People power in development

10. People power in development will move into a new age

2010 will mark the fifth birthday of YouTube. In 2004 YouTube did not exist, now it gets 1 billion views a day. In 2003 China and India had 100 million internet users. Today that number is 350 million. In most African countries the number of internet users has tripled or quadrupled in the past five years. In 2004, two in ten households in the developing world had a mobile phone subscription while today it is five in ten. These trends will accelerate and we will find ever more uses for them in development. I already see many applications: UNICEF in Malawi using mobile phones to monitor infant nutrition status in real time, international NGOs using mobiles to monitor potential famines, the use of YouTube to connect organisations' field and headquarter operations to promote the sharing of front line innovations, and the use of mobile video to monitor rights abuses. Will this new technology foster a profound new wave of participation in development and change? I think so.