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 COLUMN
'Telephone ladies' turn into entrepreneurs; and will Silicon Valley change its dress code? THIS MARCH IN Las Vegas, Professor Mohamed Yunis, founder of the Gramine Bank, addressed the issue of the digital divide in a keynote conversation at CTIA Wireless 2001, an event sponsored by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. The Gramine Bank makes low-interest loans to the poorest of the poor living in Bangladesh to help them buy equipment, send a child to school, or even start a business.
Yunis says he is now marrying telecommunications with his microcredit concept and is incorporating cell phones as part of his plan to empower impoverished people. The goal of the Gramine Bank appears to be twofold: first, to help people who normally don't get much help; and second, to exemplify to bigger financial institutions than the Gramine Bank that lending money to people who might be considered high-risk makes good business sense. Yunis says the bad debt rate for Gramine is about half a percent, much lower than most business loans. "Financial institutions of the world say the poor aren't credit-worthy; the rich people are not credit-worthy," Yunis said. Bangladesh, with 130 million people, has 500,000 telephones, almost all of them in the major cities. The Gramine Bank is changing that and has financed cell phones for women in 3,500 villages. These telephone ladies, as Yunis calls them, create a business by becoming a mobile phone booth. Villagers can now call their children who have gone out to find their fortune in the more developed parts of the world, or they can call doctors or the police for emergencies. The one idea I like the best is how farmers, formerly at the mercy of both the weather and middlemen, are now able to capture more control of their businesses. Previously guessing at upcoming weather conditions, they now just make a call. "Middlemen used to squeeze these people because they had all the information. Now they can go directly to the marketplace and find the requirements," Yunis said. The "telephone lady" entrepreneurs are earning nearly $500 per month, about the same as a bank CEO in Bangladesh. By the way, the telephone ladies also use solar panels on top of their homes because there is no electricity. Microcredit is now available in more than 80 countries that have recently emulated Yunis' concept, including the United States and Canada. Yunis wants companies and financial institutions to create separate divisions to look at the underdeveloped countries to expand business and help people change their lives. "Poor people don't create poverty. Poverty is created by our institutions. So why can't we design our institutions in a different way to create opportunities?" Yunis asked. The name game Just when we were getting used to 3G (third generation) wireless as a standard acronym -- never mind that the term fails to designate any actual technology -- now Sprint and Verizon in their infinite wisdom have decided that if one alphanumeric pair is good, two would be even better. So get used to the sound of 3G-1X. The 1X stands for the first iteration of 144Kbps wireless access. Unfortunately, the telecommunications giants are not done with us yet. Next year they will introduce 3G-1XEVDO. I should run a contest to see who might guess what the heck that means, but I'll tell you. EVDO works out to be EVolution Data Only and will offer 2.4Gbps access. This will be the optimal performance, mind you; there is no guarantee you'll ever actually get this. But it is, as the initials imply, a data-only channel unencumbered by sharing a voice line, and will be sold as such. Finally, we'll see 3G-1XEVDV, for Evolution, Data, and Voice. Verizon executives refused to speculate on the performance of this, the third generation of 3G. Prediction As the economy turns down, Silicon Valley will dress up. Were the T-shirt and sneakers a subtle sign of disrespect for the economy of yesteryear, a thumbing of the nose at the button-down world of Wall Street? Now that the Old Economy has regained its place, will respect for the brick-and-mortar way of doing business spill over into dress codes that include ties and jackets for the male Silicon Valley moguls, or what is left of them? I predict it will. Men in the Silicon Valleys across America will look more like New York bankers and less like kids on spring break. In case you never noticed, most female moguls in the Valley never dressed as poorly as the men. I wonder why that is? If you have any ideas on bridging the digital divide send me an e-mail to ephraim_schwartz@infoworld.com. Get Wireless World via e-mail Get this column free via e-mail each week. Sign up at www.iwsubscribe.com. Ephraim Schwartz is an editor at large in InfoWorld's News Department. He has covered the high-tech industry for 16 years. MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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