A ‘Meet the Product’ bloggers session was arranged for the launch of Easypaisa Mobile Account yesterday evening. Around 30 bloggers from different arenas attended the event. The session was so full of energy that it not only remained meeting the Mobile Account but exploring its features, its reach to the unbanked and discussing the unmatched success of easypaisa in just four months from its launch.
We have talked about Digital Divide before. Here’s one point of view from Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), a non-profit group based in Islamabad, about how to measure and bridge the gender digital divide.
The importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to economic development has been recognized widely during the last decade. The development promises made by the significant growth of ICTs are challenged by the so-called digital divide. The ‘digital divide’ refers to the drastic differences in levels of ICT access between different population groups.
Universal Service Fund of Pakistan continues its initiatives to award substantial funds for rural connectivity in Pakistan. Recently USF awarded telecom contracts worth Rs. 1.25 Billion for providing Broadband Internet in the un-served urban areas of Hazara Telecom Region (HTR) with PTCL and Wateen Telecom and Optic Fiber connectivity to un-served tehsils of Central Balochistan with Wateen Telecom. Read more »
The social media is taking over the world fast and furious. Found out this interesting video on social media revolution. Sharing it with you all.
What do you say, Is Social Media a Fad?
Cross Post from LIRNE Asia. Written by Rohan Samarajiva on October 24, 2009.
According to the ITU ICTeye, which is now carrying 2008 data, Pakistan’s surge to overtake Sri Lanka has petered out, leaving the Maldives (143 active SIMs/100 people) as the undisputed leader in mobile connectivity (apparently all adult Maldivians carry two active SIMs; there are only two operators in the Maldives), and Sri Lanka second with 52 SIMs per 100 people.
On the fixed side, assisted by CDMA phones that are counted as fixed, Sri Lanka is the leader (17 connection per 100 people), followed by Maldives (15 per 100).
Like in cricket, the middle of the rankings are the most interesting. Both Pakistan (50/100) and Bhutan (37/100) are ahead of India (29/100) in mobile. This shows that India cannot afford to let up the pace of 10 million connections a month for some time. If it does, it might be overtaken by Afghanistan (29/100) and even Bangladesh (28/100).
Of course, the fact that Afghanistan is ahead of Bangladesh in mobile penetration should cause all sorts of palpitations in government offices in Dhaka. Bangladesh was one of the earliest in South Asia to adopt mobile and is the most densely populated country in the world. How they were overtaken by Afghanistan, a war-torn country with difficult terrain, should cause serious re-examination of policies such as the BDT 800 SIM tax. The fact that Afghanistan’s CAGR for 2003-08 is 109%, higher than Bangladesh’s 2003-08 CAGR of 101%, suggests that the gap between the two countries is more likely to increase than decrease.
In the fixed rankings, we find Afghanistan occupying the cellar (0.37/100 people) behind Bangladesh (0.84/100). Pakistan (2.5/100) is behind Nepal (2.8/100). This is very surprising given the apparent superiority of the Pakistan policy and regulatory framework. Both use CDMA on the fixed access side, so that cannot be the explanation. Comments from Pakistani colleagues would be most welcome.
India is the only country showing negative growth in fixed over the 2003-08 period (-2%), but this simply because India is more honest in its reporting, counting CDMA on the mobile side instead of on the fixed side. For example Sri Lanka is experiencing negative growth in wireline, that is masked by CDMA growth.
From 2003 to 2008, the number of active SIMs has increased by over 12 times, while the number of fixed connections has decreased marginally, the negative growth in India wiping out all the gains in the rest of South Asia. South Asia is clearly the territory of the mobile.
This is based on a recent article in WSJ. The idea is simple but not easy to achieve: create “good enough” products which are low cost and avoid complexity. Examples in the story include a small cooler and Tata Nano car. Take a look at the interactive part of the story here. Below I’ve included a relevant section for the blog.
Unexpectedly strong demand for cheap cellphones in recent years revealed the untapped markets in India’s villages and slums. Thanks to $20 cellphones and two-cent-a-minute call rates, Indian cellphone companies are signing up more than five million new subscribers a month, most of them consumers no one would have considered serving only five years ago.
At the same time, many of the nation’s poor have become aware of material goods available in developed economies thanks to a proliferation of television networks, radio stations, newspapers and magazines.
As with all innovations, many of these new products will fail to make their mark. But with so many unlikely products aimed at overlooked consumers, the trend could bolster bottom lines over time, create new companies and lead to a new kind of multinational corporation that thrives outside of the developed world. Unilever NV and General Electric Co. are taking notice. GE’s chairman, Jeffrey Immelt, on a recent tour of Asia, outlined how the global giant is restructuring to take advantage of what he calls “reverse innovation.” While in India this month, he said the innovations in medical equipment here could eventually help bring down the cost of health care in the U.S.
Now that economy in some countries seems to be stabilizing, there is a new push to sell. In this picture, HP is following the trend which was once used by Nokia: send buses to rural areas to cultivate buyers. This may work in China where buying power is rising but I doubt if it will be useful in other countries. But if you are going to send a bus, then why not pack it with all kinds of electronics and may be a window for customer service!
This is taken from a post by Adil Najam of Pakistaniat.com. Nature is one of the most prestigious publications in the world. The topic of education is core to our future. Therefore it is worth thinking about and discussing. I hope that you will take the time to go through it. Prof. Najam writes:
The latest issue of Nature (Volume 461 Number 7260, September 3, 2009) carries an article as well as an editorial on Pakistan’s Higher Education Reform experiment and on the Higher Education Commission (HEC). Since I am myself one of the co-authors I should not add too much more commentary to what we have already written in our Nature article. But some minimal contextual information may be worthwhile.
