How Technological Justice Can Fight Global Poverty

Simon Trace, Mashable.com

Simon Trace is the CEO of the international development charity Practical Action, which works to help poor people in the developing world use technology to transform their lives.

Human development has gone hand-in-hand with technical change. Technology (defined for these purposes as both knowledge and tools) enables people to achieve well-being with less effort and drudgery, or at lower cost and with fewer resources. Technical innovation is essential for people to be able to make more effective use of the resources available to them and to respond to social, economic and environmental changes.

For those of us lucky enough to live today in one of the so-called “developed nations,” modern technology is so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that we barely notice how dependent we are on it. But remove even just one simple strand and things start to unravel very quickly, as a simple thought experiment demonstrates.

The Tech Disparity

Try to replay the first two hours of your day after getting out of bed on a cold, dark winter’s morning in your mind. Then repeat the exercise imagining how you would have fared if you did not have an electricity or gas supply to your house, your neighborhood or your place of work. That’s how a third of humanity lives. One hundred and thirty-two years after Edison introduced the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb, 1.3 billion people are still living in darkness, with no access to electricity, and 2.7 billion still cook over open fires. Clearly we have a problem ensuring well-established technologies are made available to all who need them. More…

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