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Berkeley’s New Peace Corps for Technology
Visionary research brings
information and communication technology to the heart of developing
regions
By David Pescovitz
Our features this fall offer an interior glimpse into one
of the College’s most visionary new endeavors. Called ICT4B—Information
and Communication Technology for Billions—this interdisciplinary
project has roughly 10 faculty and 15 students from the College,
Haas School of Business, the School of Public Health, and the
School of Information Management and Systems at work in labs,
classrooms, and in the field to bring this extraordinary endeavor
to fruition.—Ed.
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Fatima
Serwoni lives in the village of Namunsi in the Mbale district
of Uganda. She is one of many village "phone ladies"
in Uganda who are part of a cell phone initiative sponsored
by Grameen Foundation USA, an offshoot of the Grameen Bank.
With no electricity in her village, she relies on her car
battery to recharge her phone. The nearest public pay phone
is several miles from her small store.
PHOTO COURTESY OF GRAMEEN FOUNDATION USA |
Outside a tiny metal and straw hut in a rural Bangladesh village,
customers line up to do business with the "phone lady."
She has no computer, no electricity, no running water. But she
does have a first-generation cellular phone. If you need to contact
a relative living abroad or call about a job in a nearby city,
you visit her. She charges by the minute to use her phone, and
you’re happy to pay. Phone ladies—and these days,
there’s one in almost every Bangladeshi village—are
newly minted entrepreneurs, part of a pioneering program by the
Grameen Bank. These women are bootstrapping their economic situation
in a sustainable way while providing valuable telecommunication
services to their neighbors. With just a $200 investment, a phone
lady can earn three to ten times the average annual income of
someone from her village.
Berkeley computer science professor Eric Brewer considers the
phone ladies, who first set up shop nearly a decade ago, to be
quintessential examples of his vision for the four billion people
on the planet who earn less than $1 a day. Brewer, with a team
of Berkeley faculty, is dedicated to building a technological
infrastructure that provides access to the technology and tools
often unavailable to people in developing regions. Engineering
Dean Richard Newton, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science
and Technology Tom Kalil, and a host of researchers and graduate
students from myriad disciplines have joined Brewer in this grand
plan, dubbed "ICT4B," Information and Communication
Technology for Billions. The National Science Foundation has signed
on too, earmarking more than $3 million over the next four years
for the project.
"A better information and communications technology infrastructure
that is available and accessible to these communities will correlate
more closely with improvements in their economic well-being than
anything else we can do right now," Newton says.
A massive undertaking, ICT4B has multiple arms, some of which
are officially part of the grant, while others represent the College’s
broader interest in the research agenda. Brewer, Kalil, and Newton
teach a special topics seminar to fuel interest among graduate
students and advanced undergraduates in engineering, social science,
business, and public policy. This summer, a joint program between
the University’s Management of Technology (MOT) program
and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)
sent 29 fellowship students into developing regions—from
rural China to Uganda—to conduct a first round of initial
field research.
"What we have created is like a peace corps for technology,"
Newton says. "There is nothing you can read or be taught
that will gave you the a real understanding of what it’s
like to live and work in a place other than the United States
unless you’ve actually done it."
The students served as advance scouts for the first ICT4B technology
deployment in the summer of 2005. The researchers plan to improve
the wireless infrastructure in several villages that already have
basic equipment. In 2006, they hope to expand the scope of their
deployments to include another continent.
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Eric
Brewer and the imposing 17th century Nandi the Bull outside
a Shiva temple near Mysore, in southern India. Temples and
hills, says Brewer, are a crucial part of rural connectivity
in India. As shared public space, temples often house Internet
kiosks, while hills enable lower-cost and longer-distance
wireless communication.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ERIC BREWER |
Indeed, ICT4B is a case study in use-inspired basic research,
the development of core technology with applications in mind.
"Hand-me-down technology from Silicon Valley doesn’t
do the trick," Brewer says. "Education levels are low
and illiteracy is often an issue in many of the regions in which
we are working. We’d like to design technology with these
people and their unique challenges in mind from the beginning.
