The Ashden Awards reward outstanding and innovative projects which tackle climate change and improve quality of life through the generation of sustainable energy at a local level. As you can imagine, the winners had some amazing ideas with the potential to drastically change the lives of the communities they are reaching out to.

Four awards were given in recognition of the way in which sustainable energy has been used to improve access to Light, to Food, to promote Enterprise and to improve Health and Welfare. An Africa Award was given in recognition of the urgent need to address the combined challenges of environmental degradation and lack of access to resources in the region. More general information on the awards can be found in the press release.

The 2006 winners are described below - click "Read More" to continue reading.

The announcement yesterday morning was buried deep inside most newspapers: a WiFi capable cell phone that, for $20/month extra, enables T-Mobile subscribers to access the company's 7000 HotSpots across the US. The Mobile Gadgeteer has a good description of how the whole thing works. It also enables users to call over their own wireless modem at home (if they have a broadband connection). The bait is that phone calls over WiFi links (via Voice over Internet Protocol) are not charged by the minute--its all you can eat for the $20/month, saving your cell-phone minutes for when you are out of range of the hot spot cloud. The service appears to be targeted to a younger, price-sensitive mostly student market, who are already abandoning fixed-line phones. The multi-mode phones (with a WiFi radio chip in them) will cost about $45.

What's interesting about this, to me, is that it may well be the template for phone service (and Internet service) for many of the BOP, probably with a slightly different business model. The rural connectivity platform we have been exploring and will soon pilot in rural Vietnam is a VSAT-WiFi-VOIP model, which will use WiFi phones as the end user device and for which the core user costs are likely to be about $1 per household per year (essentially, the cost of a VSAT broadband link for each commune).

Long-term, however, I think that the key device is a WiFi-enabled mobile phone--that will work on urban cellular networks, and on much less expensive rural WiFi networks. In particular, such a model will let rural users access text messaging and soon-to-come mobile phone-base financial services. Is T-Mobile prescient here? That's how it looks to me.

Last week, I reported on a conference in Pakistan organized by the Asian Development Bank (and in which I played a small role) to catalyze mobile phone banking in that country. The major banks all showed up, and heard the banking regulator tell them to get with the program. Later that same week, the Pakistan Minister of Information Technology, Awais Ah Khan Leghari, delivered the same message to the telecom regulator and all the major mobile phone carriers, with the Governor of the State Bank in attendance. In effect, both the banking industry and the mobile phone industry, and their regulators, are being told to remove barriers and develop workable systems, so that the huge unbanked population of the country (in which mobile phone use is spreading rapidly) can benefit. The government announced a coordinating committee to facilitate this, as well as a permanent focus group between the IT ministry and the State Bank, as well as a commitment to strengthen IT/telecom infrastructure.

Announcements don’t always translate into action. But Pakistan is moving with impressive speed to cut red tape and link the banking and telecom industries in ways that could have a major impact on commerce, especially for small businesses and ordinary individuals. In Southeast Asia, the Bridge Alliance of seven major mobile carriers is also coordinating technical standards to facilitate cross-border mobile phone banking. In the Philippines, the Smart and Globe mobile carriers now each have millions of customers for their competing mobile financial services models. These and other developments suggest that Asia is developing a lot of momentum, and could turn out to be the launch pad for truly large scale access to financial services for low income populations.