poverty solutions be brought to scale?
• Is there wisdom to be found in traditional medicine?
• Which other ancient traditions can illuminate modern life?

This will be an event that any social innovator in India will want to attend – register to apply here.

Round 2 with CGAP’s Gautam Ivatury

The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers tag.

This week, Vinay sat down (over the phone) with Gautam Ivatury of the global microfinance center CGAP, which works to expand poor people’s access to financial services. Such services include but are not limited to microcredit and branchless banking. This interview is a follow up to one conducted on May 4, 2008, which you can read here.

Vinay Ganti: Could you please review yourself on the following topics, which we discussed in our last conversation?

• Reaching beyond MFIs:

Gautam Ivatury: This still continues to be a major focus of CGAP’s mission. Across all of CGAP’s work we continue to look for ways to partner with a range of institutions and providers, including but not limited to MFIs, to be able to massively expand financial services for poor people.

• Branchless Banking (see on right hand side of page)

GI: With regard to branchless banking, we set out to accomplish a number of goals. Overall we have been happy with the results of CGAP’s work in this area over the last six months, despite the fact that it has taken longer than expected for our project partners (in countries like Pakistan, Kenya, Mongolia, South Africa and elsewhere) to roll-out the branchless banking channels we helped design and finance.

Since our last talk, CGAP has expanded its policy and regulatory diagnostic work in branchless banking. New markets analyzed have included Colombia, Argentina and Indonesia, and we’ve continued to maintain close dialogue with the Reserve Bank of India and regulators elsewhere.

Also, the actual awareness of mobile banking in the field, i.e. what is and how it can work, has increased dramatically in the past. Last May we co-organized the first major annual event on “Mobile Money” for the unbanked in Cairo with the GSM Association (the industry body for the world’s 700+ mobile operators), IFC and DFID. That event got more than 500 paid attendees, most from private industry. And this week at the GSM World Congress in Barcelona, GSMA and other private sector players will announce additional activities in the space. DFID announced its new FAST program to encourage branchless banking this week. Initiatives like these are critical to get widespread adoption of the concept and to achieve scale. Moreover, major consulting and research outfits like Aite, Monitor and McKinsey have started research and published reports on the topic.

At the same time, our seven branchless banking projects have been slower to launch than we all expected two years ago. There have been some notable achievements — our Philippines partner has entered three new rural provinces and signed up about 80,000 new mobile banking clients, and Telenor bought 51 percent of Tameer Bank (our partner in Pakistan) to jumpstart its mobile banking initiatives. But in general the implementation of mobile / branchless banking has been slower than anticipated.

VG: Why do you think this is?

Aiming for 100 Million

Many people dream, but some people dream big.  Dr. Ashok Khosla is one of those that dream big – but also puts the dream into action.  As founder of Development Alternatives, Khosla plans to bring wide-scale employment to India’s rural areas.  IndiaWest reports:

“Poor people are seeing more products, but have little access to them. The poor do not have purchasing power,” said Khosla, the 2002 winner of the United Nations’ Sasakawa Environmental Prize, and the Schwab Foundation’s outstanding social entrepreneur award in 2004.

The Technology and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA), a partner of Development Alternatives, is a social enterprise focusing on standardizing “technology packages, which offer training, technical support, financing and marketing assistance to small enterprises.”  TARA’s products range from paper to textiles to cyber-kiosks.  Khosla aims to create 100 million jobs by 2018 through these micro-factories – no easy feat, considering that the organization claims to have created 3 million jobs in the last 15 years.

More importantly, the initiatives are created in a way that the villagers benefit above all.

In a typical model, the village will form a cooperative to purchase the equipment needed for the project, and determine wages for the workers, typically slightly above the area’s minimum wage. Development Alternatives’ social enterprise arm, Technology and Action for Rural Advancement, markets the products created by the villagers.

