Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Women in power
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I was not a great fan of Self Help Groups (SHG) when I first heard about it. I thought the ultimate result of their borrowings without collateral just put them deeper in to debt. I was wrong. The women in these groups knew what they were doing. I came to accept the fact that they needed to spend for their child’s wedding or for other rituals. A lot of the expenditure they made seemed unproductive to me. But I learnt that everyone must hold their head up in the community they live in and therefore some of these expenses were necessary.
More than that the biggest thing to change my mind was when Rosie, my assistant in field work at Melur, Madurai, pointed out to me during a particularly noisy SHG meeting that the women were talking. I could see that and hear it very well. Then she went on to explain, that these women were talking and expressing themselves not just in the SHG meetings but also during the panchayat meetings and their voice was getting more strident as their economic power in the household increased. If our country has to regain its former greatness it will be by the strength of our women.
PC – Phone
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During 2001 to 2004, I worked for a company called n-Logue Communications Pvt. Ltd. The company was focused on bringing internet based services to rural areas of India using indigenous low cost wireless technologies. Part of the National e-Governance Plan is to put 100,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) in villages of India. The CSC is meant to be internet enabled to deliver a variety of services to rural areas. See http://www.csc-india.org/
For these CSCs to be exceptionally successful it really requires the Government to have a very strong, powerful and reliable information technology based backend to deliver all services to rural communities.
However what I learned during that period and subsequently is that the internet and Personal Computer (PC) are the real stumbling blocks for the success of information technology in rural areas of India.
This my list of 9 things that can go wrong
1) Connectivity today is much better than it was in 2004, but speed is still an issue.
2) Electrical power availability is a show stopper
3) The initial cost of all hardware, PC, UPS, connectivity, furniture is high
4) Most softwares require knowledge of English
5) Vernacular content is largely urban centric
6) There is no mechanism for rural needs/content to show up on the internet
7) Hardware malfunctions need specialised skills not available in rural areas
8) Software problems especially virus attacks cripple the PC on a regular basis
9) The keyboard is the worst interface for rural people to use.
If you consider the mobile phone, you will find that it is a solution for all the problems listed above. The greatest part of the solution is the voice interface. There are social enterprises using voice recognition technologies to act as the interface between the mobile phone user and a server at the other end of the line. Speech recognition in local language is the most advanced technology that can be used to serve rural folk. It does not require any pushing of buttons to choose number options. Customers don’t receive text messages, they receive voice messages. Complexities of illiteracy and innumeracy are removed by the most natural of interfaces, speech.
Water Technology – 2 Distillation
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The most perfect way to treat and purify water is through distillation. In this process water is boiled and converted to its vapour phase. When this happens all dissolved ions and other particles get left behind. The vapour is taken to a cool surface and it condenses back as liquid droplets. Distillation happens to be one of the most energy intensive techniques for treating and purifying water but it is also the best.
The energy intensive nature of this process is due to the physical properties of water. If we take I gram of water (1gm =1 ml) it will take 1 calorie of energy to raise its temperature by 1 degree centigrade. So typically it takes 70 calories to take the temperature of water from 30 degrees centigrade to 100 degrees centigrade. However when we want the water to change phase from liquid to vapour each gram of water requires 550 calories of energy. This is a very large amount of energy that is again released by the vapour when it condenses back to liquid.
Engineers have designed systems that capture the energy when the liquid condenses and use that energy to evaporate more water. This is called multiple effect distillation. Countries in the Middle East typically combine their electricity power plants with Multiple Effect Distillation plants to desalinate sea water to meet their drinking water needs. See http://people.uwec.edu/piercech/desalination/MED.htm
http://www.h2ome.net/en/tag/multiple-effect-distillation-med/
Many inventors play with building multiple effect distillation units with solar power as the thermal input. So far these have remained as laboratory prototypes and have not shown technical or commercial viability. It remains a challenge.
Wind Energy
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Many times I hear people talk about renewable energy and mention wind energy as their solution to the problem. It is a romantic notion that wind energy can be used to become independent of the electric grid. Wind is unstable as it varies in speed and direction. The device built to harness energy from the wind has to withstand both these stresses and has to be light weight. The energy that is harnessed from the wind has to be stored. Currently energy storage is done in batteries, which add to the initial cost and have a replacement cost that can be very high.
Wind velocities are better at a height than near the ground. Because of this the wind energy conversion device has to be placed on top of a tower. This again adds to the initial cost and makes repairs difficult.
