Eric Brewer is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley where he leads the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group.

Eric spoke about the role for technology in effective development strategies at the base of the pyramid.

The history of development to date has been characterized by large agencies funding big projects with strings attached, usually in the form of debt or demands for political allegiance. These kinds of projects are hampered by their scale and the requirement to work with corrupt governments. They typically include little role for new technology as projects move slowly and lack the expertise to facilitate this.

Outside the sphere of traditional development, technology is having a major impact on economic prosperity. The mobile phone revolution, driven by bottom up demand, provides enormous advantages to any worker operating in a large radius. A taxi driver given a mobile phone, for example, will increase his revenue by 60% on average. Other bottom-up businesses have seen major success. The Village Phone scheme, which runs as a franchise model with capital coming from microfinance, now covers the majority of Bangladeshi villages. A village phone lady will make on average two times the income she would have done from farming.

However, the mobile phone remains a largely urban phenomenon since cellular networks require a certain density of users before they can economically justify the installation of a base station. The availability of an internet connection is crucial for the viability of businesses and services in rural areas.  WiFi-based Long Distance networks (WiLDNet) are emerging as a potential low-cost alternative to traditional connectivity solutions for rural regions. Unlike mesh networks, which use omni-directional antennas to cater to short ranges, WiLD networks are comprised of point-to-point wireless links that use directional antennas with line of sight over long distances.

Eric's Berkeley research team has partnered with Aravind Eye Hospital in Theni in the southern India state of Tamil Nadu to use this technology to address the problem of blindness in the region, 70% of which is treatable. The long-distance wireless network they have installed is allowing eye specialists to interview and examine patients in five remote clinics via high-quality video conferencing. 25,000 patients have recovered sight using this system and it is set to expand to 50 centers covering 2.5 million people.

Eric's team has also worked on software that addresses local educational needs in developing regions. In poorly resourced schools, students will often be sharing a mouse and computer screen with a group of others. Metamouse gives each student their own mouse to use; when answering questions all users must agree on a location before progressing. This encourages collaboration between students and has had impressive results in boys in particular, with a 50% improvement in scoring compared to each user having their own PC.

Megan Smith, Vice President, New Business Development and General Manager, Google.org., argued that greater interconnectedness achieved by information technology is a major liberating force in the world. Whether it is aiding the coordination of protests or increasing transparency of governments, the exchange of information has huge benefits. This is not a new phenomenon. In places where people have been able to exchange information easily, social progress has followed. Megan cited the example of Seneca Falls, New York where the canal system allowed for extensive communication; it became significant in both the women's rights and abolition movements.

While a large proportion of the world is benefiting from greater interconnectedness, Africa still lacks the infrastructure to take full advantage. Submarine fiber optic cables are necessary for quick and cheap internet cables and many African countries, particularly in the east, are not connected to these, relying instead on satellites. This is likely to change over the next few years, bringing great potential for further development.

The mission of Google.org is to use technology to drive solutions to global challenges such as climate change, pandemic disease and poverty. The organization was set up as part of a commitment to devote approximately one percent of Google's equity plus one percent of annual profits to philanthropy, along with employee time.  Google.org now places its strategic focus on those projects that can leverage the resources of Google staff, particularly its engineers.

Current projects that harness the power of information include:

• Google Flu Trends: This uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks earlier than traditional methods. This system has almost 90% accuracy in real time flu prediction and is therefore an extremely useful tool for health delivery agencies. It is now being used in 30 countries. Google is also starting to work in Cambodia to collect data around SARS.
• Google Power Meter provides a system for consumers to understand their in-home energy use and to take steps to reducing this. The Meter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information on iGoogle (a personalized Google homepage).The premise underlying this project is that greater information is going to be crucial to tackling climate change and consumers ought to be able to be empowered to make informed decisions about their energy use.
• Disaster relief: In response to the Haitian earthquake, a team of engineers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can submit information about missing persons and to search the database. Google Earth satellite images have also been used to document the extent of damage.

Global Voices was inspired by an incident in 2004, when a friend reading a New York Times article about Cameroon's elections posed the question: is there anyone in Cameroon blogging about this? Along with his colleague, former CNN Beijing journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan convened a group of bloggers from the developing world at Harvard. What came out strongly from these discussions was a desire for participants to be able to read each others' blogs. What started as Rebecca and Ethan each summarizing a couple of hundred blogs daily has grown into the Global Voices website, which uses a network of 400 editors to filter, translate and provide context to global blogs, making them accessible to readers around the world.

