Can Cell Phones Really Save the Planet?

Bracken Hendricks thinks it's not the gadget that will make the difference—but what we do with it.
Last year, nearly one in four of the world’s six billion people lived in extreme poverty. A quarter of all human beings on the planet had no electricity. Nearly a third did not have reliable access to safe drinking water, and even larger numbers subsisted on wood and charcoal instead of modern fuels. Just under 800 million adults were not able to read or write last year. And, close to nine million children died before their fifth birthday.
Yet, in the face of these terrible unmet needs, the earth’s ability to supply more resources is already strained to capacity. Last year, global forests lost an area the size of Greece. Creeping deserts drained the fertility of the soil in thousands more acres, costing farmers $42 billion in lost income from dwindling harvests. Pollution from our homes, cars, industry, and mismanaged lands, burdened the atmosphere with yet another 30 billion tons of greenhouse gases, rendering the natural environment ever more fragile, less resilient, and stressed by our demands.
The urgency of development is on a collision course with the very real constraints of a limited planet. The un-sustainability of this current path goes to the very core of our greatest global challenges in poverty, health care, education, and the environment. We can never provide enough stuff in the same old ways. The only solution is to innovate.
Reversing these devastating trends requires new access to services, new ways of building prosperity, and new communication tools available to all. Technology is accelerating and democratizing the work of saving the planet.
The value of new technology is not in the gizmos themselves. It lies in their ability to foster new communication, business models, and organizing strategies that touch human lives and foster creativity.
The value of new technology is not in the gizmos themselves. It lies in their ability to foster new communication, new business models, and new organizing strategies that touch human lives and empower creativity.
Information technology can transform development. Increasing mobile-phone penetration is linked to rising GDP. Over half the businesses in South Africa and Egypt attribute increased profits to mobile phones. Last year more than ten percent of Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product passed through the cell phone based M-Pesa financial service tool. That number will double in 2010. And, the gender gap that results in 300 million fewer female subscribers to mobile services, is estimated as a $13 billion market. But the real mobile revolution is in the innovative services that are delivered on this platform.
The African nonprofit Tostan, a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) member, has launched initiatives to teach literacy and numeracy with mobile phones to non-literate, poor and rural populations. Last year, one project reached 12,000 people in 200 rural communities in Senegal. And studies show major gains, as the number of participants able to write a text message jumped from 8 to 62 percent.
Another platform, Ushahidi, meaning “testimony” in Swahili, was built for tracking electoral violence in Kenya, to tap the knowledge held by crowds, and force transparency. But social entrepreneurs around the world now put this mapping tool to work on other things like disaster relief in Haiti. Other SMS-based tools are fighting counterfeit drugs in Ghana, monitoring elections in India, and sharing market prices to improve the lives of Southeast Asian fisherman.
The applications of cell-phone based tools are as diverse as the human imagination and as plentiful as human needs.
The applications of these tools are as diverse as the human imagination and as plentiful as human needs. Vitana.org, another CGI member, is using online tools to provide access to micro lending for student loans in un-served markets around the world. A new commitment from Delta Partners will assist separated refugee families reunite. While blogs and streaming video are empowering dissident voices and countering human rights abuse. The United States Secretary of State has even called Internet freedom a human right.
Technology innovation is transforming physical infrastructure as well. The next generation of development will not involve ever-bigger pipes, roads, and wires to move ever-larger flows of resources. Instead progress increasingly means being smart, using resources sparingly but to greater effect. CGI members are leading the way here too, with commitments that reinvent building materials, rewire communities and replace oil with fuels made from algae or electricity from the sun.

Innovative use of mobile and internet technologies

Pesinet’s service leverages the quality GSM network in Africa and open-source software to record and transfer information and then reduce the amount of time a doctor needs to access and analyze it.
A mobile application has been developed to collect and transfer data on the ground by Pesinet’s agents. An online application linked to a database allows for remote monitoring of health data by the local doctor, activity management and tracking of key impact indicators.
Data flows go through three steps:
Data collection
Health agents record data on their mobile phones via a customised JAVA applet designed to be easy to download, install and use.
The phone keeps track of each subscriber so that the agents can easily access and update recorded information on a patient.

Data transfer and treatment
Each day, proximity health agents send the data through the GPRS network to a central server. Pesinet pays for the bandwidth used and manages the server infrastructure.
Display and features
Collected information is made available through a web interface with two main features: pre-sorting and flagging of abnormal cases and generation of medical records
Activity management and administration
Program coordinators can administrate the service and monitor the collection and the enrolment processes. Automatically generated activity reports ease remote follow-up by each management level. The systems also allows monitoring of key progress indicators on Pesinet’s impact. Data is aggregated and statistics displayed in restricted access at different levels (by program, by region, by country).