Info Lady
Why is a woman cycling around Bangladeshi villages with a laptop on her bike? Because she’s an “Info Lady”.
Info Ladies travel around the countryside bringing the Internet and other tech. services to poor villagers. This is a cottage industry, 21-century style. Farmers whose crops are damaged by an unfamiliar disease get the Info Lady to google the problem. Women whose husbands are working in the Middle East ask the Info Lady to Skype call them. Older people get their blood pressure checked in their homes without having to travel miles to see a doctor.
Also, this isn’t a charity effort, it’s part of a ‘social entreprise’. The Info Ladies do provide some services free, like Google searches, but charge for others, like Skype and pregnancy tests. The local manager of the project, Shahadet says that they could have set it up as a charity, but “a charity relies on donor money and donor money is not consistent whereas the demand for the service is consistent. So, if we set the programme up as a charity, as soon as the donor money stopped, the Info Lady service would have stopped.”
In March 2014, the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development met in Dublin and declared that access to broadband could be “the universal catalyst that lifts developing countries out of poverty and puts access to health care, education and basic social services within reach of all.” In Bangladesh, the Info Ladies have already made a start.
This programme was produced in partnership with Irish Aid.
RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday 16 August, 2pm