This is an awesome development to alleviate global poverty. See
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Quote:
Connecting to the Poor
Technological advances, particularly in computing and communicating, seem to be taking place almost entirely in the developed world. Granted, India and some of the Caribbean islands are providing the staffing for sophisticated call centers and India notably has a thriving software development industry. But the employees of those enterprises are mostly well-educated and come from the middle-class or affluent segments of their populations. The inhabitants of urban slums and rural villages have not been targeted as a market for technologically sophisticated products or services.
Yet when technology has been made available to them, Prahalad has found residents of the bottom of the pyramid to be readily accepting of technology. In Bangladesh, women entrepreneurs with cell phones do a brisk business renting out the phone by the minute to other villagers. Indeed, Prahalad finds in the spread of wireless devices proof of the size and viability of the market at the bottom of the pyramid. By the end of 2003, for example, China had an installed base of 250 million cell phones. The market for wireless devices in India stood at about 30 million installations and was growing at the rate of 1.5 million handsets per month.
Where connectivity exists it is resulting in major efficiencies in traditional occupations. Within three months of the installation of personal computers in some Indian villages the farmers there were making decisions about planting based on futures prices being quoted on the Chicago Board of Trade. In Kerala, India, satellite-based images of fish shoals are downloaded on village PCs and read and interpreted by women who then direct their husbands where to fish. The husbands, after a day of fishing, use their cell phones to check prices at various ports along the coast to obtain the highest bid for their catch.
To Prahalad, all these examples are evidence that there are market solutions to the problem of poverty. The task that he sets out for multinational corporations is to break out of the dominant logic that views the world's poor as a distraction to be aided by governments and non-profit organizations. Involvement in markets at the bottom of the pyramid will challenge many of the assumptions that managers of large companies have developed over the years, ranging from packaging and pricing to marketing and distribution. The result of such efforts will not only be profitable, both for the large companies as well as the consumers, but it might also contribute solutions to the serious political and environmental problems confronting the developed world.