April 13, 2008
Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?
An 8 page article on Nokia human-behavior researcher and everyone's favorite person, Jan Chipchase, in The New York Times.
Tiny excerpt:
"Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached.
There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services.
Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are.
Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.
Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone. "
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