Moneybox:
it is now more common to have a mobile phone than a working toilet:
Surprisingly, the UN reports there
are now more people with mobile phones (six billion for world
population of seven billion) on earth than there are with access to
clean toilets (4.5 billion).
That phenomenon is easily visible in Indonesia, for example,
where it is common to see people who live in metal roofed shacks
without bathrooms surfing Facebook on their smartphones or feature phones.
And it shows how, in the developing world, multinationals are often
better at responding to peoples’ needs than governments are.
Open defacation, while not widely discussed, causes illnesses such as diarrhea thatkill 4,500 children daily. Poor sanitation also hobbles emerging markets economically. According to the UN, the problem costs India $53.8 billion a year, while Nigeria loses $3 billion annually.
In rich countries we tend to think about technologies in terms of
their order of adoption and it seems obvious that plumbing is more
basic. But from an infrastructure investment standpoint, it's easier to
build a mobile phone network than a sewer system. For that same reason,
even though there tends not to be all that much competition in wireless
telephony it's a lot less monopolistic than electricity.
In other words, part of what makes the mobile phone a great technology
is that it's useful to people even in parts of the world where the basic
institutions of governance are really bad.