Since 2004, there have been some major changes to the context in which Global Voices operates. The organization has tried to respond to each of these:

• There has been massive expansion in internet access across the developing world, but rarely beyond the middle class and educated. Rising Voices allows media organizations from developing countries to apply for small grants to help them use digital media in their communities. A number of great success stories coming out of this initiative have demonstrated that it is possible to get traction for citizen media, even in very low resource communities.
• The digital space has emerged as a political space. This has prompted far greater levels of censorship. Global Voices Advocacy works to highlight cases of individuals arrested for involvement in citizen journalism and attempts to keep these stories live. It also works to document censorship of publishing platforms and to provide spaces where people can blog anonymously.
• In 2004, almost all blogging was in English. Now the majority of people are blogging in their own languages, about local issues. Translation therefore becomes a greater challenge. ProjectLinguauses volunteer translators to amplifyGlobal Voicesin many languages other than English.

Ethan suggested three possible theories about what we are seeing in the growth of social media:

• Social media will be the natural organizing tool for a new generation.
• Social media is an asymmetric tool - it is what you use when the tools of more effective mainstream media are not available to you.
• Social media is a story in itself - it can draw attention to a story that might otherwise not be picked up.

Crisis situations such as the protests in Iran and the Haitian earthquake have started to legitimize the use of social media by mainstream media outlets, blurring the boundaries between professional and citizen reporting. And some of the key challenges associated with access and language barriers are beginning to be addressed. But the problem of global attention span will be hardest to solve. So many situations never receive coverage and for those that do, the media cycle rarely allows them to stay in the spotlight beyond a few weeks. We have developed long standing bad habits in our understanding of what constitutes news. Social media has dramatically changed who is able to speak; but will it change how we choose to listen? This remains a major challenge.

Jenny Aker an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, provided an overview of the welfare impacts of mobile technologies and how current research is testing our assumptions about the benefits of mobile phones for individuals in developing countries.

Mobile phones are used by some of the poorest people in the world; even at the country ranked 160 in the UN's Human Development Index, levels of adoption of mobile phones are at 50%. There are few systematic studies looking at why people adopt mobile technology, but those that exist suggest there are correlations with higher income levels, trading professions and an urban location. Mobile phone coverage across Africa is now extensive. Research shows that roll out by mobile phone companies is determined by factors including the size of population, the costs associated with terrain, quality of road access and the operating environment (whether there exists a competitive liberalized market).

Identifying the positive impact of mobiles can be difficult because they have so many uses, making assessment of costs and benefits problematic. Mobiles are also only pseudo private goods since they are often shared and benefits extend beyond the owner.  Despite these difficulties, a number of researchers have demonstrated the impact of mobile phones in the developing world. Robert Jensen's paper found that the introduction of mobiles into the fishing industry in Kerala, India resulted in reduced price discrepancies and significant welfare benefits in the form of increased profits for fishermen and reduced waste. Similarly, Jenny's own study of grain markets in Niger found that the use of mobile phones reduced price discrepancy and enhanced welfare through increased trader profits and reduced average consumer prices.

As well as these externalities from the IT sector, we are also seeing deliberate attempts to harness the potential of mobile phones, from private sector services (e.g. the provision of mobile money transfers such as M-Pesa) to non-profit development projects using mobiles in diverse contexts including health, governance and market information. Jenny is currently working on a project that will examine how mobiles can improve literacy in Niger. A pilot of Project ABC over the next three years will assess how access to mobile phones can complement traditional literacy lessons by giving people the chance to practice their literacy skills via SMS. Early results suggest significantly higher performance in literacy testing by groups using mobile phones.

If mobiles have genuine welfare impacts then ensuring access becomes a key policy concern. Jenny highlighted the importance of continuing liberalization of telecoms markets in Africa, maintaining fair and transparent legislation and reconsidering ICT taxes (in some countries mobiles are taxed as a luxury good). But while mobiles can enhance the delivery of and access to resources and information, we should be wary of viewing them as a development panacea since they cannot replace basic infrastructure investments such as power and roads.