Wind energy conversion devices have traditionally been used to do mechanical work, like pumping water (think of the Netherlands) or grinding flour. Nowadays they are thought of only for electricity generation. Twenty years ago there doubts about the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for wind energy as well. Today the view is that their EROI is very good. See http://www.theoildrum.com/node/1863
Mobile Health
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The mobile phone has found its way into all corners of the world and very remarkably even to the poorest people in India. The mobile is now the platform of choice for almost every conceivable application. One of the latest gives regular updates on patients’ blood pressure.
“The HP Mobile Health Monitoring Solution offers just that, but without the need for users to visit clinics or hospitals to get their vital statistics read. Instead, it deploys a mobile device to monitor and record patient blood pressures around-the-clock and then shares that information in near-real time with healthcare professionals, wherever they’re located. Any anomalies in the users’ health data trigger alerts to the healthcare service provider.”
“In the trial, 100 patients from Frontier Healthcare are wearing HealthSTATS’ wireless BPro® watch-like monitoring device. HealthSTATS software translates the patient data into meaningful clinical readings, including 24-hour blood pressure and heartbeat patterns. The information is then relayed wirelessly to a centralized healthcare data repository powered by SingTel’s cloud infrastructure.”
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2011/apr-jun/mobile_health-monitoring_solution.html
This is just the beginning. A lot of research work is going on to develop a reliable and non-invasive blood sugar measurement system. Thus, two of the most prevalent causes of death (diabetes and heart attack) will be monitored and controlled in real time by health professionals.
Renewable Energy for India
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I wrote this piece for Wake Up India – It was printed in the July- September 2011 edition and that has not come online as of yet.
(http://www.ts-adyar.org/content/magazines#Wake_Up_India)
Renewable Energy. Can it work for India?
Most people will confuse energy with electricity. This confusion has spread throughout media and can even be found in government planning. This may have to do with the way electricity is delivered to us through a hole in the wall. Electricity does not have an origin in plain sight as with any other fuel and yet we will equate it to primary energy.
The requirement for energy and electricity depends on where you live in India. We all know that there is an availability problem for electricity in rural areas and that urban area become paralysed without electricity. The primary fuels (energy sources) that are used to create electricity in India are coal, natural gas and oil. These fuels are commonly called ‘fossil fuels’ since they are mined from the earth and represent dead plant life from millennia before and us and are finite in availability.
Fossil fuels are also responsible for the phenomenon known as global warming since it is believed that the carbon dioxide they produce after combustion cannot be absorbed by the plant life of the earth at the same rate that they enter the atmosphere. This build up of carbon dioxide and other combustion products create a green house effect since they absorb and retain heat that should otherwise be rejected to outer space. This is how global warming happens and the end result is violent and unpredictable changes in rainfall, hurricanes and prolonged heating of certain parts of the world.
When you live in rural India your biggest energy consumption is for cooking and then for lighting. Cooking uses biomass in various forms like firewood, agriculture residue, twigs, and dung cake. This biomass for cooking is a sizable chunk (more than 2/3rd ) of rural energy consumption. However very rarely will this very important source of energy find its way into any planning document. The focus is always on electricity
If you live in urban India and depending whether you are poor or rich your energy consumption will be different. The rich will use electricity and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and in some cases kerosene, primarily for cooking. If you are poor in urban India there are good chances of using firewood as the primary cooking fuel. This will explain the numerous firewood depots that can be found near the slums of any metropolis. Firewood is also the fuel of choice for rural eateries.
Most planning documents prepared by governmental or international agencies will talk about electricity and developing means to increase power generation. Though biomass is one of the biggest contributors to the energy consumption of the majority of our population, attempts made for the sustainable supply of biomass is limited.
When we talk about renewable energy what pops into the mind are windmills, solar devices, hydropower and for some strange reason nuclear power. Rarely does the renewable energy sector talk about biomass. Again this is due to the concentration on providing electricity rather than energy. India is also very rich in electricity generated by hydro power which as mentioned is a renewable resource.
The way to understand renewable energy is to think about it as the result of what is available in nature right now, rather than as a finite remnant from a distant past. Thus if we can convert or capture all the sunlight that falls on the world on a daily basis there would be sufficient energy available for everybody’s needs across the globe.
To quote from wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy)
“The total solar energy absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year.” (The solar energy that falls on the world in one hour is equivalent to the world energy consumption in 2002).
