This interesting article in the Economist highlights the difference between the adoption of a new technology in emerging markets and the diffusion of this technology in the country. This article also mentions some of the challenges faced in bringing large-scale technology-based solutions to the poor in some of the markets Acumen Fund focuses on. If we are to achieve sufficient scale and bring, for example, affordable and effective technology-based health solutions to low-income consumers in these markets, we have to support solutions that recognize and target these potential pitfalls.
This issue, the deployment of information infrastructure, goes to the very heart of our own advocacy from 1996 when the case for a profit-for-purpose approach was pitched in a paper on poverty elimination thru empowerment of community business. Where top dowm strategy had collapsed in Russia this micreconomic approach became central to an initiative to create a sucessful microcredit bank.
Today, as wider deployment of for profit strategy goes out with social business and creative capitalism, we reach the point at which bridging the digital divide can be seen as more than a social object in it own right, with this as an economic enabler for primary social aims.
http://www.p-ced.com/Default.aspx?tabid=69
“Focus of this plan is on the microeconomic sector because this is the most effective way to immediately meet the fundamental objectives of a Marshall Plan: policy directed against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Tools, innovations and methodologies are available today that were not available sixty years ago for tightly-focused microeconomic development aimed specifically and very effectively at target objectives. This is not to diminish nor detract from macroeconomic factors that continue to impede Ukraine’s development. Those factors include such things as tax reform, energy policy, continued reduction of systemic corruption, Constitutional reform, and fostering further development of civil society and freedom of media.”
Reply to Jeff Mowatt