But the real key is to work with local NGOs [non-governmental
organizations] on the ground; they are the groups that really
understand the problems and the local culture and can facilitate
successful technology."
Power is at a premium too—most rural villages in developing
nations run on solar energy; and deployment will be difficult
where technically savvy citizens are scarce. "These are the
very challenges that drive our research agenda," says Kalil.
Fortunately, the ICT4B team has lined up what Newton calls a "tremendous
set of partners" both in the U.S. and abroad, including Hewlett
Packard Labs India in Bangalore, Intel, Grameen Bank, the Markle
Foundation, India Institute of Technology Delhi, Microsoft, and
the United Nations Development Programme. ICT4B is also closely
affiliated with the UC Berkeley-based Center for Information Technology
Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), a multi-campus hub
for collaborative efforts among engineers, scientists, and social
scientists. "CITRIS needs to be about big ideas that are
tried at scale," Newton says. "ICT4B is one opportunity
for us to do that."
According to Brewer, Kalil, and Newton, open communication and
the exchange of information—whether it’s through a
mobile phone, a single shared Internet terminal in a village,
or an inexpensive handheld information appliance linked to a wireless
network—is one way to begin bridging the gap between rich
and poor.
To that end, ICT4B research projects range from novel wireless
networking architectures, to speech recognition chips that understand
multiple languages, to inexpensive flexible displays that can
be cranked out in rolls; others in the College are developing
medical devices to tackle some of the major health care concerns
in developing regions.
"Information technology is not an end in itself," says
Kalil. "It's a means to improve health care, improve the
environment, strengthen democracy, and reduce poverty."
Easy access to accurate information, Kalil says, could even help
eliminate corruption in government. Already, the Madhya Pradesh
State Initiative in India has built an intranet that provides
rural villagers with direct access to government agencies. Previously,
farmers paid $100 to officials for a copy of a land title. Now,
the same titles can be ordered online for pennies. Meanwhile,
an experiment in China revealed that farmers could earn 60 percent
more on their crops if they had access to telephones to learn
the true prices in nearby urban markets.
"The assumption of economics is that there’s basic
information available about the state of the market," Brewer
says. "That may be true on Wall Street, but it’s not
true in a rural village in China."
Right now, farmers have to trust the middleman who picks up the
produce from the village. "Obviously though, it’s in
that individual’s best interest to give incorrect information,"
Brewer says. But if the farmer knows the real value of his produce,
he can adjust his price accordingly, or even wait a few days to
harvest until market demand is higher. "Ultimately, the productivity
of the region increases and the market becomes more efficient,"
says Brewer.
"But it’s crucial to underscore that ICT4B is not about
charity," Brewer adds. "It’s about sharing technology
to solve pressing economic problems. Charity may be a short-term
fix," he explains, "but once the donations run out so
do the benefits. The key is to help the villagers establish their
own profitable businesses to earn money that can then be re-invested
in the region. If there is going to be long-term change, it has
to be self-sustaining and pay for itself in the long run."
That self-sustaining model has worked wonders with Grameen's phone
ladies. More than 52,000 Bangladeshi women have taken out small
loans from Grameen Bank, a pioneering non-government organization,
to buy mobile phones and establish themselves as phone ladies.
In fact, the rural poor in Bangladesh spend seven percent of their
income on telecommunications, most of that going through phone
ladies.
"The poor have some disposable income," Brewer points
out. "It's not an oxymoron. In Dharavi, one of the poorest
shanty towns in Bombay, 85 percent of the households own a television."
So while these markets have been historically difficult for Western
technology companies to reach, they do exist. Once the technology
and market are proven, existing companies and nimble startups
could "do well by doing good" in developing regions.
David Pescovitz writes Lab Notes, the
College of Engineering’s online research digest and contributes
to Popular Science, Small Times, and Business 2.0.
His writing on science and technology has been featured in Wired,
Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, and the New York
Times.
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