Sara Agarwal is director for international financial organizations at Hewlett Packard. Dr Parag Khanna is a researcher at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank based in Washington, DC ..
Since the rise of mobile communications and the Internet, movements have emerged to take advantage of these technologies to economic growth, social equity, improving education and health, and other public goods. Under the heading "Information Communication Technologies for Development" (ICT4D), donor agencies, NGOs, businesses, industry coalitions and others have called for initiatives to help countries bridge the "digital divide" or "leapfrog" the latest- or the standards of the next technology.
A new era of tech events began
We're back in New York in November for the 4th edition of our technology event focused on growth.
But both the rapid pace of technological change and the cost of introducing new products have proved to be stumbling blocks . Emerging government spending on the ICT market is expected to be $ 138 billion in 2014, but many of these investments as well as numerous ICT projects undertaken by the World Bank and other donors fail to cause tangible and profitable benefits.
Now, a new generation of digital breakthroughs - cloud computing, big data, social computing, and 3D printing - hold the potential to offer important benefits, but only if we change the way the technology adoption is practiced. We argue that "leapfrogging" should not be considered a one-time purchase but a step acquisition process, low-cost services.
The objective is not to jump on the Western economies, but to jump on expensive and redundant technologies and make better use of existing tools and services. Focusing on adaptive technologies that can be upgraded over time, countries can achieve a superior level of technology that allows them to improve service delivery in the most affordable manner.
In this article, we highlight the four key technologies and their potential benefits to countries across a range of areas of development of health education for the transportation, and make recommendations on how the various stakeholders such as governments, donor agencies and NGOs can collaborate on reforming procurement, integration, capacity building, finance and other fields to a leapfrogging sustainable reality.
Next Gen Tech: Cloud, Big Data Social, 3D
Cloud Computing
the advent of cloud computing offers a potential breakthrough in achieving high quality IT services at much lower cost . Cloud's products offer low-income countries of standardization and digitization of basic services such as checking, storage, document management and workflow, content access), while outsourcing complex processes and focus spending on rental or license technologies rather than expensive hardware systems and backend that cost more in advance and require skilled technicians to maintain.
In other words, they can move the sunk costs of capital expenditure (CAPEX) costs adaptable to operational expenditure (OPEX). Whether big or small, governments then pay only for the services they consume and subscribe to, and can add optional plug-ins (for security and privacy, for example) to adapt or improve their results.
The World Bank has welcomed the cloud computing as enabling a "shared infrastructure" that "pools resources, exploits economies of scale, performs operational efficiency and reduced costs. "
there are already many examples of cloud computing to streamline government operations. in Albania, 14 separate departments run their own iT infrastructure, with over 300 servers in dozens places and managing a multitude of operating systems. This has resulted in enormous costs of maintenance and variable service.
Now, the IT infrastructure of all the Albanian government is hosted on a private cloud. the server provisioning time has been reduced by 70 percent, administrative costs were reduced, the time of supply application was reduced to seven months, and department can focus more on the citizens of solutions.
Similar stories can be told of Panama in Tanzania. In the Indian state of Karnataka, Hewlett Packard eProcurement system now manages the entire process of indentation, estimating, bidding, auction, and cataloging of contracts in a single online portal reducing the potential for corruption and reduced the four-month selection period a and a half months.
Shared Services Cloud computing brings not only reduces the overhead of the government but can empower entire populations. In the education sector, for instance, better educational content online provided through the cloud has the potential to address development challenges conventional classrooms countries such as large class sizes, lack of local experts and laboratory environments on sTEM subjects difficult to teach, and teacher training.
Where one-size-fits-all classrooms have left generations for weaker students behind the cloud-based devices that mix text with multimedia sources and adjust the difficulty of different levels can customize learning and encourage critical thinking and creativity modules.
Cloud services also empower people increasingly mobile and urban. In Turkey, where each municipality is responsible for its own public transportation, transportation software company Kentkart deployed in real time based on the clouds General Transit Feed Specification system (MSFT), which allows all passengers with smartphones for the location and the live arrival times of buses and subways.
Social Computing
Wherever humans interact digitally, it is the ability to find useful information. The flow of unstructured data (from real-time communications and postings from Facebook to YouTube) include a wide range of data that can be analyzed by social computing.
social computing can be used to crowdsource suggested responses to situations and difficult decisions. They can also be used to anticipate crises. Twitter messages can provide early warning on problems such as shortage of food critics, and Google Flu Trends analysis of search terms to estimate and geo-locate flu epidemics.
These applications can help governments all prepositioning of food stocks to vaccines against influenza, as well as relief supplies during natural disasters.
sharing through social connections can also allow employees to work within the government to leverage the collective knowledge within their organization to make and implement more effective policies Datas.
Big Data
Big data will beyond social computing to leverage not just large data sets, but the interrelations to find correlations that can help countries maximize the political and social protection. Even more than cloud computing, big data involves changing the decision-making process to include technology.
The examples of using large volumes of data to meet the basic needs of emerging markets are also vast and promising. The agricultural sector has already benefited enormously from data correlations with farmers around the world now able to quantify the harvest, correlate them overcome models and market demand, and maximize revenue.
Transportation is another critical area. In Abijan, capital of the Ivory Coast, Orange Telecom has launched a program "Information for Development" which used 15 million anonymous mobile phone call data points to correlate the movement patterns of transport timetables in common. the result was the redefinition of major bus routes in the city, reducing congestion and reduce travel time.
