July 13th, 2005
BBC NEWS | Technologies ‘to aid the poor’
The best way to help developing nations is to recognise that development is “of the people, by the people and for the people”, says a Bangladeshi entrepreneur.Iqbal Quadir, Grameen Phone founder in Bangladesh, told experts gathered for TED Global in Oxford that aid strategies for the last 60 years had failed.
Technologies such as mobiles empowered people because they connected them. This, he said, fuelled productivity much more than the top-down aid approach.
