Almost two years ago, Jeremy praised Kiva here on Tech IT Easy. I’m also a strong believer in microlending and Kiva. It makes a lot of sense to help build businesses and help entrepreneurship thrive in developing countries.

But, for entrepreneurship and business to work, the would-be entrepreneurs need skills. Here in the western world we might take education as granted, but this isn’t the case in many developing countries. Even if free education is available, the opportunity cost for families to let their kids attend school might be too high. If you’ve ever browsed through Kiva the entrepreneurs’ profiles, you might have noticed that many of them state they’re aiming to get their children good education and that most businesses are relatively low-tech.

This all is why I see that projects that aim to teach important skills to people in developing countries as at least as important as making small businesses work. And this is why I’d love if you, dear readers, could pitch in to my girlfriend Satu’s and her colleague Pia’s fundraising effort to raise £4,000 for VSO’s Accenture Kilimanjaro Challenge.

They are taking part in the Accenture Kilimanjaro Challenge, which is a charity project by VSO and Accenture to support VSO’s work in East Africa by climbing the cool Mt. Kilimanjaro. All the money these two geeks raise will go to VSO’s projects in East Africa (they’ll pay for their trip themselves). You can read what VSO does, for example in Mt. Kilimanjaro’s Tanzania. What I learned was that even though basic education is free in Tanzania, only half pass the primary learning exam. In my opinion it isn’t enough to throw OLPCs at these kids, the whole education system needs more resources, from schools to teachers and the students themselves.

So, go show some Tech IT Easy geek-love and help put these girls at top of the summit. You’ll find more information about their project at their sites. You can follow the Satu’s & Pia’s fundraising effort at their fundraising site, their blog or at their Facebook group.

I hope that through VSO’s work, we will be able to see more Tanzanian and other East African entrepreneurs on Kiva in the future. Join me in making this real by donating as little as £2 to the girls’ fundraising effort.

Also, I encourage you to start the habit of lending as little as $25 to an entrepreneur in developing world at Kiva. And, if you feel like it, give an OLPC for a kid at $199 a piece.

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Premise: A while ago, Fred Wilson, a (possibly biased) tech-investor, wrote that he was bullish on the tech-industry. Recently, the New York Times reports that e-commerce is up because people want to travel less (fuel costs). And previous stories reported on the migration of advertising revenues from traditional media to online media.

A note: I don’t know that there will be a recession. I know that the real-estate bust in the US is a pretty big deal, and that banks from Europe and Asia have been pretty heavily invested in that supposed goldmine. And any fall-out in the US, i.e. banks shutting down or otherwise, will likely have global repercussions on the banking-sector, and affect other industries also.

With that out of the way, three problems/phenomena I associate with these times are:

• A lack of accountability in investments (e.g. currently real estate and previously startups & Enron), also accompanied by emotions like fear & greed.
• Rising input-costs (the market should normally adjust for that, but the explosive growth in demand from emerging countries + the lack of an alternative for, in this case, fuel, make this a pretty big uncertainty)
• Changing paradigms, such as the rise of webware, the (expected) fall of hardware-prices, the possible fall of software-sales, the continuing displacement of brick & mortar business models, businesses being forced to go & think green, and much, much more.

So, there’s probably a few more symptoms (throw them out in the comments!), but it seems to me that the internet is pretty well placed to deal with some of these problems.

Let’s start with accountability. The strength of the web is that everything on it is digital and, in theory, nearly (*) everything can be measured (*: I am quite sceptical about the measurability of video & audio, though arguable the serious data is still in text). Added to this, there are technology-shifts, like digital television, mobile computing, and E-Ink, which make it easier to have a wider reach as a data-gatherer, not to mention that business are increasingly placing their data online, again facilitating data-exchange in partnerships. This should make it easier for businesses to base their expense on actual data, the same for investors and advertisers. Together with the consequences of the last internet-bust, I think that everyone is pretty careful to base their decisions on information, not hopes and dreams (well, I’m still sceptical about Twitter).

Next, rising input prices. Having blogged on the topic of food and retail for about a year, I’ve obviously had to follow this trend/reality quite a bit. The NYTimes heading I linked to above summarises my feelings quite well, customers are looking at the opportunity cost of fuel (as well as the cost of being green) and alternatives like e-commerce may seem much more attractive. In the long-term, people like James Howard Kunstler are calling for more and more “locality,” i.e. that people will be willing to migrate less for work and, I guess, shopping, which opens up opportunities for e-commerce and ways of working across a distance.

Finally (?), changing paradigms. Well, whatever the new world looks like, a pretty warm place is reserved for the web. Web-apps and -services are maturing, offering more and better features, and providing individuals and businesses with a comfortable ecosystem to operate in. The OLPC, the Asus EEE, and other cheaper systems (when Dell comes in, it will be mass), may be less powerful, but they will be optimised to use the web most of all. Societally, it may eventually become the logical choice for the mainstream to spend less than $500 for a laptop, in which case hardware-makers and, possibly, software-makers will suffer. But the web won’t. Similarly, while I don’t yet see brick & mortar disappearing, it is clear that eventually 99% of B&M businesses will have to have an online presence. About the world going green, I can’t sell everything, perhaps someone else can give the answer to that.

Is the internet recession-proof? My guess is as good as the next guy. But, more efficient use of computing, datamining, search, advertising, e-commerce, and logistics are all technologies I am extremely bullish on these coming years.

What do you think?

Vincent

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