If you believe the hype, technology is going to help us end global poverty. Advances have indeed made a huge difference in the lives of the poor, but there's also a healthy amount of skepticism out there. Berkeley researcher Kentaro Toyama has a blog dedicated to calling out naïve or inappropriate uses of information and communication technologies (ICT). Calling himself the
ICT4D jester (using the development jargon for "information and communication technologies for development"), he has no shortage of material. We've all heard stories of computers that
sit unused in African classrooms; on a recent post, the jester takes aim at
texting cows.
The organization I'm part of, BRAC, is known for going to scale with solutions that are often radically low-tech. We're more likely to scale up
birthing kits that cost less than 50 cents apiece than mobile apps that might diagnose disease; more likely to open one-room schools in rented spaces or even
boats, where children sit on the floor and learn to think creatively, than insist that every pupil have Internet access.
But I'm hardly a naysayer when it comes to tech. I agree with Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, who write in
Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think that higher productivity associated with the falling cost of technology is leading us to a world of plenty.
The trick is making sure everyone shares in the coming abundance — or at least has a fair shot at doing so.
