Grameen Telecom (GTC) is a company dedicated towards extending the benefits of the information revolution amongst the rural people of Bangladesh. Currently GTC provides the GSM 900 cellular mobile phones to the villagers. Our corporate vision is to provide telecommunication services to the 100 million rural inhabitants in the 68,000 villages in Bangladesh.Village Phone (VP) : The Basic Concepts:
The "Village Phone" concept was developed by combining Grameen Bank's experience with the village based micro-enterprises and the latest digital wireless technology and the well tested/ proven idea of Public Call Offices (PCOs) and the privately operated phone centers.
Village Phone (VP) is a unique idea that provides modern telecommunication services to the poor people in Bangladesh. A Grameen Bank member obtains ownership of the phone under the lease-financing program of the bank and provides the services to the people in the adjoining area, covering both outgoing and incoming calls. The VP bills along with its other dues are collected by Grameen bank. It is our belief that very soon, VP will attain the position of being the largest wireless pay phone project in the World. Our desire is to install 40,000 village phones by the year 2004.
Each Village phone remains under the custody of a village pay phone operator, who is responsible for extending the services to the customers for both incoming and outgoing calls, collection of call charges according to prescribed rates and proper maintenance of telephone set. The operator's income is derived from the difference between the air time charges paid by customer/s and the billed amount required to be paid by the VP operator along with a flat charge for each incoming call.
3. OBJECTIVES:
To provide easy access to telephone services, all over rural Bangladesh To initiate a new income generating option for the villagers To gradually bring the full potential of the Information Revolution to their doorsteps and thereby introduce telecommunication as a new weapon against poverty.
(thats from Grameen's Website. When recently transiting through Dhaka , Bangladesh on my way to Kathmandu from Bangkok, I did take note of the Grameen Phone's billboards all over the international airport and was impressed by the horizontal implementation of the organization.....some more thoughts on this project...)
Adaptation of technologies to support, facilitate, and mirror the advancements in developing countries; the appropriate technologies already exist; they simply have to be adapted and mirrored in other areas in the world at similar stages of economic and rural development. Adaptation in areas such as electricity/recharging-if we are working off the grid, solar chargers will have to be included as part of the "rental" package. Think about the effect that new technology and the access to this new technology could have on the lives of people who have never been able to connect with relatives living only hours away; who have never been able to sell crops to distant markets because of the lack of communications; who have never been able to seek the help of doctors because there was none in the immediate vicinity; this could have a drastically positive impact elsewhere, much as it has in Bangladesh. Using an innovation that has already been proven, working with a success story and implementing elsewhere,this is a key for success; use what works! "Development" or not, the means to access basic communication should be a fundamental right as we move into the 21st century, paired into the Millennium Development Goals, and certainly available in 2015, the deadline for the remainder of the these development targets.
"I noted that Ethiopia lived, in essence, without modern healthcare, enduring a life expectancy rate of forty-two years, child mortality of 170 for every 1,000 born, a one-third chance of living to 65 years, one doctor for every 30,000 people, and public spending on health of $2 per person per year."
-J. Sachs
Development of the Public and Private Sector in Poor Countries:
The public and private sectors need to have seperate, but seperately and individually critical roles, in poverty alleviation. The matrix is essential; the whole is truly a sum of the given parts. These easily defined roles cover all the essentials in development; when these areas are covered, and covered with sufficient aid delivered in a streamline, effective, and coordinated manner that does not burden the recipient country unnecessarily with process upon process; significant progress can be made and measured. The roles of each need to be looked at with the effectiveness and individual organization of each; the government is good at building roads and schools; individuals are good at being entrepreneurs, and growing individual knowledge capital.
As defined by Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, here are the key areas, or sectors for focus, broken into public and private roles:
THE PUBLIC SECTOR'S ROLE:
1. Human Capital: nutrition, health care, family planning, literacy, public health awareness
2. Natural Capital: conservation of ecosystems, protection against natural hazards, avoidance of toxic waste
3. Public Institutions: operation and extension of public health services, judicial and police systems, educational systems
4. Infrastructure: roads, power, water, sanitation, emergency transport, information and communications technology
5. Knowledge Capital-scientific research in the areas of energy, agriculture, etc. (this one can be more of a hybrid, with the appropriate breakdown dependent on individual situations)
THE PRIVATE SECTOR'S ROLE:
1. Knowledge capital: investments in business and individual human capitals (educational progress and work training)-households need to accumulate their own savings/business capital
"Except in the case of the poorest households, governments generally should not provide the capital for private business. Experience has shown that private entrepreneurs do a much better job of running businesses than governments."
"The government can provide the initial inputs to help impovrished get started in market-based activities, through things such as microfinance, which allows for private capital accumulation. However, once the households begin to accumulate their own savings, the government needs to move out."
2. Household contributions to health health, education, nutrition-having individuals contribute and feel ownership over these direct processes governing their lives
All of these need to be targeted in PACKAGES which "attack" the problems from all different angles; addressing one problem is important; leaps and bounds in effectiveness can be measured with a combination strategy, and combination implementation.