Healthcare can also benefit from big data. in India, a new GE artificial intelligence software called Corvix uses historical data from geolocation to predict how diseases can spread through the cities and where better to find future hospitals.
3D printing
one of the most exciting new areas of technology innovation with profound implications for developing countries is 3D printing (formally known as additive manufacturing), which allows geometrically complex objects to be manufactured using 3D models of data and printing devices important.
3D printed could be used to do all of prototype products in spare parts for industrial machines; the print food is also a promising application under development. The potential for countries to jump on an expensive industrial infrastructure is almost unlimited. small-scale producers and entrepreneurs can now produce items that would previously have required a much larger initial investment, and potentially climb the chain of competitive value much faster.
Very promising experiments in 3D printing is underway that promise large-scale social and economic empowerment. fellow TED Marcin Jakubowski has recently launched the "Global Village Starter Kit" that collects plan and drawings for agricultural tools that can be 3D printed and used by farmers wherever the kit is deployed, reducing the cost and time required to replace worn or broken tools.
In India, 3D printing applications such as Fittle are used to provide Braille documents accessible for the visually impaired. 3D printers are already used to hearing aids, and distribution of these printers in rural or peri-urban areas could allow a large-scale treatment of hearing loss at affordable price.
One of the significant environmental benefits of 3D printing is that it can make use of biodegradable plastic, which is often impossible in traditional manufacturing.
following: Where to go from here
Where to go from here?
The main challenge for countries governments face is to enable better delivery of public sector services amid weak economies, poor infrastructure, stress resources and rising public expectations. However, as the above examples show, drilled in a low cost, high impact technology can market failures indeed bridges in the provision of infrastructure, enable more efficient and equitable provision of education and health, and creating new business models to reach the poorest citizens.
What can we do to accelerate the adoption of these technologies in emerging societies?
The first area relates to procurement reform: how governments buy and acquire ICT systems? The Office of the US Trade Representative estimates that up to 20 percent of the GDP of a country is made up of public procurement.
Enabling innovation in the public sector procurement process today could enable new technologies in cloud computing and virtualization to save considerably on costs while allowing governments who pay for them to get better performance solutions. Yet most of the public sector procurement systems across the world do not favor this type of innovation, and de facto procurement standards promoted by organizations such as the World Bank in emerging markets do not currently offer an innovative alternative.
For example, the World Bank recently tendered a request for companies to bid for the supply of 3,500 computers to the Ukrainian government. In conversation with the private sector, the government became convinced that Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) would be a better and more profitable option, and replace data service centers internally.
The rules of procurement of the World Bank, however, did not allow this transition to this system because it was not part of the normal supply or demand processes. A two-part supply feedback process inviting the tender to determine the best solution before the second phase of real procurement would bring innovation in the much more robust procurement process.
ICT integration at low cost is also a major challenge to extend the benefits of these new breakthroughs. Although three quarters of the projects of the World Bank involve technological components, donor agencies have tended to Stovepipe their technology programs to focus on narrow projects, missing opportunities to enrich them in other areas.
To counter this trend, the World Bank launched an "Open Technology Development Alliance" to pull the vast party basic knowledge of ICT residing in companies, governments, universities and civil society and to share ideas with their domestic customers. But such practices must reside in the governments of the countries themselves as well.
with the support of donors, governments can set up "innovation agents", whose main duty is distributed innovative solutions in the areas of public services. This should be explicitly included in the "economic growth and development Act" pending in Congress that calls for strengthening public-private partnerships in all development projects.
A third approach to the distribution of access to low-cost technologies is capacity building. Fully leverage these innovations require management and transactions by persons trained in computer systems analysis and engineering.
The trend of investment in vocational education that better links learning institutions in the labor market and emerging economic opportunities is particularly relevant in developing countries. The private sector can play a crucial role in stimulating the creation of relevant educational modes more on the market.
Finally, the challenge of financing the adoption of innovative technology should be tackled through joint funding models that deliver both economic and social benefits. For example, Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative involves the deployment of power generation cost and access to the Internet across the continent.
Another innovative approach is the impact of development bonds in which private entities (whether companies or foundations) invest in complex technologies to wider social benefit and collect financial returns for governments and donors when the results are demonstrated.
Overall, funding should increase to melt, while the business models for sale to governments should reduce the pay-per-use that characterizes the level " bottom of the pyramid "huge success approach to the provision of low property markets -Income.
This model applies even more costly Featured technologies such as cloud organizations computing.Development and aid agencies could easily promote the use of this type of innovation among governments they support such a solution -Efficient cost of procuring more quickly and seamlessly.
Conclusion
for developing countries to leapfrog as described here, the minimum requirement is basic level scanning without which there is no data to store in the cloud, correlations to find, or social computing to monitor.
At the other end of the spectrum, evidence of possible comes from countries like the United Arab Emirates who quickly graduated to the converged infrastructure in which servers, networks and IT management systems are harmonized in a unique setting.
The hardware and software advances discussed here enable developing countries to move to a more modular and cost-effective strategy to take advantage of technology for development. But the implementation of this technology spectrum in developing countries will also require the collaboration of many stakeholders, public and private, domestic and foreign.
If all stakeholders in the development arena ICT4D on profitable systems and upgrade technology with long-term financial models, while developing countries will indeed catching up and keeping pace with global technological standards.