How Technology Democratised Development

Over the coming weeks, A Matter of Life and Tech will feature a range of voices from people helping to build Africa’s tech future. This week, mobile innovator Ken Banks argues that technology has become a vital tool in the fight against poverty.

Twenty years ago, if you were information technology-literate and interested in international development, your options were limited. That’s how things were for me when, in 1993, armed with ten years programming and networking experience I began turning my attention to the developing world.

My efforts didn’t get me far. The information technology revolution we see today had barely started at home, let alone in many of the developing nations. If you weren’t an English teacher, a doctor, a policy maker, an economist or a dam builder, careers in development seemed somewhat limited.

How things have changed. Driven largely by the spread of the world wide web and the burgeoning mobile phone sector, opportunities to develop solutions to many of the world’s social and environmental problems have reached almost every bedroom and garden shed in the land...