The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
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| Latin America and the Caribbean (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Through savvy carrier deals, subsidized handsets, and free limited data access, Facebook could ensure emerging markets come online with friend requests as their first experience. That could turn populations in southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America into Facebook users for life.
the emergence of a tech-savvy generation able to address Kenya’s public-health problems in ways that donors, nongovernmental organizations, and multinational companies alone cannot. ..... a nation where one in 25 is HIV-positive (10 times the U.S. rate) and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are among the leading killers. ..... The health ministry wanted to let community health workers put information into the database directly from mobile phones ..... the Netherlands office of Bharti Airtel, the Indian telecommunications giant that also operates a mobile network in Kenya. The company proposed spending tens of thousands of dollars on mobile phones and SIM cards for the data-gathering task, and it said it would need another $300,000 to develop the data application on the phones. The total package ran to $1.9 million. ...... rounded up the four students. They spent the spring of 2011 at the CHAI offices, receiving internship pay of about $150 a month. They sat for days with the staff in the health ministry to understand the traditional way of gathering information. Then they pounded out the app and polished up the database software to allow disease reporting from any mobile Web interface. By last summer their “Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response” system was up and running at the ministry, obviating much of Bharti Airtel’s proposed costs ...... Mobile phones are lifelines for Kenyans. Some 26 million of the nation’s 41 million people have phones, and 18 million use them to do their everyday banking and conduct other business; most use a service called M-Pesa, which is offered by the country’s dominant wireless provider, Safaricom. If mobile phones could play as big a role in Kenyan health care as they do in Kenyan financial transactions, the effects could be profound...... the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which spends $500 million per year in Kenya alone. ...... Sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than two-thirds of the 33 million people estimated to have HIV worldwide. ..... more might get done if local hackers would get together, write more code, and start some companies that had sustainable business models. ..... the country’s first truly mass-market Android smart phone went on sale in 2010, for $80. ..... “We can’t replace the doctors, can’t replace the hospitals, but we can improve access to relevant information.” ....... Soon it will be available through SMS—an essential feature, because 85 percent of Kenyan mobile-phone owners don’t yet have Web access. Kyalo hopes to aggregate other medical apps on the platform and ultimately sell sponsored messages from pharmaceutical companies, health-care providers, and others. ...... “Government is the hardest nut to crack” ..... Safaricom announced that it was launching its own doctor-calling service. In a nation with few doctors and no free 911 service for medical emergencies, residents can now at least speak to a doctor for about 25 cents per minute. ....... She had traveled 50 kilometers to see a specialist for her breast cancer, and now she was alone, exhausted, and at the wrong place on the campus. A pale blue cataract blighted her left eye, and a look of fear and pain shadowed her face as she rested her head against the pillar ...... Last year USAID, a major funder of health projects in Kenya and other developing countries, requested proposals for help creating a unified, Web-based national health information system that would be “host country owned.” The five-year, $32 million contract went to Abt Associates, a consultancy based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has done extensive work in global development projects. But although it has expertise, so does the new tech class back in the host country—which also has a long-term stake in the solution and no U.S. overhead. “If you talked about an RFP for $32 million at iHub, people would go nuts! You’d fund 500 startups for that,” CHAI’s Jackson Hungu says. “And this country’s public health delivery would be changed forever. I have no doubt about that.”
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| Image via CrunchBase |
The chip is designed to power Android phones that are cheap compared to those devices sold in rich countries such as the United States. ..... Latin America, Africa, China, South East Asia ... Low-cost smartphones have already begun selling in large numbers in Africa and elsewhere .... those models have been built on processors significantly less advanced than those used in high-end smartphones. Intel believes its new processor will strike the right balance between price and performance
52-year-old Irishman (born Paul Hewson) is also a technology investor and an activist who cofounded the ONE and (RED) organizations, which are devoted to eradicating extreme poverty and AIDS. He has spent years urging Western leaders to forgive the debts of poor nations and to increase funding for AIDS medicines in Africa. ..... antiretrovirals, a complex 15-drug AIDS regimen compressed into one pill a day (now saving eight million lives); the insecticide-treated bed net (cut malaria deaths by half in eight countries in Africa in the last three years); kids’ vaccinations (saved 5.5 million lives in the last decade); the mobile phone, the Internet, and spread of information—a deadly combination for dictators, for corruption. ...... In Africa, things are changing so rapidly. What’s been a slow march is suddenly picking up pace in ways we could not have imagined even 10 years ago. Innovations like farmers using mobile phones to check seed prices, for banking, for sending payments … to the macro effect we saw with the Arab Spring thanks to Facebook and Twitter. ......... Great ideas to me are like great melodies. They are instantly recognizable, memorable, and have some sort of inevitable arc ........ In the tech world, it’s hard to imagine there being any better form or function to a lot of Apple’s products. ........ The Apollo program in its day was 4 percent of the federal budget. All U.S. overseas assistance is just 1 percent, with 0.7 percent going to issues that affect the poorest people. I believe that extreme poverty is the biggest challenge we have. ........ You could boost farming productivity in Africa, which is twice as effective at reducing poverty as anything else. ..... Corruption is deadly, but there’s a vaccine for that too—it’s called transparency. Daylight. ....... we can end a few things that just don’t belong in the 21st century. Like AIDS, like malaria, like polio. ....... social movements are the things that make the real difference, people from different walks of life coming together to stand up for what they believe in. Whether they do it by marching, by writing, by tweeting, by posting, by singing, or by going to jail. ........ Collecting more data and more open data so we can drill down further on knowing what to do ..... Hundreds of thousands marched in the “Drop the Debt” campaign, and now an extra 51 million kids in Africa are going to school because of monies freed up by debt cancellation—it’s a staggering number
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| Satellite image of Africa, showing the ecological break that defines the sub-Saharan area (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Over the past decade six of the world's ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere's slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia...... With fertility rates crashing in Asia and Latin America, half of the increase in population over the next 40 years will be in Africa. But the growth also has a lot to do with the manufacturing and service economies that African countries are beginning to develop. ........... Most Africans live on less than two dollars a day. ... Some countries praised for their breakneck economic growth, such as Angola and Equatorial Guinea, are oil-sodden kleptocracies. Some that have begun to get economic development right, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia, have become politically noxious. Congo, now undergoing a shoddy election, still looks barely governable and hideously corrupt. Zimbabwe is a scar on the conscience of the rest of southern Africa. South Africa, which used to be a model for the continent, is tainted with corruption; and within the ruling African National Congress there is talk of nationalising land and mines ..... around 60m Africans have an income of $3,000 a year, and 100m will in 2015. The rate of foreign investment has soared around tenfold in the past decade. ...... China's arrival has improved Africa's infrastructure and boosted its manufacturing sector. Other non-Western countries, from Brazil and Turkey to Malaysia and India, are following its lead. Africa could break into the global market for light manufacturing and services such as call centres. ...... It has more than 600m mobile-phone users—more than America or Europe. ..... Around a tenth of Africa's land mass is covered by mobile-internet services—a higher proportion than in India. ..... productivity is growing by nearly 3% a year, compared with 2.3% in America. ..... Africa still needs deep reform.
