WSIS, Mobile, Global: Through its systems of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the United Nations is launching initiatives to help eradicate poverty in the world’s underdeveloped regions.

The international community, in turn, is using MDGs to halve extreme poverty by 2015 and instigate a global partnership for development. Reflecting the UN’s plan, Ericsson is partnering with the United Nation's Development Programme (UNDP) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) to promote worldwide communication.

Ericsson, SIDA and the UN are concerned that without more active participation from the private sector, the MDGs stand little chance of meeting the 2015 timeline. It is their strong belief that the Information and Communication Technology sector, and in particular telecoms, has an enormous role to play in achieving the MDGs.

Ericsson has therefore launched a new business model, which is optimised towards providing rural users with mobile coverage. As part of developing the model, a feasibility study was conducted which included analysis of the socio-economic impact of access to communications in Tanzania, as the first country. The study supports the premise that the mobile phone will be one of the technologies with the greatest impact on economic development.

"We are very pleased to announce that UNDP's partnership with Ericsson is moving efforts forward", declares Bruce Jenks, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director, UNDP. "The best way to impact poverty is to stimulate the local economy. This partnership is unique because it is one of the first cases where we can see a solution to poverty founded in market-based incentives and new business models aimed at reaching the poor. In this case we are, together with Ericsson, promoting access to telecommunications, which has proven to support sustainable development. UNDP's role has been to facilitate the business development process and ensure trust and buy-in from local stakeholders," Mr Jenks concludes.

While the number of mobile subscribers in the world has reached 2 billion, in five years from now, the prediction is 3 billion, and every other person on the globe will have a mobile phone. However, the vast majority of new subscribers will be in emerging markets, and each subscriber will have typically lower purchasing power than today's subscribers.

New business models are being developed to address this segment, and they specifically address those markets’ requirements in terms of regulation, lack of infrastructure, lack of technical competence development, reduced total cost of ownership for the operators, and local applications that are suitable to the specific market.