Do rural communities need tetherless computing?

It is not obvious at first glance that rural communities need any digital technologies, let alone cutting-edge research in an esoteric area of computer networking. As many people have pointed out, why would a villager suffering from malaria and malnutrition, illiterate, and perhaps jobless, care about sending email from a WiFi-enabled smartphone? Does this make any sense?

Superficially, there is no connection between high technology and rural development. However, if one digs deeper, a surprising connection shows up. This has to do with the reasons why rural communities are poor in the first place. The villager is poor because he or she does not have skills for which the global market is willing to pay for. Without money, food is scarce, and with hunger, opportunistic diseases take their toll. Of course, exploitative social structures and blind tradition have their role to play as well. Nevertheless, it appears that, given the wealth of capital and technologies in the world today, the only reason for poverty is the lack of efficient and affordable information flows.

By information flows, I mean the transfer of knowledge (what something is) and expertise (how to do something) among the communicating parties. Information flows can be in the form of books, radio and TV broadcasts, or email. We can classify these into traditional and digital information flows. Traditional flows are coarse-grain: what is broadcast to a mass audience is not customized to the recipient. Therefore, it is likely to be less effective than customized communication. For instance, a TV program that goes through every possible crop disease doesn't really help a farmer who wants to know about a specific disease. A second problem with traditional technologies is that they are one-way. You can read a book, but you can't reply to the author. Third, traditional technologies are not democratic. Access to the content creation is guarded by many guardians: editors of newspapers, book publishers, and TV station owners. Finally, many traditional technologies are relatively slow. It takes months or years for a book to be produced; TV and radio are much more immediate, of course.

In contrast, modern digital communications, and the information flows then support, are fine-grained, two-way, democratic, and rapid. These attributes allow them to be affordable, robust, and efficient conduits for information flows. We believe that these flows can break the chains of poverty rapidly and discontinuously. Why so?

Access to information is closely tied to productivity, that is, the use of skills to produce goods or services. The greater a worker's productivity, the better he or she is paid. A web-designer sitting in a village can make ten times the income of a daily-wage laborer. A farmer who knows when to water his crop, based on satellite information, is able to better husband his resources, and grow more.

Access to information removes information arbitrage due to traditional asymmetries. A farmer who knows the price of cotton in the futures market in the Chicago stock exchange can make rational economic decisions.

Access to information improves governance. The two biggest problems with governance in the third world are monitoring and enforcement. Government hands out money for 'development', but neither the government nor the taxpayers know where the money went. The billions of dollars that went into food aid programs have most likely ended up in Swiss bank accounts!

Access to information can break the hold of millenia of superstitious thinking.

In short, the provision of appropriate information flows is, to my mind, the basis of a fundamental change in the material and social circumstances of the developing world.

This, then, is the goal of our work: to use the ideas of tetherless communication to provide affordable and effective information flows, and to carry through our ideas through to the field.