Tracking TARA’s progress in the next decade will be interesting and may provide further evidence of the impact of social enterprises and employment generating activities.

Tech Winners Starting Small, Scaling Up

Remember the Tech Museum Awards? The award “honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.” The 25 winners were announced yesterday, with two innovators from India. MercuryNews.com covered the ceremony in San Jose, California and met with the winners, including DESI Power and Digital StudyHall.

First, DESI Power is based in Bangalore and utilizes affordable and reliable electricity:

Hari Sharan employs 19th-century biomass gasification technology to bring electricity to rural Indian villages. His company, DESI Power, converts vegetation — such as rice hulls and corn husks — into energy. Not only does that provide power to poor communities, it also creates opportunities for micro-enterprises that keep residents from migrating to the slums of big cities.

TC-I covered another unique way of converting vegetation to energy via rice husks. There is tremendous potential to scale up with these plants, and DESI Power is already operating four plants and increasing to twenty next year.

Another creative use of technology aims to strengthen education. MercuryNews reports on Digital StudyHall, which is actually a research project out of a US university.

2008 Manthan Award Winners – ICT and Development

Prerna announced the acceptance of nominations for the 2008 Manthan Awards back in March, and Livemint.com now provides highlights of the innovative winners. The full list of winners can be found here.

On first glance, I was amazed by the sheer number of categories (there are 13) and the diversity of tech products out there. Here are a few personal favorites, but I encourage you to look through the list to get the full view:

• Wall newspaper – broadcast sheet pasted on the walls of milk cooperatives and Panchayat buildings in 40,000 villages, targeting the rural and low literate
• Safal National Exchange of India Limited (SNX) – pursuing a One India One Market vision, creating an opportunity for small farmers to gain access to national markets through negotiating prices in a transparent way that eliminates as many intermediaries as possible
• Lipikaar – an e-localization method that allows typing in 16 different languages using a normal keyboard, making it extremely user-friendly for non-English speakers
• Learn with Fun – making maths an enjoyable subject through satelitte communications in a vernacular language, to reach out to rural areas where drop out rates are high

There are seemingly endless ways to marry technology and development, and these winners provide just a taste of the current landscape.

[TC-I Call to Action]: NASSCOM Foundation Social Innovation Honours

NASSCOM Foundation, the CSR branch of NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), is launching a Social Innovation Honours award.

The annual Honours aim to showcase projects that demonstrate best practices through exemplary use of ICT in areas of social transformation. This honour is a celebration of innovations that bring about social change and development through the application of cutting-edge technology.

There are categories for non-profit, for-profit, and government organizations in India to enter their projects for consideration. If you have a project that uses cutting edge technology to affect education, health, employment, or the environment, this may be a great opportunity to share your success. Applications can be submitted from now until October 20, 2008. The winners will be announced at NASSCOM Foundation’s Leadership Summit in February 2009. You can find more details here and download the application here.

Solar-Powered Wireless Router Offers Opportunities in Technology

We post a lot of contest opportunities on TC-I, but the really interesting part is when the winners are announced and new ideas are revealed. Last November, ASSET (Achieving Sustainable Social Equality through Technology) India Foundation set up a Challenge by partnering with the Rockefeller Foundation. ASSET India Foundation focuses on the children of sex workers and providing them with technology training so that they can opt out of that industry and gain better career opportunities. The contest was run through InnoCentive, a global innovation marketplace. According to marketwire, the premise of the Challenge

sought the design of a solar-powered wireless router composed of low-cost, readily available hardware and software components. The router is to become part of a reliable Internet communications network connecting metropolises and remote towns in developing countries.

A software engineer from Texas named Zacary Brown came up with a viable solution. The idea will be made real by University of Arizona students this year.

The solution runs on a Linux-based system and is powered totally by a battery that is charged through solar panels. It was built with hardware that is able to withstand daily outdoor use and can be controlled remotely, allowing network operators to activate the switches with pre-paid cell phones.

