MOBILE PHONES, MOBILE PROGRESS
We are still talking about "Finya Computer, Pata Dollar" ('press the computer button and make dollars'). I hope that tech has allowed you to connect to new people, places, and ideas - and to improve your income generation capacity. Tech can connect people to dignified work and unlock trapped prosperity across communities.
A Bicycle for the Mind
Like a bicycle expands where your feet can take you, tech expands what our minds can reach and achieve. The internet and mobile phones enable us to access information, markets, services, and networks like never before. This opens new possibilities for income, dignity, and community: that is, connecting to new people, places, and ideas.
There is consensus that there exists a Digital Divide: That there remains a divide in who can access and leverage these technologies. Gender, education, age, and locality shape how the bicycle of tech carries diverse groups forward, and at varying speeds. Sometimes, tech is the bridge that connects the disparities between diverse groups of people. Other times it exacerbates the differences between the said groups. But it does increasingly more good than harm.
In Tanzania, For Example
A recent study in Tanzania (Mobile Broadband Internet, Poverty and Labor Outcomes in Tanzania, by the World Bank) tracked how expanding mobile broadband internet impacted people's livelihoods. It compared households and individuals with 3G access to similar counterparts without access, over 5 years.
It found mobile internet boosted income generation capacity - increasing earnings for some while enabling others to switch from lower productivity farm work to more prosperous non-farm ventures.
This study concluded that not everyone’s opportunities, however, were created equal: that tech-enabled opportunities largely benefited younger, more educated people in urban areas. Rural and less literate groups did not fare as well as the former. Not unexpectedly.
Umefikiwa: You have a smart phone, can read and write (obviously), and have access to the internet: How are you maximizing these to make more of your career, income, and community?
This shows that mobile internet can unlock prosperity. But simply providing the tech bicycle may not alone redistribute opportunity. We must make the bicycle work better for less advantaged groups through further policy and training wheels.
The future of work must have equity and people's dignity at its core. If shaped intentionally, tech can pedal us there. But progress requires addressing unequal access to the bicycles of tech and the paths they travel.