“Photosynthesis captures approximately 3,000 EJ per year in biomass. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.”
There are various problems associated with renewable energy that have prevented its widespread use. One of the biggest challenges is to create technologies that will allow the energy captured to be stored for use at a later time. The other challenges are with the variable nature of the input.
Take for instance wind energy, all of us know that wind speeds are highly variable and can change both speed and direction minute to minute. This gives designers of windmills many challenges. They have to account for the wide variation in speeds and the changes in direction. If you drive past any wind farm where there are multiple windmills installed, there are good chances that you will see rotor blades broken and therefore windmills not working. These catastrophic failures are an indication of how difficult it is to design across a highly variable speed and direction regime. Extremely modern designs make use of advances in material technology that help them build lighter and stronger wind mills that overcome the earlier flaws and perform better.
In the case of solar energy too there are variations in the input due to cloud cover or overcast days where the amount of sunlight reaching the earth is not sufficient for meaningful use. Sunlight can be captured and used for heating or otherwise through photovoltaic cells converted to electricity. However the storage problem is there for both conversions. Some of these conversion devices also tend to be very expensive and have poor efficiencies. Much of the research work around converting sunlight to electricity is around making high efficiency low cost photo voltaic cells. If you think about it all plants are using sunlight and fixing carbon dioxide thus increasing their mass (referred to as biomass). So a plant by its photosynthetic process overcomes the problem of conversion of sunlight, build up of carbon dioxide and storage of energy.
The answer to the question posed in the title is that Renewable Energy is already working in a big way for India. Biomass energy is providing a very large part of the energy requirement of the rural population and for the poor in urban areas. Hydro power provides around 14% of the electricity produced in the country according to the International Energy Agency1 and 25% according to Asian Development Bank2. The potential identified and not exploited could contribute over 60% of electricity requirement but the investment requirements will keep this sector contributing between 20 to 30% of current requirement. In a report by the Global Energy Network Institute3 states “the technical potential of these renewables exceeds the present installed generation capacity.”
The potential of biomass has again been missed in many of these reports. The cooking energy requirement if met by anaerobic digestion of all household waste can free biomass that can potentially create small power generating units of 25kW to 50 kW in each village of India. This means that these villages after meeting their internal requirements could sell power to the national grid.
Mistaking electricity for energy has led to this situation whereby planners have missed on how simple biogas technology at a household level can free up sufficient biomass to create as much energy as the country needs for current and future demand. In simpler terms renewable energy can work for India.
Ref 1. (http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2010/key_stats_2010.pdf pg21)
Ref 2. (http://www.adb.org/Documents/Reports/Hydropower-Devt-India/Hydropower-Devt-India.pdf pg 15)
Sustainable Fresh Water Supply for Chennai: A Status Update
In this article, Joseph Thomas elaborates of sustainable fresh water initiatives in the city of Chennai and discusses the progress made since new policies were introduced in 2003.
Chennai city, one of the major metropolises of India, is situated at the northern coastal edge of the State of Tamil Nadu. The city is more well-known by its older name of Madras. Currently, Chennai is inhabited by more than 7 million people in an area of 176 sq km. Water supply for this population is maintained by tapping a combination of surface storage reservoirs and aquifers. The Chennai Municipal Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB), a statutory body established in 1978, is responsible for water supply and sewerage services in the Chennai Metropolitan Area. The main sources of public water supply in the city are the three reservoirs — Poondi, Redhills and Cholavaram — with an aggregate storage capacity of 175 million cubic metres (MCM). The other major resource is groundwater from the well-fields in the Araniar-Kortaliyar basin and the southern coastal aquifer, and also a large number of wells and tube-wells spread all across the city (Figure 1). Over-extraction of groundwater resulted in a rapid ingress of seawater, which extended from 3 km inshore in 1969 to 7 km in 1983 and 9 km in 1987[[i]]. Groundwater levels within the city also fell and brackish water began to appear, even in localities which earlier had good quality groundwater sources. The CMWSSB calculates water availability based on surface and aquifer contributions under its direct control. Since it perceived reservoirs and other surface supply as more significant for a long time, very little attention was paid to subsurface storage or ground water recharge. As an outcome of research, done by several agencies the CMWSSB embarked on a campaign to create ground water recharge facilities in the city, and later throughout the State. This led to significant changes in ground water levels and to the quantum of water available to the population of a growing metropolis.
Read the entire paper here.
