The BBC's Damian Grammaticas sees how poor Indian farmers are using business text messages to get better prices for their goods.

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At the Khandova temple in Jhejuri it's festival time. The harvest is just in and it's time to celebrate.

Thousands of farmers, dressed in white, come from across Maharashtra state to climb the steep hill up to the temple. With them are their wives wrapped in brightly coloured saris and children too.

Inside the temple handfuls of turmeric powder are showered over everything. People sing, dance, and pray for good fortune.

Two hundred and fifty million Indians rely on the land for their survival.But many live in real poverty. And in Maharashtra the suicide rate among farmers is high.

So the pressing question for India is how to improve farmers' livelihoods.

A toll-free mobile service being launched in selected remote areas in Africa promises to save lives by connecting people with emergency medical cases to health personnel.

Under the initiative launched in Nairobi on Wednesday, health workers will also be trained through mobile phone sessions on day to day skills like collecting and sharing basic household health information.

Telecommunication equipment provider Ericsson and mobile phone service provider Zain have adopted the new approach in a bid to stimulate the demand of mobile solutions in areas they consider commercially challenging.
The two companies have entered into a partnership that will ensure they provide network access, mobile phone handsets, sim cards and toll-free emergency numbers in remote areas in order to stimulate demand for cellular phone solutions in those areas.

The initiative is being rolled out in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

In Kenya, Ericsson and Zain subsidiary, Celtel, are rolling out a pilot programme in North Garissa in Dertu village targeting some 5,200 inhabitants.

According to the President of Ericsson, Mr Carl-Henri Svanberge, the partnership also includes the Earth Institute and will benefit 400,000 people in Africa.

In the partnership, Ericsson will provide network connectivity in the identified areas, while the mobile service providers will provide the SIM cards and airtime, while the handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson will provide the handsets.

A blizzard of advertisements for Indonesia's 11 mobile operators has covered the country, competing for the lowest prices, best call quality and cheapest deals.

So begins what is expected to be a major boom in mobile subscriptions and telecom revenue.

The national regulator slashed internet work connection charges by up to 40 per cent last month and these savings have largely been passed on to users.

The authorities are pushing operators to share towers, which will reduce costs and enable greater network expansion.

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.

Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.

Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.

The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.
ITC has rolled out 6,400 e-choupals across India since 2000. The initiative has gained new relevance as New Delhi urgently tries to tackle threats to food security, the growing gap between rich and poor and stagnant agricultural growth that has added to soaring food prices,

India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions."

By Jean-Louis Warnholz

The idea that global companies can do good and do well at the “bottom of the pyramid”—that is, among the poor populations of developing countries—has generated excitement among corporations, governments, and NGOs in recent years. But most of the resulting initiatives by multinationals have missed the very poor, the 2 billion people in places like Haiti and Bangladesh who live on less than two dollars a day and have been virtually ignored by the corporate world and cut off from the global marketplace. The multinationals seem not to have noticed the examples of Telenor and Digicel, innovative mobile phone companies that have found opportunities to earn profits and simultaneously improve local economic landscapes by serving the very poor.

Telenor was drawn to Bangladesh and Pakistan, and Digicel to Haiti, by low-wage workforces and the potential for creating local consumer markets, despite endemic poverty. Both companies refused to accept the low-purchasing-power status quo and have been systematically building up local consumer markets. They are now boosting economic growth by generating jobs, tax revenue, and investment.

The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ­Negroponte's early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC's former chief technology officer, Mary Lou ­Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC's computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC's future doesn't revolve around the hardware she helped bring about. "Laptops are easy; education is hard to transform," she said. "I don't even speak Spanish. How can I even start to transform primary education in Peru?"

In truth, she can't. But Peru now has a chance to help Rosario, Cecilia, Nilton, and 486,497 other kids--and, maybe, someday, the little girl on the traffic island in Lima.

By Mark Pickens

The New York Times recently highlighted the work of Jan Chipchase, a Nokia researcher trying to understand how the poor use mobile phones. The article includes a report that Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as an informal money transfer mechanism, particularly to get value back to family in rural areas.

"Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that's especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator ("phone ladies" often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man's mother the money, minus a small commission."

Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, published a report with the International Finance Corporation entitled "The Next Four Billion," an economic study that looked at, among other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their money. One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category - information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study's principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that's almost never the case. What they're buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family's income grows - from $1 per day to $4, for example - their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. "It's really quite striking," Hammond says. "What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications."

There are clear reasons for this, but understanding them requires forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that's mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal - land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars - can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A "just in time" moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone's ability to increase people's productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There's the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people's loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move - displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies - can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

By Andrew Parker

Nokia said on Wednesday it had seen no evidence that the global economic downturn was affecting demand for mobile phones in emerging markets, as it outlined plans for new handsets for developing countries.

Alex Lambeek, a Nokia vice-president responsible for the Finnish company's strategy in emerging markets, said 2008 should be the first year in which the number of handsets sold in developing countries to customers replacing their existing mobiles would surpass those to first-time buyers.

Sony Ericsson, the world’s fourth largest handset maker, last month issued a profit warning after finding that European consumers were buying fewer new mobiles to replace their existing models than previously anticipated.