From time to time, I find myself at confabs and conferences for the North American technorati and we get carried away about ideas like high-speed wireless Internet services streaming to all sorts of IP-enabled devices and gadgets that will be so dirt cheap everyone will have one. Heck, just yesterday, for a story on the launch of Microsoft's Halo 2, I came across some research that suggested that more than 40 per cent of all Canadian homes have at least one videogame console and that, of those, more than half are likely to have two or more videogame consoles by the end of this year.
And yet, the United Nations is reporting today that there are 1.6 billion people in the world who do not have electricity in their homes. Needless to say, getting more Internet bandwidth to these homes is a pretty low priority.
"Day in and day out, rural women spend hours at a time gathering fuel-wood, inefficiently processing food and inhaling smoke from wood-fired cooking stoves," said Susan McDade, a New York-based UN project manager.
"For these women and their families, dependence on traditional fuels and fuel technologies barely allows fulfilment of the basic human needs of nutrition, warmth and lighting, let alone the opportunity for more productive activities."
The UN cites some research that suggests that bringing energy and electricity to poor rural areas is one of the most effective ways of fighting poverty. And to get electricity to the poorest 700 million people in the world, one professor suggests it would require an infrastructure investment of about $20-billion (U.S.) a year for the next 10 years.
Why shouldn't we be able to do that?