This is a very complicated issue, and I'm not really qualified to provide a full response. Just a few ideas:

1/ Poor people are a problem for commercial enterprises! They've got no money. So privately produced technology is not directly available.

2/ Most governments now claim to have too little money to provide anything but the basics.

3/ Charities have limited resources and are too often focused on a particular group. No good for general improvement.

So I don't see any easy path to improvement. Reconditioned old technology, whatever charity can provide, and telling government it must do better.

Christopher NOCK

Really, this is reality Christopher.

Unfortunately so.

NOCK

João Batista Ferreira

Interisting for me is the statement "that there are several free or unused technological means that should be used for social and humanistic issues in favor of poverty reduction". I would like to hear some details which justify this assertion.

Thanks, Hein Retter

Hein Retter, the new technologies are mostly used improperly, for banal purposes, that is, without any purpose, causing even the loss of time. As an example, we can cite the use of social networks and the application WhatsApp are used too much for no specific purpose.

A simple social network can be used for the sake of poverty reduction, such as websites, blogs, among countless other technologies. However, the interest, the will to do something for a suffering class that sometimes becomes the factor difficult.

I am thinking of underdeveloped countries, lacking in infrastructure with not as many opportunities for it's population. In Europe we have ISDN, high-speed intrenet connections, train-system, highways and such. People can easily live in the countryside and work in the city due to public transport that is available and affordable, or they might be working at a home-office and so forth.

From a traditional perspective one would expect any African country to have to go through all stages of development until finally reaching the European standard and since we too progress will never be able to catch up. There is the rub: due to modern technology they do not actually have to go through the length of each and every single step of development. They might skip some of them. Why, for instance, should they lay out kilometers of cable for telephone and internet if they might just as well evect towers for mobile devices? Even the poor will be enabled to connect that way. Cheap and available devices are already in production and affordable, not to mention used ones. What is the use of people surfing the internet you might be asking.

The first aspect would be easy access to information, ways to communicate and organize. This might proof incredibly valuable for local producers and production communities when dealing with European customers when it comes to coffee and kokoa-beans. It is a way of impowering too, since people get access to news and might be in the position to question their sometimes corrupt government. Also access to information and learning facilities is a problem, since you need money for schooling that some people might not have to their disposal. The internet (if used for more than chatting, Instagram and Twitter-rants) could provide all that. Most practical: information on new ways of production, assistance from their peers in that respect.

Now I do not expect people to buy and set up a computer before buying bread, but having access to one from time to time might be enough for the start, just as one tractor can change living-conditions for a whole community. (In most parts of Africa a tractor is technology too!)

Following such an interesting discussion!

Foe example, e- teaching can make education available tp those that can't access it easily ( free online courses, etc.)

Good question. This emerging distributed-ledger technology (DLT) of blockchain is the most effective tool ever for reducing inequality. Let us stop and think. If human action is transparent, and available to nearly everyone, rent-seeking reduces drastically. Yet DLT does not drive sociology. It is the other way round. People are embracing DLT with the same motivation as social media or indeed this platform (RG). Why? We are seeing a wave of stronger appreciation of humanity and the environment. This jolt dubbed fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is way stronger than we perceive in common talk. You might ask, how did we get to this point (4IR)? Perhaps we don’t have an exact answer. We are a dynamical system. Cf. Preprint Transport and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Mirna Leko-Šimić

The think that the empirical evidence on MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) shows that the MOOCs have not been very effective, and simply reinforces existing inequalities.

Could someone present robust empirical evidence either for or against the effectiveness of MOOCs? Then at least we can try and discuss some “facts on the ground”, rather than speculating in the clouds (computing!!)