When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say
we’re going to do something about malaria.
Well I disagree Mr Gates because the two are not mutually exclusive. Government ought to focus on the provision of amenities whereas big Tech companies like Microsoft, HP, Google, IBM, Infosys, etc (including local telcos) need to engage with the theming and enterprising youth of the continent to provide home-grown value addition services which lower the transaction costs of businesses [e.g. M-PESA or mPedigree or other simplified and interconnected cloud based data processing facilities for analysing demographic data] in an environment that nurtures innovation and creates shared value.
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