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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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AUGUST 19, 2003
Technology with Social Skills [Page 2 of 2] MAPPING TROUBLED AREAS. Not all sensible solutions are low tech, however. Take poverty mapping, the new darling of the development community. Using census data, along with global positioning satellite technology, development agencies are creating high-tech maps that highlight areas of poverty. They interpolate based on such statistics as GDP per capita or daily subsistence levels, or using such measures of well-being as life expectancy, child mortality, and literacy. The maps allow global organizations -- much more accurately than before -- to pinpoint the areas that most desperately need food and emergency resources, such as grain, fertilizer, or medicines. Brazil's largest state, Minas Gerais, is using poverty maps to redistribute annual tax revenues of $1 billion to poorer municipalities that are making an effort to invest in health, education, sanitation, and environmental conservation. (See "Plotting the War on Terror and Disease".) Poverty maps become more powerful when combined with other, sometimes seemingly unrelated data. For example, South African emergency response teams combined data on sanitation and safe water supplies with information from a poverty-mapping initiative to create a strategy to contain a cholera outbreak in KwaZulu Natal province in early 2001. The data helped contain the disease in three months and limit fatality rates to 0.22% of those who were infected, the lowest ever recorded during a cholera epidemic. Perhaps the greatest leap forward, however, has to do with innovative ways to target and distribute technology. Across the globe, so-called social entrepreneurs are finding ways to bring technology to disadvantaged groups that otherwise might be left behind, including the poor, the sick, and the disabled. "DEMYSTIFYING THE COST STRUCTURE." Project Impact in Berkeley, Calif., is dedicated to making medical technology, such as intraocular lenses used in cataract surgery and hearing aids, available and affordable to the world's poor. Around the globe, 55 million people are blind, two-thirds because of cataracts. Project Impact Executive Director David Green's brainchild, AuroLab -- now an independent company based in India -- has developed cheaper manufacturing processes that allow it to sell intraocular lenses for $4, vs. more than $100 in the U.S. Through the Affordable Hearing Aid Project (AHAP), Green can manufacture high-end hearing aids, which sell commercially for $2,000 to $3,000 each, for $45. Project Impact distributes them for zero and $200 each, depending on the patient's ability to pay. "The key to making any technology affordable is demystifying the cost structure," says Green. He accuses medical outfits of deliberately selling medical technology at high prices because they prefer to be in a low-volume, high-margin business than a high-volume, low-margin one. His aim -- by developing similar technology and taking control of manufacturing -- is to turn the medical-technology business on its head. So far, Green has raised $2.6 million to fund AHAP. He plans to ramp up distribution by partnering with social organization The Lions and Bangladesh's Grameen Bank. Green isn't alone. Three years ago, Victoria Hale created the first nonprofit pharmaceutical outfit, OneWorld Health (OWH), in San Francisco. Its goal: To find cures for infectious diseases that plague the developing world but that might never prove profitable for U.S. drug giants. Hale persuades for-profit companies to donate their research on afflictions such as Chagas disease, a parasitic ailment that has infected more than 16 million people worldwide and kills 45,000 people annually. OWH then uses grant money and donations to complete clinical trials and deliver affordable drugs to the developing world. For Chagas disease, OWH has identified an oral drug, K-777. And in November, 2001, it successfully negotiated for the right to develop the drug as an antiparasitic agent from patent owner Celera, which is based in Rockville, Md. OWH is currently testing the drugs on animals and hopes to begin human trials soon. FILLING THE GAP. Then there's Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, the nonprofit that created the Martus software program. Based in Silicon Valley, Benetech got its start selling PC readers for the blind. Today, it operates BookShare, an Internet library with 14,000 books where blind, visually impaired, and learning-disabled people can legally store and share scanned publications. Benetech is also working on a prototype of a wireless handheld device that would allow people with disabilities better access to common devices such as ATMs, vending machines, or office appliances such as copiers and printers. "There are a lot of great tech applications that help society but aren't $50 million-a-year markets with a 30% return on investment," says Fruchterman. "And what falls in the gap is great stuff that should get done but isn't going to get funded by venture capitalists." (See "Assistive Tech Needs a Hand in D.C.".) It's through efforts such as these that technology is making its greatest contribution to solving social problems. No technology, no matter how advanced, can solve world poverty or social justice. But putting the right tools in the right hands at the right price is a start. "I'm not so optimistic to believe that Martus will reduce the number of human-rights violations," says the Asia Foundation's Steve Rood. "But with increased sharing of information, we believe we can improve communication and maybe bring people to justice." And that adds a whole new dimension to the meaning of technology revolution.
 By Jane Black in New York
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