There's your connectivity-in-a-box!

ARTICLE: Bridging the Digital Divide: In war-torn Congo, cellphones are radically changing the way people live, by Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post (national weekly edition), 17-23 July 2006, p. 10.

Open para here is priceless:

Until not long ago, if Zadhe Iyombe wanted to talk to his mother, he had to make the eight-day boat trip up the Congo River to the jungle town where he was raised. In a country with almost no roads, mail or telephone system and a grisly guerrilla war raging, making that exhausting and dangerous trip was about the only way he could find out if his 59-year-old mother was still alive.

Then he got a cellphone.

Now he talks to his mother every day.

Connectivity soothes.

Cellphones are revolutionizing commerce and medical treatment and advertising and agriculture and just about anything you care to name in Africa, simply by connecting people to people and people to information and sellers to buyers.

The article says there are now 2.4 billion cellphone users in the world. Experts used to say that half the world's population had never used a phone. But with the majority of the world's cellphone users (59%) being found in the developing world, cellphones become the first technology in history to have more users among developing states than developed ones.

And this usage trajectory is steepest in Africa. 63 million users two years ago, but 152 million today. Congo is ground zero for this connectivity make-over: 3.2 million cellphones to only 20,000 conventional landlines.

And so the global cellphone companies come --and invest.

This is connectivity-in-a-box, pure and simple. Harnessing that rapidly to a postwar or postdisaster situation? That's Development-in-a-Box.

And guess what? Steve DeAngelis and I don't need to sell that vision to the aid bureaucrats in DC. We really need to sell it to the corporations who can make money in the interventionary aftermarket.

Cellphones are such a great commerce steroid:

Conveniences such as laptops, Internet access, ATMs and credit cards are rare or nonexistent in Congo, so entrepreneurs are devising ways to use cellphones to serve the same functions.

Sure, bad guys will also use the technology to do bad things--oldest story in the business (and they still call it "wire fraud"), but think of the pre-loaded cellphone that our intervening Marines hand out upon arrival: think of all the stuff we plug into that phone to make them happy the American military showed up. Think of how fast we set up that net, because the private sector companies are already plugged into the coalition-run recovery plan. Why do the companies want in under such dire circumstances? They want the access to the virgin market.

That can be Development-in-a-Box, meaning one crucial component. Not a big aid program, but something where the Pentagon hard-wires the private-sector effort right into its campaign plan, so that it's ready--bingo!--right from day one, demonstrating the immediate empowerment that makes individual-led economic recovery/development possible.

Great article that many readers sent me last week. As will be my custom, now, given my heavy sked, I wait until the piece shows up in my national weekly edition that I get in the mail.

For now I get the WSJ every morn, the NYT every day in the mail (usually 2 days late) and the WP in the weekly edition. Yes, I could spend all day online, but I like my busy life and my kids too much for that sort of lifestyle.