When will the next five billion people get a turn?

• Author: Jones, Kermit
• Position: ICT for the Next Five Billion People - Book review

ICT for the Next Five Billion People

Arnold Picot and Josef Lorenz

(Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2010), 122 pages.

Less than two decades after the Internet went global, two billion people now have access to it. Just fifteen years after cellular phones were reduced from bulky expensive curiosities to handheld, GPS-guided, application-wielding devices, they are used consistently by three billion people. Yet, in spite of these impressive strides, five billion people are left out of the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution. When will the next five billion people get a turn? Ten presentations offered answers to this question during a May 2009 conference on ICT hosted by nonprofit Munchner Kreis. ICT for the Next Five Billion People, edited by conference organizers Arnold Picot (author of over 400 articles and twenty books on ICTs) and Josef Lorenz (of Nokia Siemens Network), is the book that grew out of these presentations.

Within the broader framework of reducing poverty and smoothing social and economic disparities across populations, ICT for the Next Five Billion People provides a vision for ICT applications in emerging markets and business models specifically tailored for sustainable development. Representatives from academia, research and industry discuss the use of ICT in multiple areas, from a commodity exchange in Ethiopia to an information market in India. Picot and Lorenz provide detailed examples of finance, business and health service expansion by private and public sector entities to the 60 percent of the world population that lives in emerging markets.

But this is not yesterday's ICT book. Many of the presenters, representing the research branches of companies such as Vodafone Group and nonprofits such as Grameen Solutions, take a long and binocular view of the future. Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing (SAP) researchers discuss impressive cases of mobile technology that made rural South African business supply chains run more efficiently, with projections for future applications as well. Researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute suggest targeted and competitive connectivity subsidies in emerging markets to augment applications already in place. Examples of this are the use of cellular phone-based search technology by grain traders in Niger and the trading of phone credit as currency by low-income customers in Kenya.

Unifying the ten...