Converge Weekly

For low income households (aka bottom of the pyramid, BOP) in Pakistan, phones are more popular than radios but haven’t taken over TVs yet. This is from research conducted by LIRNEasia, a Sri Lanka-based Asia-Pacific information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organization. The study said that in Pakistan, a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households now have 68 TVs, 39 phones, 24 radios and 3 computers. As comparison, for a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households in India, there are 50 TVs, 38 phones, 28 radios and one computer.

This goes against the common perception that radios are more important for low income households. If we look at the current PTA Indicators, around 60% of Pakistani population owns mobile. Mobile is fast replacing Radio because even the lowest level sets now come with added Radio, Apps and games.The LIRNE Asia blog quotes Richard Heek’s paper (ICT4D 2.0: The Next Phase of Applying ICT for International Development):

Finally, some have asked if the Internet should be the focus or if developers should look at where the poor have already “voted with their wallets” and see whether the simpler, cheaper technologies already in use can deliver sufficient ICT functionality to make a difference. Rather than wait for handset and bandwidth upgrades to allow mobile Internet access, we must determine what can be achieved for development through calls and SMS and, possibly, older technologies. Access figures are hard to come by, but we can estimate that something like 80 percent of the population in developing countries has access to a radio, 50 percent to a television.2,3 Early in ICT4D’s history, these statistics prompted the swift reinterpretation of ICT to incorporate radio and television, and foreshadowed the role convergence would play in ICT4D 2.0. Looking at the technologies that already penetrate—mobiles, radios, televisions—developers must now seek ways to add computing and Internet functionality.