Vodafone Connected Women Summit: Turning Ploughshares into Mobiles

This week Julia Hobsbawm invited me to the Connected Women Summit in London. Since J is one of the most connected women anywhere, Professor of Networking, in fact, I expected to find a bunch of clever, high powered women discussing how to become even more so. There were plenty of those, but the summit had nothing to do with Londonistas and everything to do with helping women in the emerging world. The Vodafone Foundation have produced a report with Accenture and Said Business School which speculates that global productivity could increase by $29 billion – the equivalent of the 2012 GDP of Tanzania – by giving women in the developing world greater access to mobile technology. There is merit in the cost/benefit argument that mobiles help people make make money, but the benefits in terms of education, literacy, access to health information and safety are far more obvious and provable. In subsistence economies such as rural India, Turkey and much of Africa, for example, women work together to make and trade goods which provide a necessary, often life-saving income for their households. The Cherie Blair Foundation played a leading role in cajoling Vodafone into action. Despite my misgivings about mobile... More