Internet & Alleviating Poverty

Poverty, a perennial phenomenon that afflicts thousands of people worldwide, has been a compelling presence amidst the focus on issues like political turmoils and natural disasters. According to figures from the United Nations, an astonishing 25, 000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. In reality, shortage of food is never the source of the problem, the problem is that many of these hungry people are trapped in severe poverty. Without money to buy food, these people become malnourished, this makes them weaker and often sick. With their ability to work reduced, their plight is worsen as they become hungrier and poorer, until the vicious cycle ends in death. Alleviating poverty thus becomes a point of paramount significance, one of which aspects that we'll be exploring for today is the use of internet.




The Internet is commonly made available to poor communities in the form of community-based telecentres. These telecentres provide shared access to the Internet and are the only realistic means of doing this for poor communities. One such example is the "Village Internet Program" spearheaded by Grameen Communications and Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh. In it, village computer centers will make it possible for people to access the Internet in search of income-generating activities and to provide education and computer-based employment.

One major benefit of this is increased access to agricultural and market information. Farmerscan learn about the current market price of their product through the Internet, resulting in increased economic efficiency. Consequently, accurate and timely information will reduce exploitation of poor rural producers by allowing them direct access to the market rather than go through middlemen who can control prices at both ends when they control information and transport.

Cyber Kiosks also bring employment opportunities to the community at large. With training, young people will be able to perform data entry and provide transcription services for any company in the world, a better alternative (in monetary terms) than migration to urban slums in search of employment. These educated youths can then become a resource for teaching others, providing educational opportunities beginning with the most basic primary education, before moving to distance learning and to remote classroom facilities in villages that until now had not even a schoolteacher.




Having arrived at an age dominated by science and technology, many of us are finding that science and technology act as aids to help us perform more efficiently. For the more affluent, science and technology have improved, but not revolutionized, their lives. For the poor, however, science and technology are likely to have a far greater impact as they promise to provide new, important, and sometimes even life-saving economic opportunities.