Digital and mobile devices can bring huge improvements to the health and lives of the very poorest. Vanessa Zainzinger takes a look at the organisations attempting to bridge the technological divide
Last month, the non-profit organisation Worldreader held a video contest. The first price was a trip, but instead of the five star hotel one would expect for a price, Worldreader took the winner to Ghana to do some volunteering work.
Contesters were asked to submit a video that answered the question “Why do you want to help Worldreader bring ‘Books to All’ to the developing world?” This was great PR for the NGO, which has found much praise lately for its work of using e-readers to teach literacy in the developing world. While we take our access to technologies for granted, it is easy to forget that we are part of the mere 25% of the world’s population who have a wonderland of information at their fingertips – access to the internet. Mobile network connections, health data collection software, things that are such a vital part of our lives that they have started to seem trivial, are missing in the developing world as huge steps towards the end of extreme poverty.
Few NGOs, such as Worldreader, have started to use new technologies to tackle global development and humanitarian challenges. Worldreader aims to “put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet”, so the organisation decisively writes on its website. The idea itself has nothing to do with technology: books have been the basis for education for thousands of years, the information source that has been driving the human race in its development towards what we have accomplished today. Without books to learn from, we would be pretty stuck. At the Orphan Aid Africa school in Ghana, where Worldreader had the first trial of their concept in March 2010, kids were studying without having books available. It’s no new idea that we need books to learn, but it is new to have the technology to access a whole library with one single device not bigger than a paperback. With e-readers, we are reducing the cost and complexity of providing reading material even in the most remote areas. Thus we can teach literacy, increase the level of education and consequently boost a country’s economy through better educated graduates. With the cost of digital content falling quickly, the shipping being a mere fraction of what it would cost to take the same amount of material in books, it seems rather simple. Writers the likes of Cory Doctorow and Daniel Pinkwater are donating their work to make the content available on the donated readers even more diverse.
“The world is a better place when people have access to more information. The goal of universal access to all human knowledge is a noble one,” Doctorow says about his involvement with Worldreader.
Noble it is, but is it realistic too? The challenges of this cause can not be underestimated. Although the prices are falling quickly, e-readers are still expensive. They may seem easy to use, but for students who have never had access to a computer it requires time-consuming training to teach them how to use their new gadgets. Yet these are all issues that can be more or less easily dealt with compared to the two biggest challenges: a) you can’t download books without internet access and b) you can’t charge a battery-powered gadget without access to electricity.
Trying to fund a solar cell and satellite internet access suddenly take things to a whole new level – and quite a disillusioning one at that. Internet access is a luxury that organisations like the Web Foundation are trying to make a given for everyone, but this is far from being achieved. Instead, it has been mobile technology that has been giving NGOs the chance to provide tools that make a significant difference. The area that has profited most from this little revolution is health care.
“Very few technologies have scaled down to even the remotest village in sub-Saharan Africa. Cars haven’t, fridges haven’t, literacy hasn’t. But mobile phones have,” says Joel Selanikio, co-f