LEVERAGING DEVELOPMENT WITH TECHNOLOGY AND MICROFINANCE

The poor are typically isolated, lacking opportunities and being\r\ndeprived of necessary developmental assets such as proper communication and\r\nnetworking. Network theories may thus act as an original starting point for\r\ninterpreting issues of poverty, which can be alleviated by combining basic\r\ntechnology with affordable funding programs such as microcredit. Value-adding\r\ntechnology, levered by microfinance, may then be sequentially added to the\r\ndevelopment paradigm. To the extent that technology and microfinance can be\r\nsuitably combined, they may lever scalable productivity, in a way similar to\r\nMetcalfe’s exponential upsides for networking organizations. This may happen for instance with M-banking, within a ‘digital culture’ environment, and with viral social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, or Mobile Apps.