Casey
I had an interesting lunch yesterday with Paul Clifford, Director of Planning & Strategy at Cisco’s headquarters in China. Paul is heading up a $50 million fund through the China Development Bank(CDB) where Cisco and the CDB use their respective resources to implement a new, technology based, model of development.
One idea for the initiative is to create a new Sustainable City - a city in a rural area that would be completely wired, or shall I should say, wired-less and environmentally sustainable. While the traditional Sustainable City is a revolutionary concept in terms of development and sustainable growth, this would take the current model to a new level.
To give you an idea of what Clifford is talking about. Let's look at Dongtan. Dongtan is the world's first Eco-City. Dongtan was presented at the UN World Urban Forum by China as an example of an eco-city, and is the first of up to four such cities to be designed and built in China by ARUP. The cities are planned to be ecologically friendly, with zero-greenhouse-emission transit and complete self-sufficiency in water and energy, together with the use of zero energy building principles. Dongtan was planned to open, with accommodation for 50,000, in time for the Expo in 2010 in Shanghai. By 2040, the city is slated to be one-third the size of Manhattan, with a total planned population of 500,000. The project has fallen behind schedule, with Arup's architects expecting only a tenth of the expected population to be in place by 2010.
Think about the possibilities of one of these cities. Let's look at healthcare. In rural areas of China today, if someone contracts a disease such as cancer, his chance of survival is pretty close to zero. There are no doctors in areas to treat the disease, if those doctors do exist, they most likely cannot afford treatment, not to mention have the money to pay to go to a big city like Beijing or Shanghai for quality medical treatment.
Cisco’s Sustainable City is one solution. Patients can obtain virtual medical consulting using Cisco’s streaming video and audio platform. At no costs, doctors can examine patients, do diagnoses, and create appropriate methods of treatment, providing treatment to clients who would have never dreamed of having access to modern medical services.
No think of the possibilities of microfinance in a Sustainable City. Paul brought up an interesting idea of placing a virtual bank next to the medical consulting area. This type of technology could not only provide a means of distributing capital to clients, but also provide them with access to a world of information and virtual markets that could provide them a new potential level of success and growth in their microenterprises. Imagine an organic farmer in rural Sichuan that could access market prices and coordinate with vendors at a boutique grocery store in Shanghai. Now she could sell her vegetables for five times the price as the market down the road from her village. She might even make enough revenue to rent neighboring land and hire others from her village to work in her microenterprise.
Before, a loan would have enabled her to buy the seeds, fertilizer, and supplies to grow her crops, sell them at market, repay her loan, and have some extra cash to send her daughter to school. However, her income would hit a ceiling that she couldn’t pass as she maxed out the amount she could grow on her land. She and her neighbors would run into the same problem that Malthus predicted where Capital and Labor can only go so far until development hits a wall. With a Sustainable City, now she can actually be a part of growing a local economy.
It is amazing to think of the synergies between microfinance and technology. Paul has opened a whole new world of microfinance and technology interfacing that I did not even know could exist. Thinking in Paul terms, www.wokai.org doesn't seem like half the challenge it did yesterday...
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