Disagreements about applying resources to alleviating the suffering of poverty have deep roots. Two thousand years ago, in a oft-quoted passage from the Bible, Jesus told his disciples not to worry if they missed an opportunity to give money to the poor because “The poor you will always have with you,” and therefore there’s always another opportunity to give in the future. In the 18th century Adam Smith took a more proactive approach than Jesus, arguing that the best treatment for poverty was to increase the wealth of nations by allowing capitalists to increase their own wealth.
These two views continue to shape current conversation on the “bottom billion” of the planet’s population who are getting poorer or, at best, stagnating in poverty. Digital media devices have increasingly become available to populations that may be struggling with hunger, unsafe drinking water, civil war, or systemic corruption. In light of these basic challenges, the question of whether the global poor really need cell phones absolutely deserves to be asked.
When people ask this question, it’s a mirror image of the same question companies ask: What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of digital media?
As media professionals, we are accustomed to making the case that our specialty area can contribute to the profitability of our employers. We often just accept that the other end of the pipeline knows what it’s doing, and that digital media consumers can best judge that value they get from their cell phones and laptops. But there are two reasons why we can’t make that assumption when it comes to the emerging market of digital media users in the bottom billion countries.
The first is that when a bottom billion family directs scarce resources into a digital connection (almost invariably through a mobile phone), the short-term impacts are real. In his overview of the issue, Mobiles for Impoverishment?, Richard Heeks cites the finding by Hosea Mgopole, Hidaya Usanga, and Matti Tedre in Mobile Phones and Poverty Alleviation: A Survey Study in Rural Tanzania (.doc) that “48% of respondents reported that they sometimes substitute important needs (e.g. education, buying food, and clothes) for mobile phone ownership/usage.”
Mobile phone adoption is deeply tied to perceptions of status. In a wealthy country with an advanced banking system, we are accustomed to the idea of people borrowing against their own futures to obtain status symbols beyond their current means. But when the future borrowed against isn’t cash, but is food, clothing, or education, should we look at leveraged status climbing differently? This is the debate between Jesus and his disciples about the prioritization of resources to alleviate the effects of poverty, recast in a digital light.
The second reason we can’t make simple assumptions about the value of digital media adoption in poor communities is because, in Heeks’ words, “most research tells us that the poor are using mobiles for social more than business purposes.” The ROI of social communication has been notoriously difficult for businesses to quantify. When we talk about its use by the global poor, we turn the question on its head: We aren’t focused on the value of social media to companies, but instead on the value of social media to users. But we have the same lack of metrics to work with.
If businesses engage in social media on little more than faith, can we extend the same faith to poor social media users? It may be that, in the long run, the capital that the poor put into social media by shorting themselves on immediate needs will pay off in systemic improvements that lift their incomes. Perhaps social media’s value can’t be measured because it increases the wealth of the community as a finger on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory of economic regulation.
As just one example of unexpected benefits from digital media, in a short piece for Wired magazine, Clive Thompson summarized a Stanford University study that claims digital media has ushered in an era of unprecedented literacy among college students. Perhaps the poor family that choose a cell phone over education is actually giving their children a better education than we suppose, as they master two-way literary conversation. And, as was pointed out in “The Bottom Billion” the establishment of a journalistic Fourth Estate is of immense value in improving the systemic conditions of poverty.
Using Jesus and Adam Smith as bookends on a discussion of the value of digital media to the poor might not be quite fair to either one, but there does seem to be a growing discussion happening somewhere between the two. In this new territory, digital media and microcredit start to blur, and social capital becomes as much a part of wealth creation as financial capital. The here-and-now problems shouldn’t be glossed over, but it can almost give one hope that perhaps the poor really won’t be with us always and there really is a middle way enabled by technology. Certainly, it will be interesting to watch how the poor use these new devices in the coming years.
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