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Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, reports on the state of African connectivity development, which remains hampered by very high costs. In West Africa, for example, connectivity costs more than 66 times as much as it does in the United States--$8 per kbps versus a typical cost for US universities of $0.12 per kbps.

But Zuckerman also suggests 4 areas where Africans are leading the rest of the world:

- Narrowband - innovative connectivity solutions that use very little bandwidth, like the Ghana “Javelin” project

- Localization - Translation of open source software into a wide variety of languages, especially through the help of organizations like Translate.org.za.

- Radio - Use of community radio for information dissemination, integration of data and radio in projects like Geekcorps Mali.

- Urban wifi - with huge wifi networks in Accra, Bamako and other African cities.

I would add one more to the list—financial services over mobile phone networks. Celtel was an early pioneer with Celpay, and Wizzit in South Africa has been among the most innovative in this space, along with Smart and Globe in the Philippines.

It is remarkable, as Zuckerman points out, that Africans are able to innovate around myriad regulatory and price barriers to lead in these areas. That suggests the question: what is the comparable list for other developing regions?

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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project gets a lot of hype, which I have no problem with- the more attention the media devotes to development issues the better, in my opinion. But it always bothers me a bit that this MIT creation gets all the press when it hasn’t even reached the implementation stage yet, and other NGOs are already on the ground wiring thousands of villages ala FirstMile Solutions.

In the spirit of spreading the ICT-for-BOP love, take a minute to check out WorldChanging’s recent interview with Inveneo.org, a mostly women-led group (cheers for gendered approaches to poverty issues!) that has worked to create a growing network of wired villages in Africa. The computers are different from OLPC because they have no moving parts and are powered externally and the internet connection hardware differs from FirstMile in that it relies on wifi relay towers.

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Whatever you think about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child from the policy and practicality perspectives, you can't help but applaud what the project is doing on the technical side. The new issue of Technology Review has a fascinating article on the computer, and its innovative and envelope-pushing technology.

Some of the elements that excite me include the capacity to pool a number of the laptops to create a VoIP phone system; the high-resolution LED-illuminated screen able accurately to replicate the delicate curves of language scripts which require it, such as Arabic; and the alternative power sources under development for it. Take a look.

I sense the law of unintended consequences at work here; Negroponte may not achieve what he has set out to do - that is in the hands of a lot of external actors, but he may well set off another revolution in the computer industry.

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The global cell phone market recently passed 2.5 billion connections, having grown by 500 million in 12 months. A quarter of this growth is attributable to India and China. In the latter country 5 million new connections are added every month.

As a result of this staggering growth rate, of the 2.5 billion users worldwide, the majority (59%) now lives in developing countries. This is the first time in history that a telecommunications technology has more users in developing countries than in the developed world.

As mobile technology has been appropriated by the developing world, its applications have evolved to serve the needs of its new users. Many of these applications are unfamiliar to users in the developed world.

Beyond a simple telephone call or text message to a friend or family member, BOP applications of mobile telephony span the spectrum of daily life: farmers and fishermen check market prices; entrepreneurs offer their phones as a community payphones or use them to make their offices mobile; handsets are used as e-wallets allowing customers to transfer cash to merchants or remittances to family members; restaurant owners advertise via text messages; concerned citizens monitor elections and report results; would be travelers check weather forecasts; and the unfaithful even uses text messages as means to coordinate an illicit rendezvous.

To catalyze further growth in mobile applications at the BOP, MIT has launched the Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles, as part of the Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship within the MIT Design Laboratory. EPROM includes a mobile phone programming educational curriculum and an SMS bootcamp in partnership with the University of Nairobi.

You have probably heard of Open Source Software - software developed by hackers and released into the community under licenses that freely allow copying and modification. Linux is a good example.

David Rowe, an engineer from Adelaide, South Australia and a small team of hackers around the world are developing "open source hardware" - high quality, professionally designed hardware designs that are being released for others to copy and build on.

The hardware (when combined with open telephony software such as Asterisk) allows anyone to build advanced telephone systems at very low cost. The idea is to help close the digital divide by building telephone exchange (PBX) hardware for $200 with features matching existing PBX systems - that cost $10,000. This makes it possible for a small village to deploy and maintain a telephone system at very low cost.

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