The topic of higher education reform, of course, has been a subject of intense debate in Pakistan and has been closely followed internationally because of the sweeping scale of the reform experiment in Pakistan. For this article the authors – Dr. Athar Osama (a scholar of science policy in developing countries and a Visiting Fellow at the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and someone who has written occasionally for ATP), Prof. Adil Najam (myself, the Director of the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future), Dr. Shamsh Kassim-Lakha (former President of the Aga Khan University and former Minister of Education, Science and Technology), Prof. Syed Zulfiqar Gilani (former Vice Chancellor, University of Peshawar) and Dr. Christopher King (editor of ScienceWatch) – reviewed the activities and impacts of the reform experiment to date.
The editorial says:
Eight years ago, a task force advising Pakistan’s former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, laid out a bold plan to revitalize the country’s moribund research system: initiate a fivefold increase in public funding for universities, with a special emphasis on science, technology and engineering. The proposal was a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the economics of developing nations, which favours incremental investments. Sudden surges of cash are held to be dangerous in poorer countries, which often lack the institutions or the calibre of people required to make the most of such a windfall, and the money can easily be wasted or fall prey to corruption.
There’s a lot of chatter in the blogs about Sony and Amazon competing against each other for the electronic book reader market. There is also the talk of Apple entering in this market. As is common, the prices started high and started falling. My question is – when will a low cost version of Kindle like gadget become affordable and common that we can use it for improving literacy in developing countries?
Here’s my ideal kindle for developing countries.
Wireless connectivity (3G would be preferred), intuitive application and interface and local content are needed to make it a success. Its a lot to ask and one wonders if smart phones will take over and kill this category of gadgets?
Universal Service Fund has achieved another milestone by reaching out to the remote rural areas in Balochistan. It was just recently that we had written about the digital divide within Pakistan and expressed the hope that the efforts of USF will bridge this divide. We received the announcement today that:
USF has signed contracts for providing basic telecom services in Nasirabad (Balochistan) with CM Pak and Broadband Services in Multan Telecom Region (Southern Punjab) with World Call. CEO CM Pak, Mr. Qian Li and CEO World Call, Babar Ali Syed signed these contracts with CEO Universal Service Fund, Parvez Iftikhar.
For the Rural Telecom project, CMPak will be paid Rs. 1.57 Billion to provide telephony services to 648 unserved Mauzas to serve a population of around half a million in districts of Bolan, Jaffarabad, Jhal Magsi and Nasirabad of Balochistan. See map below, taken from USF site.
Whereas in the Broadband project, WorldCall will be paid Rs. 785 Million to provide broadband connections in 11 districts (38 small towns) of Southern Punjab, in addition to establishing 27 Educational Broadband Centres in high-schools, colleges and libraries plus 121 Community Broadband Centres. It is noteworthy that this is in addition to broadband services in MTR that PTCL will provide under a contract with Universal Service Fund signed last month.
More from the press release after the break.
Developing Telecom Watch blog has posted a roundup of telecom and broadband penetration in Pakistan and the digital divide across provinces about which I wrote a while ago. It references the USF work to serve remote and under-served areas. In particular, it mentions the PTCL-USF deal from earlier this month.
Pakistan’s Universal Service Fund (USF) and incumbent fixed line and broadband provider Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL) have signed three broadband contracts, Trading Markets reports. Under the terms of the agreements PTCL will provide broadband services in the unserved urban regions of southern Punjab and Lower Sindh. It has also agreed to bring fibre-optic connectivity to all tehsils (administrative divisions) in southern Balochistan, and will install around 1,166km of fibre-optic cable in the region. As a result of the projects approximately 63,000 new broadband connections are expected to be established in southern Punjab, and PTCL will also set up educational broadband centres (EBCs) in 206 high schools, colleges and libraries, as well as 58 community broadband centres (CBCs). In Sindh around 23,500 new connections are expected, alongside 82 EBCs and 43 CBCs. The USF will give PTCL PKR1.16 billion (USD14.3 million) for the developments in Punjab, PKR550 million for Sindh and PKR1.2 billion for the fibre rollout in Balochistan.
For low income households (aka bottom of the pyramid, BOP) in Pakistan, phones are more popular than radios but haven’t taken over TVs yet. This is from research conducted by LIRNEasia, a Sri Lanka-based Asia-Pacific information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organisation. The study said that in Pakistan, a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households now had 68 TVs, 39 phones, 24 radios and 3 computers. As comparison, for a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households in India, there were 50 TVs, 38 phones, 28 radios and one computer.
This goes against the common held belief that radios were more important for low income households. It also shows that phones can be a great way to educate and help these low income population. The LIRNE Asia blog quotes Richard Heek’s paper (ICT4D 2.0: The Next Phase of Applying ICT for International Development) and I re-quote from the pdf document below.
Finally, some have asked if the Internet should be the focus or if developers should look at where the poor have already “voted with their wallets” and see whether the simpler, cheaper technologies already in use can deliver sufficient ICT functionality to make a difference. Rather than wait for handset and bandwidth upgrades to allow mobile Internet access, we must determine what can be achieved for development through calls and SMS and, possibly, older technologies. Access figures are hard to come by, but we can estimate that something like 80 percent of the population in developing countries has access to a radio, 50 percent to a television.2,3 Early in ICT4D’s history, these statistics prompted the swift reinterpretation of ICT to incorporate radio and television, and foreshadowed the role convergence would play in ICT4D 2.0. Looking at the technologies that already penetrate—mobiles, radios, televisions—developers must now seek ways to add computing and Internet functionality.
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