Why the Web Is Useless in Developing Countries – And How to Fix It

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Why the Web Is Useless in Developing Countries – And How to Fix It

Mashable
February 4th, 2011

Credit: Whiteafrican / Flikr

By Sarah Kessler

Like many who study the struggles of developing countries, Steve Bratt has done the math on the potential of mobile phones. The United Nation’s Internet Telecommunication Union estimated that at the end of 2010 there were 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide and that a full 90% of the world population now has access to a mobile network. In contrast, only about 2 billion people have Internet access.

The high prevalence of mobile phones (even in developing countries, penetration rates were expected to reach 68% by the end of 2010) has led many non-profits to choose mobile networks as tools for positive change. Mobile banking in Kenya has helped farmers increase their incomes, 300,000 people in Bangladesh signed up to learn English through their phones, and many consider mobile phones the key to developing nations.

But Bratt, now the CEO of The World Wide Web Foundation, came up with a different hypothesis when he looked at the 3.3 billion-person gap between mobile phone users and Internet users. Theoretically, he thinks that the two numbers could one day even out as people use their phones to log onto the Internet.

The problem is that for a person in a developing country, the current Internet is nearly useless.

“Maybe they can look at scores from the playoffs, but if they want to find a local doctor, if they want to understand which crops to plant or how much money they can get for their crops, if they want to be able to teach their kids a language other than English or French or Chinese, there’s just nothing for them there,” Bratt says.

Why the Developing World Needs the Internet

Yacouba Sawadogo’s family migrated south when several periods of drought in the 1980s made their land in the Sahel increasingly useless. But Sawadogo stayed. And unlike many farmers in the area, he was able to develop effective farming techniques that have started to restore the land.

“He just created an orchard in a place where there’s nothing around him but dessert,” Bratt says.

Other areas in Sahel face similar challenges with their land, but few of them have been as successful as Sawadogo in developing techniques to meet those challenges. Sharing Sawadogo’s knowledge with other areas would have immeasurable value, but so far the effort to do so has been restricted to face-to-face exchanges, including busing in farmers from other areas to observe the techniques. Unfortunately, this method is slow and limited to a handful of farmers at a time.

The World Wide Web Foundation thinks that the mobile Internet could be a “digital bus” that would help share this information.

This story continues at Mashable.