[i] http://www.rainwaterharvesting.org/Crisis/Urbanwater-scenario.htm
Addressing the Needs of Rural Populations
In this paper, Joseph Thomas, Chief Technology Officer at Villgro discusses some of the challenges of early-stage technology development for BoP markets.
Rural development endeavours have gone through many changes over the past 40 years. The first of these were the appropriate technology groups that believed in the use of local resources and skills to build sustainable technology solutions for problems faced by rural communities. The number of institutions in the world operating under the rubric of “appropriate technology” grew from a handful in the early 1970s, to over five hundred by 1977, to an estimated one thousand by 1980. In the 1980s there was a convergence of the approaches of the AT movement and participatory technology assessment.
Many practitioners of Appropriate Technology tried to establish dissemination models for innovations without enterprises. Enterprises where viewed with suspicion as their mandate was not one of social good but of profit. However these practitioners held a belief that demonstrating a successful innovation in a small locality would be sufficient. They further believed that there would be immediate adoption across geographies and governments. When these adoptions did not take place, these practitioners created small enterprises under the banner of “income generating technologies”. It was quickly realized that these had very positive local impacts but did/could not scale. Often the local enterprise succeeded due to the passion of one person.
In this paper we will discuss those problems and some of the technologies that are at the laboratory stage that have the potential to solve them. The sectors of digital infrastructure (IT), energy, healthcare, enterprise, and natural resource management will be covered here.
Read the entire article here.
Mobile Banking in 2010
Mobile Banking technology has played a huge role in financial service delivery, and therefore financial inclusion. The industry and its players have also moved rapidly to develop partnerships with social enterprises engaged with delivering financial services to low-income markets, be it microfinance institutions, technology enterprises, large-scale commercial banks and so on. In this post Robert Moore, Villgro Fellow 2010, reviews literature that provides insight into the working of the industry.
“Mobile banking may be an industry I would like to start a business in: There are millions of people with phones but not bank accounts – mostly in developing countries”. This quote is from my first blog post of 2008 on www.poorbillionaire.com and marks the day I started taking a big interest in the mobile banking industry.
If you take a lesson from the telecommunications industry you can see that the developing world has “skipped” a step in development: starting with no phones at, skipping land lines, and adopting mobile phones. If this could influence the banking industry the developing world can go from having no bank accounts at all straight to mobile banking – both a leap in the standard of living for the poor and a leap in the progress of the banking industry. Think of all the things you can do with your mobile that you can’t do with a landline and you will start to realize the impact this change in the industry will have.
To support the growth of this industry a conference called the Mobile Money Summit was started in 2008. An example of this conference’s impact is showcased in a paper produced from the 2009 summit titled “Accelerating the Development of Mobile Money Ecosystems ” which talks about how quickly this industry is growing and how the challenges both as a market opportunity and as a poverty alleviation tool are being better understood.
But the paper I really want to talk about is Nexbillion.net Editor Nathan Wyeth’s three part article titled “Report from the Mobile Money Summit”. His introduction says: “My hope in attending the summit was to share with NextBillion readers the state of the industry and what can be expected in the future outside of places where mobile banking and payment systems have already taken significant hold – namely Kenya and the Philippines (and significant branchless banking in Brazil) – as well as indicate how mobile money systems can be brought into base of the pyramid business models not only for microfinancial services but far outside of the financial services sector – in health, education, agriculture, energy, and more.”
His article brings you up to speed about the potential of this industry and teaches a little about the developing world market. Part one – “State of the Industry” talks about the industry’s markets structure, business model structure, and the banks’ need/priority of “stability before inclusion”. The idea that the poor will actually except negative interest on savings accounts if they are able to save their money securely is one of the interesting concepts that he mentions in Part two – “Product Innovations to Reach the Poor” and that credit profiles can be generated based on current mobile banking transactions for future use in microloans. Part three – “Learning from Agent Networks” discusses the distribution channels involved in making this all happen.
Nathan’s article is a worthwhile read for those interested in Mobile Banking or a glimpse into the world of developing economies and one of the angles that is being used to approach them.
Technology, Innovation and Gender
In February we featured a study by the International Council for Research on Women titled “Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology can Advance Women Economically.” Villgro Fellow 2010, Jeanne Chen takes another look at this piece, focusing on how social enterprises can be more conscientious of the gender gap in innovation.
