12 August 2009

Mobiles fight poverty: Iqbal Quadir on TED.com

While the media team is on holiday, we continue to bring you some of TED’s oldies but goodies. During the two week break, we will post noteworthy talks that contain ideas still worth spreading.

Today we travel back to 2005 for Iqbal Quadir’s talk on how mobiles fight poverty. Iqbal Quadir explains his digression from his New York investment-banking career to return to his native Bangladesh in order to catalyze the country’s development. Quadir looks to European history to determine the formula for evading poverty: the empowerment of citizens coupled with the devolution of authorities. Foreign aid has actually been detrimental to citizens of poor countries because aid disproportionately empowers the government, which becomes reliant on foreign governments’ charity rather than citizens’ tax revenues. One way to circumvent this scenario is with mobile phones. Connectivity leads to productivity; therefore an instrument of connectivity such as a mobile phone will bolster productivity and concurrently combat poverty.

In 1997 Quadir partnered with GrameenBank to create GrameenPhone. The company leveraged GrameenBank’s existing network to provide poor villagers with micro loans to purchase mobile phones and sell minutes to fellow villagers. Today GrameenPhone is the largest cellular network in the country and maintains nearly 30 million subscribers. GrameenPhone just announced a 10% year-over-year revenue growth for the second quarter of 2009, and has received approval from the Bangladeshi SEC on its IPO application. GrameenPhone significantly contributes to the national economy of Bangladesh as one of the country’s largest taxpayers and raises Bangladesh’s annual GNP more than foreign aid, exemplifying Quadir’s contention that the key to development is businesses, not aid.

In 2005, Quadir partnered with Dean Kamen to bring to Bangladesh electric generators that run on cow waste to continually output one kilowatt of electricity, which can light 70 energy-efficient light bulbs. Access to light bulbs at night translates into increased productivity for villagers. Furthermore, following the template of GreameenPhone, the energy machine empowers villagers as entrepreneurs who can sell electricity to fellow villagers. Quadir continues his mission to bring entrepreneurship and economic development to poor countries as the founder and director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, conceived in 2008. The center is a hatchery for 12 student fellows’ incipient ideas for world development. Quadir will guide the fellows in developing and implementing their ideas for bottom-up, technology-based entrepreneurship-for-profit businesses in the developing world.

For more on the use of mobile phones in developing countries, check out Jan Chipcase’s talk on TED.com.

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23 January 2009

Muhammad Yunus' 3 ways to save the developing world

Via the Daily Beast : An excerpt from "Creating a World Without Poverty," by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank. In this essay, Yunus offers three thoughts about how luckier countries can help the developing world during this credit crisis, when gains of the past few years are being erased. The key: social business.
Read the essay >>

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12 April 2008

Jan Chipchase's quest

Photo: Shaul Schwarz/Reportage, for The New York Times. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The New York Times Magazine recently tagged along with Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase and got an arresting look at the impact of mobile phones in the Third World.

Chipchase, a "user anthropologist," spoke at TED in 2007 to talk about how Third World users have transformed their mobile devices: they've become fixed identity points inside fluctuating populations, channels for entrepreneurship amid poverty, pocket-sized Western Unions. Many Ugandans, he points out, use prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money. (And during the recent Kenyan crisis, donations to the Kenyan Red Cross could be made in the form of minutes, as noted by TEDGlobal fellow Afromusing.)

Part ethnographer, part marketing agent, Chipchase's work reveals the fundamentals of human character across cultures -- and is helping shape next-gen product design to match local needs. Read the story in print this weekend or online now >>

There's another TED connection in this story: Watch Iqbal Quadir's talk about GrameenPhone, an outgrowth of the GrameenBank devoted to building mobile networks in the developing world. -- Matthew Trost

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29 March 2008

Fair play for Kenya farmers' market

Ode Magazine writes of the inspiring efforts of TEDGlobal Fellow and agriculture activist Thomas George to build fair-play marketplaces for poor farmers in Kenya. His organization, Vipani, is a resource for workers on small farms -- people without credit, connections or know-how -- to access networks of other farmers, buyers, suppliers and lenders.

George's work -- which he plans to expand to Rwanda and Uganda -- will resonate with fans of Eleni Gabre-Madhin, who spoke on Ethiopian commodities markets at TEDGlobal Africa in 2007, and Iqbal Quadir, who talked about empowering communities by connecting farmers with mobile phones.

"A thriving rural economy," says George, "will benefit not only farmers, but everyone in the community." -- Matthew Trost

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13 November 2007

Iqbal Quadir's new Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT

TEDGLOBAL2005 speaker and GrameenPhone founder Iqbal Quadir is launching a new center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, thanks to a $50 million structured gift from Legatum, a Dubai-based investment firm.

The Legatum Center "will help MIT students start enterprises in developing countries, to foster organic and durable economic growth and more equitable societies", Iqbal told us in an e-mail. He will act as the Center's Exec Director, while Prof. Alex Pentland, Director of the Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Lab, will be the Faculty Director.

"We will champion bottom-up economic growth, rather than the prevalent top-down, state-led, aid-funded projects that by and large have not worked", Iqbal added. That was also at the core of his TEDGLOBAL2005 talk (on this topic, watch also the talks by Ashraf Ghani and Jacqueline Novogratz or several speakers from TEDGLOBAL2007 in Arusha). The Center's primary activity (starting next Fall) will be running a fellowship program for MIT students who intend to create scalable, socially responsible enterprises.

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20 August 2007

CARE Turns Down Federal Money for Aid and Turns to Investing

TEDsters have already heard this story -- from speakers Iqbal Quadir, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Ashraf Ghani, Jacqueline Novogratz, and several others at last June's TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania: developing countries need investments more than aid.

One of the world's biggest charities has now acted upon this idea. CARE, writes the New York Times, is turning down some $45 million a year in US federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

CARE says it will phase out by 2009 the practice of selling state-subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases compete with the crops of struggling local farmers (watch Jacqueline's speech for a parallel take on how donated clothes compete with local textile production). The move is controversial -- other charities are defending the current system -- but CARE has already started investing in local companies.

Read the full NYT story.

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10 October 2006

Iqbal Quadir on TEDTalks: The impact one cell phone can make on a village...

Iqbal Quadir is co-founder of GrameenPhone, an innovative wireless company offering services to poor rural villages in Bangladesh. In this talk, he explains the triple impact of cell phone service in rural areas (connecting the village to the world, creating business opportunities, and generating over time a culture of entrepreneurship.) He also relates his personal "A-ha moment," when he understood that "connectivity is productivity." (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:37)

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18 October 2005

Time for time-shifted cellular?

Big discovery for me this year is that the key enabling digital technology in the developing world is probably NOT the computer, but the cell-phone.

- TEDster Tom Standage wrote a brilliant cover story  in The Economist to this effect.
- Iqbal Quadir's talk at TEDGLOBAL offered further powerful evidence via the astonishing story of Grameen Phone
- and two eye-opening trips for me this year -- to Ethiopia and India -- further convinced me. In India everyone was using cell-phones, in Ethiopia, everyone wanted one.

Today, the fantastic website worldchanging (which TED Prize winner Ed Burtynsky is supporting with one of his wishes) pointed me to research from Philips that could allow the introduction of yet cheaper communication devices -- modified MP3 players -- by using 'time-shifted' communication. Turns out you may be able to get much of the benefit of a cell-phone without having to communicate in real time. I LIKE this idea.... and the potential 'leapfrogging' it could enable.

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