Giant opportunity: Emergent ICT-enabled empowerment

My desert island business tool would have to be my netvibes homepage : by allowing my to efficiently follow and ingest over a hundred different feeds covering the entire breadth of my varied (and some would say eclectic) interests it has become the substrate upon which much of my work is done. It’s my deck.* Themes emerge and disappear, are reinforced, modified, diverted, consolidated. And sometimes enough interesting pieces of the puzzle emerge, pushing me to anchor them in my thoughts by writing a post here. I’ve written a number of times on the potential for mobile telephony to shift the paradigm in Africa, but post the Safaricom IPO this is perhaps more of a mainstream view today and needs less repeating. What is perhaps less talked about is the potential to combine increasing mobile and broadband penetration with robust and inexpensive local networks to transform outcomes even in the most remote environments. One of the major challenges fac...