In March 2005, ‘The Economist’ ran an opinion piece called “The real digital divide.” The basic ‘opinion’ behind the piece was that cell phones were the best place to start solving the digital divide.

And no, they weren’t talking about using the calculator on your phone.

The magazine reported, “the benefits of building rural computing centres… [were] unclear” and that this could be because “it is treating the symptoms, rather than the underlying causes” of the digital divide.

According to the article:

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points.

I think it is amazing that infiltration of the cell phone, something most urban Americans take for granted, could cause such significant improvements in under-developed societies.

An organization known as Fahamu located in Durbin, South Africa has a cell phone related initiative that has gained significant international attention. According to their website:

The initiative aims to use SMS technology to provide information on new agricultural technology, production information, internet training skills and the rights of women in these rural settings.

And since, as I learned today in a statistics class, a country’s infant mortality rate is linked to the rate of female literacy, this South African initiave seems like it could do a great deal of good.

On sort of a different note, I have been playing around with podcasting through iTunes (I love it). I recently subscribed to ‘The World: Technology from BBC/WGBH/PRI’ which talks about technological advances around the world. You should check it out!