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When it comes to poverty reduction, what role does Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play?
There are innumerable ways in which ICT can be applied to deliver better services to poor people, whether it’s telemedicine, using ICT to bring medical care to people in remote areas, or e-schools, using ICT to enhance the delivery of curricula to remote areas. There is a wide variety of practical applications, and I’m referring to actual examples in a growing number of countries where these applications have been put into practice with great effect. The most important general contribution that the emerging information society can provide to people everywhere, however, including the poor, is access to knowledge and an empowerment mechanism by which they can themselves take hold of their own lives and seek to improve them.

In January 2004, the UNDP and Microsoft jointly put out a press release announcing a partnership. What has developed as a result?
This is something that will build over time. I think that the synergy between UNDP ICT and Microsoft results from our respective global vocations, but unlike Microsoft we look for highly differentiated solutions to problems at the country level and within countries at the local level. In other words, we eschew the idea of there being a single solution for every problem. Now, you might say that is contrary to the Microsoft idea, which is complete uniformity in their software applications. But no, we’re helping Microsoft identify areas in which their standard software applications can actually be applied in specific organizational or other contexts. I think that we’ve learned a lot from each other so far. Concretely, we are building this partnership in a few countries, such as Morocco and Mozambique, and we hope to spread this outward.
But let me also say that we have certainly not decided that all the software solutions for the developing countries are going to be based on Microsoft technology. We are very keen to encourage countries and organizations and individuals within them to make their own choice of the best software solution. In Afghanistan, for example, we identified telecenters that could be empowered with free Microsoft software, while at the same time educating people about the advantages in other contexts of open source technologies. As I say, we look at different solutions to different problems. Where we can work with Microsoft and see that their product can bring an advantage to a particular situation, then we’d be delighted to help them find an opportunity. On the other hand, we look for other solutions, many of which include the rivals to Microsoft. Chief among them is the open source non-proprietary software.

As with countries like Bulgaria and Brazil, which tend to favor free and open source software.
I was about to mention Bulgaria as a good example of a country which, for its own reasons, has decided that in much of its public sector it wants to go for an open source solution. And we’ve been ready to help them on that. We try to be non-conflictual about it. We believe in using partnerships to the advantage of our clients. And this doesn’t mean that we have a single standard solution. That doesn’t mean to say that we are going to be inviting all of our program countries around the world to use Microsoft exclusively just because we have a global arrangement with them. We will be fairly opportunistic and see where it is that countries find Microsoft to be an advantage and where they don’t. (more…)

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Describe the transformation of the citizen sector that we’re witnessing today.
First, it helps to look at the historical framework. Starting around 1700, the business sector went through a transformation, one that empowered anyone with an idea to start a business. This shift was so effective that, over the past three centuries, it compounded productivity in the business half of society two to three percent a year. An equal shift in the social half of the world did not happen. As a result, societies became half-stunted and backward, and relatively unproductive, while the business sector grew dramatically. The very recent citizen sector breakthrough is a direct result of this intolerable imbalance. The social entrepreneurial movement started earlier, of course, with individuals like Florence Nightingale and Maria Montessori, who were as brilliant, in a social context, as Carnegie or Rockefeller were, in business. Despite these remarkable pioneers, however, the social sector as a whole did not make the jump to the entrepreneurial/competitive architecture that had allowed business productivity to soar. Roughly two and a half decades ago, the social sector as a whole began the process of tipping from premodern to the same entrepreneurial/competitive architecture adopted by business centuries earlier. Control by a few percent was no longer cutting it in a world of ever more pervasive and rapid change. Social entrepreneurs have led this transformation. However, two decades ago we didn’t even have the word “social entrepreneur”; when we started talking about it, people would go glassy-eyed, and the really smart ones would say it was an oxymoron.

What sort of character becomes a social entrepreneur?
The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society. Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern. They will persist for decades. And they are as realistic as they are visionary. As a result, they are very good listeners. They have to hear if something isn’t working; and, whenever they do, they just keep changing the idea and/or the environment until their idea works. They are intensely concerned with the how-to’s: How do I get from here to there? How do I solve this problem? How do these pieces fit together?

In the eyes of Ashoka, is the citizen group the same thing as the NGO?
We cringe whenever anyone uses the term NGO, or non-governmental organization -or non-profit, for that matter. You can’t define a sector by what it isn’t. Again, the history is interesting: the Europeans saw something new and they said, “Oh, it’s a non-government organization.” The Americans said saw something new that was not what they expected and called it a “nonprofit”. (A brothel, for example, is usually a non-governmental organization!) So we prefer to focus in on the active ingredient, the citizen individually, or in a group, who takes the initiative in an area of public concern, be it to provide a service or introduce a needed change. (more…)

The ability to transfer information cheaply can create an unstoppable political force. Cell phones and the Internet, arguably the most effective democratic tools on the planet, helped to unite one million Manila residents in protest against President Joseph Estrada’s government. On January 20, 2001 the protestors were mobilized and coordinated by a single text message. The message that sparked the four-day protest read simply “Go 2Edsa, wear black.” This demonstration is one of the greatest examples of a demonstration toppling a government, without firing a single shot.