[p2p-research] director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT

Sun Jul 4 22:07:42 CEST 2010

Yes, would be glad to.

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 1:25 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Sam,
>
> I think that *Iqbal Quadir should know about our work, both FF-P2P-F, and
> could perhaps use our work as potential for funding opportunities,*
> **
> *could you contact him on our joint behalf?*
> **
> *he's at MIT,*
> **
> *Michel*
>
>
>
>
> The link between poverty, (de)centralisation and (non)connectivity<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=9662>
> [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
> Michel Bauwens
> 9th July 2010
>
>  A talk by *Iqbal Quadir* , “Technology Empowers the Poorest”, summarized<http://longnow.org/seminars/02008/may/21/technology-empowers-the-poorest/>by Kevin Kelly:
>
> “In Quadir’s view, it’s not that centralization per se creates poverty.
> Poverty is the natural beginning state of all societies, east or west.
> Rather, *decentralization is the engine which removes poverty and brings
> wealth. To the degree that infrastructure, education, and trade can be
> decentralized, wealth will rise in proportion. To the degree that
> infrastructure, education and trade are centralized, poverty will remain*.
>
> Whereas many of us in the west, particularly the digital west, agree with
> this intuitively, we act contrary to this observation when we give
> large-scale aid to poor countries. As Quadir’s colleague William Easterly
> argues in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth, the billions and billions
> of dollars spent on aid for developing countries has not only *not* helped,
> it has set them back decades. Aid, as we know it, kills development. This
> harm occurs because almost all previous aid has funneled through a central
> government or semi-governmental organizations and that official route
> tightens centrality. Even if the governments were saintly, and they are
> definitely not, the scale of money flowing through these centralizing nodes
> prohibits the distribution of resources, infrastructure, trade, and
> education. The more aid that arrives, the less development can actually
> happen.
>
> *Technology is the escape from this quandary. Quadir came to see that
> “technologies that connect” could liberate productivity. He matched his
> experience in Bangladesh as a 13-year-old boy having to walk 10 kilometers
> to get medicine, only to find out the medicine man he sought was not home,
> and then walking back empty handed, having wasted a day — all because there
> was no connection between his home and the pharmacist. Many years later in
> New York he wasted a day at work when there was no electricity to run phones
> or computers. Productivity required connectivity. If connectivity could be
> decentralized then it would lead to increased wealth.*
>
> Quadir settled on the cell phone as a way to decentralized connectivity. In
> the early 1990s cell phones were big, dumb, and very expensive. Calls were
> $3 per minute. Only the rich could afford them. But he wanted the poorest
> people in the world to get them. How would this be possible?
>
> First, he believed in Moore’s Law: that the phones would decrease in price
> and increase in power every year. That seemed inevitable to him. He said he
> could see “micro-chips marching toward the poor.” He was right about that.
> Second, he piggybacked his hopes on a remarkable invention of another
> Bangladeshi, Mohammad Yunus, who developed micro-financing (and later won a
> Nobel prize for this invention). In Yunus’ scheme a woman who owned
> virtually nothing could get a loan of $200 to purchase a cow. She would then
> sell the surplus milk of the cow to pay back the loan, earn both milk and an
> income for her family, and maybe buy another cow. Ordinarily, no bank would
> have lent her this trifling amount because she had no collateral, no
> education, and the costs of overseeing such a small loan with small gains,
> would have been prohibitive. Grameen Bank, Yunus’ creation, discovered that
> these illiterate peasants were actually more likely to repay these small
> loans, and were very happy to pay good interest rates, and so that in
> aggregate, these micro-loans were more profitable than loaning to large
> industrial players.
>
> Quadir proceeded to ask, what if the women could rent a cell phone instead
> of a cow? Grameen Bank could make a micro-loan to the poor for the purchase
> a cell phone, which they then could sell/rent minutes to the rest of the
> village. The enterprising phone-renter would benefit and more importantly,
> the entire village would benefit from the connectivity. It did not really
> matter if the minutes were expensive, because when you have no connection,
> you are willing to pay dearly for it. Quadir started off his GrameenPhone
> with 5 cell towers, and eventually GrameenPhone erected 5,000 towers.
>
> In 1993 when Quadir began, Bangladesh had one of the lowest penetrations of
> telephones on the planet — only one phone for every 500 people. GrameenPhone
> project unleashed 25 million phones. Today there are 100 times as many
> phones, or one per 5 people. Just as Quadir had envisioned, this
> decentralized connectivity has increased productivity. Without connectivity
> people waste a lot more time on economic errands. With cell connectivity
> farmers maximize their profits by getting real-time prices at distant
> markets; shepherds can call a vet, or order medicine. One study concluded
> that the total lifetime cost of an additional phone (including the cell
> tower and switching gear) was about $2,000, but that each phone enabled
> $50,000 of increased productivity. And surprisingly, the poorer the country
> to begin with, the greater the increase in wealth from connectivity.
>
> A lot of myths cloud the good intentions of developmental aid, Quadir says.
> Myths such as: poor countries have no resources, or that the poor don’t have
> discretionary spending, or aren’t concerned with brands,or aren’t good
> credit risks, and so on. All these assumptions have been proven untrue over
> and over again, and especially so with GrameenPhone. The chief myth it
> dispelled was that government needs to subsidize technological development,
> when in fact there is good money to be made enabling the productivity of the
> poor. As Quadir says, “You don’t make money on the poor, but with the poor.”
> At dinner I asked Iqbal what he would have done differently with
> GrameenPhone. He replied, “Kept more shares.”
>
> Quadir is now searching for other technologies to decentralize, and thereby
> become a tool to erase poverty. He is director of the Legatum Center for
> Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, which has been funded with $50
> million. He is investigating whether energy can also be dethroned from its
> current mode of extremely centralized generation. Only 10% of the
> electricity produced at its source remains at the end of the wires as they
> reach homes and factories. Perhaps there are ways to decentralize its
> generation, which would trigger connections at the local level, and in his
> scheme, elevate wealth and democracy. If it worked, decentralized energy
> might also work in rich countries, increasing wealth and democracy in our
> part of the world as well.”
>
>
> --
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>
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>
> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
-- 
Sam Rose
Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
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"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."
- Carl Sagan
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