"Poverty is not about not having money it's the lack of being able to realise yourself as an individual"
Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, 97% of homes and virtually all rural villages lack a telephone, making the country one of the least wired in the world.
Villagers have an average GNI per Capita of $200 yet the aggregate buying power of a whole village can be very different. Grameen Bank and Grameen Telecom very successfully launched an initiative to make small micro loans available to women villages to buy handsets and set up an owner operated Village Phone businesses.
South Africa
Initially as part of their license obligations, Vodacom provides community phones, run by local businessmen as phone shops, under franchise. These business run out of converted shipping containers and consist of several mobile phones strapped to the container. The phone shops operate with a shared access business model.
Nigeria
Across West Africa many people make a living selling individual calls on handsets. Local innovators simple set up on the side of the road under an umbrella reselling calls. These people will offer additional services to users, such as writing down and storing the phone number called in a register, both to help the user check the validity of the phone number, and also aid as a record of calls made for the user, so that he does not need to remember frequently used numbers.
Social innovation
When trying to address the markets at the 'Base of the Pyramid' we cannot just take traditional technology from the developed markets, remove functionality, and lower the price to try and fit within the perceived price range. You must be innovative and create products which meet the specific and different needs of this market.
Technology adoption
Contrary to belief, consumers in this market accept technology very rapidly. The subscribers adopt new technologies easily since they are moving from having nothing, to having something. There is no change.
Creating products that fit
People aspire to brands from the developed world to mark a change in the quality of their life so the innovation that is required is to work out how to give them the brand or service of their dreams at an affordable price. This is where we must use the most advanced technology, combine it with the existing infrastructure and just apply it differently to create new products to address the market with radically different and lower cost structures.
Another answer is to aggregate demand, where an individual subscriber may not be able to afford a service, a group or even a whole village may. Shared access is rapidly becoming a standard model for providing ICT in this market.
BoP Mobile Life in Kenya from Movirtu on Vimeo.