Technology and innovation are two words that form a pillar of social enterprise – even social enterprise itself is still considered an innovation. Social enterprises seek to develop technologies with the underlying assumption that they will increase productivity or create opportunities for social economic advancement. Some technologies are simple like the treadle pump, and others are complex like solar lanterns, but all of them help the BoP and it’s this latter benefit that we invest in. As social entrepreneurs, we’re obsessed with measuring this benefit and finding new ways to scale the impact further – in short we want to know that everyone who can benefit from this technology is adopting it. All the aforementioned statements are frequently discussed, but what we don’t hear enough about is whether these successful innovations are reaching men and women equally or whether there is a gender gap to adoption of technologies.
The International Council for Research on Women (www.icrw.org) recently published the report “Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology can Advance Women Economically” (downloadable here: http://www.icrw.org/files/publications/Bridging-the-Gender-Divide-How-Technology-can-Advance-Women-Economically.pdf), which focuses on understanding how technology for the BoP differs in its impact on men versus women and what measures can be taken to ensure more inclusion of women. Four main barriers to adoption were identified:
- Lack of education and technology literacy: women are often excluded from opportunities to learn the new technology
- Time poverty: domestic responsibilities leave limited disposable time for tech exploration
- Social norms: women are often not in the habit of operating technology, or adoption would require women to enter a public arena (i.e., market) outside their customary comfort zone
- Limited economic means: domestic finances are most often controlled by the men of the households, leaving women unable to make a purchase decision to adopt innovations
These barriers can be overcome when developers of the technology or the social enterprise promoting the innovations take efforts to address the root causes, starting with including women in the design process. ICRW gives an example of the the Upesi rural biomass stoves, which were designed with inputs from women and consequently were adopted. I find this point to be one of the strongest recommendations – it addresses a systemic concern that prevents women adoption. As long as technology continues to be designed by men, women adoption will be low, perpetuating social norms that continue to support the existing gender gap. Sometimes, the solution is as simple as making a technology like a cooking stove, a height that women can reach. ICRW also suggests that inclusion of women in the design process can help to overcome many of the technology literacy and social norm barriers.
Other recommendations are centered on customizing the last mile distribution to address the awareness training needs, purchasing financing, and distribution through channels catered to women. By providing financing or bringing the innovation directly to the women, rather than relying on market place distribution, women are enabled to make the adoption. It is only through active efforts of the social enterprise to convert women adopters that this is possible.
ICRW provides the example of Solar Dryers in Uganda, which were financed by a partner NGO, enabling women to dry fruits for commercial consumption. As in the Solar Dryer example, technologies which can either create income generating activities or increase the productivity of women can go a long ways to contributing to their economic advancement. In addition, ICRW cites that the indirect benefits of increased productivity can also reduce the barrier of time poverty.
Overall, what I find most compelling and the most important point to takeaway is the need to examine and reevaluate how we think about the potential impact of a technology on helping the BoP. Social enterprises need to be more conscientious of the gender gap in innovation adoption and need to be vigilant in their efforts to address this gap.
One particular example comes to my mind of an innovative successful business model, who could benefit from thinking about their social impact with respect to an adoption gender gap. VisionSpring (www.visionspring.org), an organization recently partnered with Villgro, uses a high touch-point sales distribution model to bring low-cost reading glasses to the BoP across southeast India. VisionSpring’s customer demographics are heavily skewed towards men even though there are many women who attend the eyecamps and should be customers. There seem to be two primary reasons for the gender divide between VisionSpring’s customers. The first is that eyeglasses are perceived as aesthetically unappealing, which trumps the value of clear vision. The second is that women are less likely to have disposable income and the economic means to make the purchase. Both these reasons are problems that should be and can be addressed by the social enterprise. Awareness campaigns for the importance of proper reading glasses in the preservation of vision, not to mention the benefits of increased productivity, can be conducted to overcome what is essentially a misguided social norm that is a barrier to wearing glasses. Women can also be engaged in sourcing frames that are more aesthetically appealing. Finally, some form of partnership with a microfinance institution to finance the purchases is also possible to overcome the economic concern.
The point I want to emphasize is not how VisionSpring can work to increase its female customers, but rather that it needs to proactively think and evaluate the impact of its technology to identify how to overcome the gender gap. This is true across all social enterprises. Even though many social enterprises have introduced game changing technologies to the BoP, I think if we look closer, we would see a divide in the impact by gender. This gap is one that needs to be overcome if we truly want economic advancement for all of the BoP – of both women and men.