The whole point of this solution is to allow adolescents outside of major cities to gain access to technology work and hone marketable job skills. To learn more about ASSET India Foundation, InnoCentive, and this solution, read the press release by marketwire.

TC-I Tidbits

Your daily dose of headlines:

• Energy: Four ultra mega (super duper?) power projects have been greenlit by the Indian government across the country.
• Education: Microsoft is investing $20 million in education initiatives in India over the next five years. Along with their current programs which focus on resources and training, the company will partner with state governments to implement national programs.
• Employment: For technology graduates, according to a study completed by Accenture, India is the place with the most job opportunities this year (with the US coming in second place).
• Technology: Airtel and Nokia are working together to develop a regional language fonts keyboard. This will allow greater linkages with rural areas.
• Environment: Concern India Foundation, a non-profit public charitable trust, plans to introduce cloth shopping bags in Bangalore’s major retail stores and shopping destinations. This is just one of the initiatives from the NGO, along with a “Kachra Kumar” competition for children to capture litterers on camera. [Source: Business Standard]

TC-I Tidbits

Your daily dose of headlines:

• Technology: Trak.in reports that a DesiWiki will help Indian start ups to increase their knowledge base on the technical aspects of starting a new venture.
• Education: In order to encourage students to stay in school, the government approved a merit scholarship that will award deserving students of lower income sections with Rs 6,000 annually.
• SMEs: Indo American Chamber of Commerce (IACC), in association with the World Trade Centre (WTC), aims to host the fifth Indo-US economic summit in September 2008 to strengthen links between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India and USA and create opportunities for them to work with each other in areas of mutual interest, access technologies, form joint ventures and sign trading arrangements. [Source: Business Standard]

TC-I Tidbits

• In 65 days, 70% of Gujarat’s villages will be linked with Broadband connectivity, promised Chief Minister Narendra Modi[via iGovernment]. Lets see if he comes through. He cant fool us here at TC-I, our correspondent Prerna is in Ahmedabad as we speak. Staying with promises, the Chhattisgarh government proposed to electrify 79 villages using Solar Energy identified under that Rural Electrification Corporation (REC) project

• Just learned that Ashoka is running a Geotourism challenge in partnership with National Geographic. The deadlines for submission are already up (sorry we missed it). But you can vote on some cool ideas, including this one by Dhan Foundation, focused on rural tourism.

IBM and Rural India Make a Connection, Literally.

As a follow-up to previous posts relating to the role of mobile technology as an enabling factor in the development of rural India, IBM has recently launched a pilot project in south India that will allow rural communities to access information ranging from healthcare service providers to potential markets for finished goods through a toll-free number. Users will be able to access this information either through their own mobile, or through local “kiosks”:

Rural users can dial the toll-free number from a kiosk or their own handset to find out things like what precautions to take for some common diseases, where to find the nearest primary healthcare centre, which plumber or carpenter is available at what time and at what charges, what are the micro-finance options available and also learn some basic English or another language.

This project is part of the India Research Lab’s “Spoken Web” project, which includes 6 other projects in the area of voice-enabled mobile commerce. In terms of the logistics, the exact revenue model has not been disclosed, but the kiosks themselves will be established in partnership with local NGOs.

Although I am optimistic about initiatives of this nature, it is my hope that IBM, in partnership with local NGOs, work not only to enlighten rural communities on the concrete, locally relevant implications of this resource, but also provide insight into the connection between access to information/knowledge and power. If a community member does not feel empowered enough to effect profound change within their own lives through more concrete means, how can they see the tangible benefits of a voice enabled mobile service? There need to be more concrete, awareness/confidence building initiatives that accompany these technological innovations in order to bring about true behavioral change and boost self-confidence on both an individual and community level.

