Trends and Outcomes

Two distinct sets of facts & trends have been gathering in my head over the last few weeks, all from disparate conversations and websites, more than a few from Anup Shah's blog, but coming together in my mind this week as things best considered in conjunction with each other.

First: The continuing dire straits of life in the developing world:

- Half of the world — just less than 3 billion people — live on less than two dollars a day;
- The GDP of the 40 most heavily indebted poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined;
- Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names;
- 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world);
- 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water.

In China, 800 million people do not have adequate access to credit; 300 million people live below the poverty line; and 400 dollars is the annual income of a rural inhabitant;

In India, between 60-70% of the people do not have formal access to credit, even less than that have access to secure savings, and over 200 million people live below India's poverty line

Second: The amazing possibilities being created by the proliferation of technology around the world.

- Global mobile phone penetration hit 50% last Nov. and is projected to reach 75% by 2011; 
- There are now over 3 billion mobile phones in the world. Putting this into context, there are only 800M cars, 1.5B TVs and 1B PCs around the globe today. Given how revolutionary those inventions were and how long it took to reach those numbers, its amazing how quickly we have gotten to 3B+ phones and what this number means for the potential impact on global communication and access to information.
- Although global Internet penetration is only 20% on average, or 1.4B users, somewhere around a third of those users access the Internet primarily from mobile phones or shared devices like Internet cafes (in total, over 750M people access the mobile Internet today).
- As Smart phones proliferate and replace feature phones, global Internet accessibility, particularly in countries with poor PC and wireline infrastructure, could skyrocket. Mobile phones have already replaced PCs in China as the dominant Internet access point.
- China now has more Internet users than any other country in the world and the rest of the BRIC, India, Brazil and Russia, are all in the top 11 countries in terms of % penetration
- In the mid-1990s two-thirds of Internet users were in the U.S., today the U.S. accounts for just 20%

Much of the world is still poor, under-financed, under-educated, malnourished, and ruled by corrupt and undemocratic regimes.  But just as a flood of information about the outside world from TV and cable networks helped bring down the USSR two decades ago, I believe the proliferation of weapons of mass communication hold similar promise for citizens of the developing world...with one big caveat, when people look out into the world from the tiny screen on their shiny new mobile phones and see all the things that their countries have been missing for generations, they might not just be anxious to work hard and buy stuff, they might also be angry enough to violently act out.

Comments

[bharatentrepreneurs.com]

Hi....Mark! would you be interested in link exchange....

my site is www.BharatEntrepreneurs.com