Bridging the Digital Divide

Excerpts from David Kirkpatrick's report from Davos:

Wiring developing countries—and its poorer citizens—has two virtues. First, since information is power, finding ways to get better information systems—think cellphones, PCs, PDAs, and yet-to-be-invented hybrids—to the world’s disenfranchised will give them greater political clout and financial opportunities. It’s the way to bring them into that global economic system that already so benefits those of us who can read this column via e-mail or on the web. This is a moral imperative.

Second, as a business writer who focuses on the technology industry, it’s easy for me to get excited about what this might mean for innovative companies. As C.K. Prahalad, a management professor at the University of Michigan and author of the recently published The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and others have pointed out, the world’s 4 billion or so poor are the largest market that has ever existed. This is true not only in terms of their raw human numbers, but in their aggregate buying power. Their vast numbers make this true despite average earnings of the equivalent of no more than two dollars a day.