Cellphones and Development

Recently, the NYTimes featured an article entitled, “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?”, in which it highlighted a new wave of “human behaviour” research funded by cellphone companies such as Nokia in order to tap into less developed markets. The author of the article centers around a series of conversations/interactions with Jan Chipchase, a “user anthropologist” for Nokia, but I will highlight the larger trends presented in the article instead.

According to the article, Asia and Africa are at the cusp of a new wave of technological improvements and access that potentially stand to benefit a significant portion of the poor, underprivileged population (we have highlighted a few key trends here – InternetSpeech, SMS for Blood Donors, Quarter Million Internet Capable Phones, LifeLines Education, Cellphones as a Social Epidemic, and CureHunter). Small improvements in terms of access, suggests the article, can generate exponential returns:

Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures…Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.

How exactly do cellphones contribute to development, you may ask? Well, according to development specialists and business scholars Robert Jensen, cellphones have been proven to augment income:

Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they’d even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent.

In fact, “a 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.” Further research by the World Resources Institute, which, in collaboration with the International Finance Corporation, published a report entitled, “The Next Four Billion,” has found that poor families invest a significant amount of their savings in the information-communication technology category. Here are further details from their findings (more after the jump):

Midday Newsfeed

• Technology: Although it is a hub for information technology, India is only #50 on the world’s most networked economies list, partly due to its poor ICT infrastructure.
• Health: According to a survey, in the next decade, one in 20 female deaths in India between the ages 30 to 69 will be caused by smoking. (Source: India Today)
• Citizen Advocacy: Indian citizens are submitting an open letter to the Prime Minister urging the reconsideration of a bill that would place restrictive regulations on civil society organizations receiving foreign contributions.
• Business: New Ventures India launched a Coaches Network at the Green Investor Summit. The members of this network would devote time in nurturing seed and early stage green companies. (Source: Business Wire India)
• Agriculture: Via the UN News Centre: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today bestowed its highest award, the Agricola Medal, on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his efforts to spur agricultural development and reduce hunger and poverty in India.

InternetSpeech – The New Digital Genie?

In a recent interview with Fortune Magazine, Muhammad Yunus beautifully articulated his dream of a “Digital Aladdin’s Lamp”, which would provide poor women around the world with access to global markets and trends for local benefit:

“A genie comes out of it and asks, ‘What can I do for you, ma’am?’ And she says ‘I make these baskets but nobody buys them.’ And the lamp says ‘I will find somebody to buy it.’ And the lamp comes back with buyers. She doesn’t know about a keyboard or a computer. She just asks questions of the genie.”

Sound like a fantasy?  Well, it seems we aren’t so far from realizing Yunus’ dream.  How?

Previously, we wrote about the “Question Box,” which aims to “bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link.”  Now, there is another access point for the BoP – audible internet accessible over the phone (developed by InternetSpeech).  Let me say that again – internet access over the phone, no literacy, keyboards, or screens necessary.

It seems that new trends in mobile phone technology are ushering in a new era of connectivity, access, knowledge, and power for the rural and urban poor.  Can you imagine what the future holds?

Imagine a farmer in a remote village using her voice and her $20 People’s Phone (which only works as a phone and doesn’t even have a screen to send or receive text messages) to check market information via Reuters, and then log onto an eBay-like market to offer her crafts.

A few hours later, she could log listen to the bids received and settle a transaction through e-mail.

Sound too good to be true?  Click here to listen to a demo.

Source:  NextBillion

IIM-A Launches iAccelerator

Pluggd.in discusses the launch of an incubation program for technology start ups at IIM-Ahmedabad.

“iAccelerator aims at accelerating the web and mobile related brainwaves into prototypes and possibly build a team around the idea, get some funding and most importantly achieve some traction from the potential customers. We feel that it is a novel way of accelerating IT/web/mobile related consumer ideas. The iAccelerator would comprise of intensive monitoring of product development, mentoring by VC, business and technology experts.

The program is set up in a summer camp style and lasts for 3 months. The deadline for applications is April 20, 2008 and the application form can be found here.