Melinda Gates: Tech's Responsibility to the Developing World




This kind of "positive disruption" was the theme of the third annual TEDxChange event last week. Gates hosted the conference and introduced seven speakers, including a theologian who discussed the balance between faith and family planning, a spoken-word poet who talked about the power of awareness, and children from the documentary Revolutionary Optimists who shared their views.

We had a chance to speak with Gates after the event, when she discussed how we can challenge and push the relationship among technology, health and development.

"You don't go into medicine without caring about changing the world," she says. "You don't go into technology without caring about changing the world."

These are the ideas and innovations that Gates believes are currently inspiring change in developing nations; ideas that we can learn from and expand on in order to improve quality of life around the world.

Mobile Currency in Africa

M-Pesa Mobile Currency

One of the most successful uses of technology Gates has seen is M-Pesa, a form of mobile money used in Kenya and Tanzania. With M-Pesa (M for mobile and Pesa for the Swahili word meaning "money"), people can transfer funds easily via cellphone. Since the system allows users to put money into safe accounts, it's conducive to saving.

"More people in Kenya are moving money now through the M-Pesa system than they are through [regular] transactions and the banking sector," Gates says.

And it's understandable, since mobile technology is increasingly accessible in the developing world. As of July 2012, mobile phone access reached three-quarters of the world's population, and inexpensive devices like the $15 Vodafone 150 and the $40 Aakash II tablet are geared toward users in developing nations.

While in Tanzania, Gates witnessed women's savings groups adopting the M-Pesa system. In the past, for example, women would exchange loans amongst one other by depositing and withdrawing from lockboxes, sometimes on a weekly basis. Each woman would have a different key to one of the padlocks, in order to safeguard the money.

Now, with the M-Pesa system, they share the six-digit cellphone PIN among the group (in a group of three, for instance, each woman has two digits of the PIN) to create a digital safety mechanism around their money.

"To me, that's incredible innovation — and disruption," Gates says.

Disseminating Information on a Local Level

Gates stresses the importance of working at a local level in order to find solutions to problems — that is, actually visiting local communities to see what the people have available to them, and then working with them to produce change.

It's very much like the "teach a man to fish" axiom — Gates sees more success in education and trust, rather than imposing solutions on local people.

"There's a technology called Digital Green in India that started on a very small scale, and it's now spreading very broadly in a number of communities," Gates says. "It allows you to go into a local community with a tiny little projector — basically the size of a recording device these days — set it up, and let the farmers record themselves about the new agricultural [best practices] they've learned."

According to Gates, people living in places like India or remote Africa don't often have access to this kind of education, and those who do might not trust someone from outside the community. However, when one trustworthy person is able to offer agricultural extension services, and the local people record themselves, they're able to spread appropriate and sound information that can help them survive.

The Digital Green team at the New Delhi headquarters is then able to use that information to educate other communities across the country.

Preventing Technology Creep

When it comes to issues in the developing world, an understandable concern is "technology creep," wherein organizations use advanced technologies even when a low-tech solution may prove a better option. To avoid this, according to Gates, one must understand what kind of technology certain people are likely to have, and work with it in a local context.

She cites India's health sector as an example. Although the health sector there is well-funded, there's a sort of barrier between the local community workers, called ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), and auxiliary nurse midwives, who are in charge of vaccinating children.

"These ASHAs weren't connected to the system," Gates says. "But by using a simple cellphone technology, they started to be able to train these workers to come up with [an] ASHA's work list for the day on her cellphone, based on just putting in the information about the community around her."

This information includes names of the pregnant women in the community, how far along each woman's pregnancy is, the child vaccination schedule and more.

An ASHA worker is easily overwhelmed, Gates explains, often trying to visit 100 houses in a day, but she can now look at her cellphone to determine which people need her help the most, and she can visit them in order of priority.

Women in the local villages can be skeptical of ASHAs, knowing that they are trained only to a certain level. To help the situation, the ASHAs can share pre-recorded voicemails with patients and families, in which an expert explains common symptoms and treatment plans for illnesses. Mothers were more likely to believe the ASHA worker after listening to these messages.

"That's setting cultural change by using appropriate technology in a way that a villager can understand it," Gates says.

Shifting Tech Companies Toward Social Good

Bill and Melinda Gates

We've seen tech giants like Ericsson and Samsung make efforts to help developing nations, but why aren't there more tech companies involved in social good?

Gates says that tech companies understandably need to make a profit, that they focus primarily on getting "the next fantastic piece of technology out there," which can certainly have many benefits. However, she believes the most talented tech sector employees care about changing the world, and that their companies need to tap those passions for social good.

Getting big tech companies involved might be easier said than done, but it isn't impossible. Gates posits that we can take the already existing talent in the tech space and push the major players, who have the means, to do more. But she says it's important to communicate what's practical and achievable, which includes consulting employees that live in and understand struggling regions.

"We have to get this connection between the tech sector [and the developing world], and get people traveling to see what the world is like in some of these places, and then put their brains against the problem," she says.

Tech companies are already devoted to making products for people — think of the possibilities if they were to wholly invest in creating cultural and social change. After all, as Gates says, it's the human story that really moves people.

Images via Mario Tama/Getty Images; courtesy of Flickr, Erict19; via Washington Post/Getty Images

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