What you get is a company providing anti-corruption services to people experiencing roadblocks in their dealings with bribery ridden government departments.  This is gold.

This social enterprise is the brainchild of Shaffi Mather and his partners out of India, and I saw him present their idea at TEDIndia in November this year.  Shaffi’s legitimacy in this space includes his qualification as a lawyer, property developer, and founder of 1298 Ambulance, a cross-subsidy model social enterprise successfully making ambulance services available to the people of Mumbai.

He had realised that the cost of providing people with help in tackling bribery, utilising existing Right to Information legislation, was significantly less than the cost of the bribes being requested. Instant business model, with a ready market (~$1 trillion). Just add chutzpah.

Best part is this. On stage, his flippant remark “We could call it something like bribebusters.com…”, led to an email that night by an international paper requesting an interview with him about this “BribeBusters.com” they’d seen mentioned on the twitter backchannel of the TED event.  1. He hadn’t registered the domain name.  2. He didn’t know whether a company with this name already existed. 3. He immediately registered the (surprisingly) vacant domain name once he recovered from his brief panic, fearing a defamation suit from an existing company.

Whether it will be called Stop Bribery and Prevent Corruption, or BribeBusters.com, its a great story. Listen to his talk below.

Image courtesy http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/1106-sb-OneWeb-Mobile2/

Here’s a link to a short article by Jeffrey Sachs on the digital war on poverty.

Its interesting to see market forces accomplishing a feat NGOs would be unable to (assuming they had wanted to).  As of 2007 over 50% of the world’s population now use mobile phones.  It took 20 years to reach 1 billion, another 3 years to reach 2 billion, and the 3rd billion took just 2 years.   Mobile phones and their future capacity for information distribution are making their way into the hands of the world’s least resourced.  Assuming there is bandwidth left over after everyone’s finished downloading Myley Cyrus ringtones, there will be an opportunity to connect people and distribute something useful.

Mobile phones will initially help enable banking and access to microcredit loans, and as the technology develops, we’ll see a gradual improvement in access to the world’s increasingly organised information.