When the world's richest computer magnate writes off half the world as a potential market, it's time to sit up and take notice. According to Bill Gates, the poor countries of the world need help with their health and education systems before they need Western technology - including that provided by Microsoft.
Recently, Gates told the Digital Dividends conference in Seattle that the market of people who make $1 a day - up to half the world's population - was "not a significant market".
"Do people have a clear idea of what it means to make $1 a day?" Gates asked his audience of well-heeled diplomats, CEOs and politicians. "There is no electricity. No power systems. These people are trying to stay alive. There is no need for a PC."
When the conference chairman suggested that Gates didn't "get it" in relation to the Internet, Microsoft's founder responded quickly. "I've never been a `get it' kind of guy. But I get there are other things these people need other than technology."
Maybe Bill just got out of bed on the wrong side on the day, but his comments have unleashed a lively debate about the benefits or otherwise of technology in eliminating poverty.
It's a classic "chicken and egg" situation in which Gates clearly believes you have to have basic levels of literacy and wealth in the developing world before the new technologies can grow.
The more orthodox view, expressed for example by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the same conference, is that the emerging technologies can help poor countries catch up on the rich West. "Some countries will be able to skip entire layers of infrastructure that we had to build," Bezos said. "Locations with poor landline infrastructure can go directly to cellular and fibre."
Unfortunately for Bezos, there is little evidence so far to support his vision. The so-called "digital divide" is growing on two levels: between the rich and poor countries; and between the rich and the poor in the developed West.
The facts make this clear. More than half the world has never used a telephone. While 40 per cent of the US population use the Internet, only 1.6 per cent of Asians and 0.3 per cent Africans do so. Over 80 per cent of Web pages and 90 per cent of documents on the Internet are in English.
Some 96 per cent of Internet host computers are in the highest income nations, which have only 16 per cent of the world's population. New York City has more Internet hosts than the entire continent of Africa.
Worse than this, the growth of Internet usage in Africa is slowing down. Now that the economic elites are online, penetration is reaching saturation levels. Red tape further impedes the spread of technology. At present, 17 African countries have fewer than 1,000 Internet users. Across the continent, the vast majority of users tend to be university-educated and male.
According to the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, Mark Malloch Brown, an important crossroads has been reached: "We see the digital economy is growing so rapidly in the North, but if we leave it to market instincts the South will get left behind - badly.
"It would be a foolish Internet tycoon who turned his back on half the world," Brown told The Irish Times on a recent visit to Dublin. "We have to be careful not to let IT spending displace investment in basic health and education, but the new technologies can play a role in delivering services more efficiently."
Brown gives the examples of AIDS-ravaged southern Africa, where 30 per cent of doctors and teachers have succumbed to the disease. Could IT not make up for this crisis by helping to deliver distance learning and healthcare, he asks?
E-governance, he suggests, can help cut red tape for small businesses by removing the middleman and providing more choice. Efforts are being made to tackle the problem. Last month, the UN appointed a former president of Costa Rica to lead its drive to bridge the digital divide. Jose-Maria Figueres has been charged with leading the Information and Communication Technologies Advisory Group, which will try to figure out ways of bringing the Internet and other technologies to the developing world.
UNDP has been given a leadership role in the UN structure in co-ordinating the activities of business and humanitarians. On a global level, the organisation already claims some successes. The organisation says it has connected more than 15 countries to the Internet for the first time, and created 5,000 websites for governments and other organisations.
In Bangladesh for instance, GrameenPhone, the Grameen Bank's mobile phone business, has brought modern communications technology to women in over 1,200 villages. The project works in the same way as the bank's micro-loan programme, by giving rural women access to credit. Women who live in a central part of the village can borrow the $350 needed to buy a solar-powered mobile phone. After a day's training, the woman provides phone services to other villagers for a price. The "telephone woman" earns on average $450 a year after expenses, and the rest of the village gets access to information and services that would otherwise remain beyond its grasp.
Meanwhile in Africa, a US NGO is developing a satellite-based communication system that promises to provide remote communities with e-mail access. One of the main aims of the project will be to allow villages with little or no medical services to access health information at low cost.
Ireland chipped in with a £300,000 contribution to the UN Digital Divide Fund, half of it from Ireland Aid and half from the Department of Public Enterprise. The grant was announced during Brown's recent visit to Dublin; UNDP has been charged with administering the fund.
There is also talk of drawing on Ireland's digital expertise in support of developing countries and seeing if other countries can learn from our success in building up a modern technology infrastructure.
But as everyone who has worked in development knows, the Third World is littered with dried-out dams, leaky pumps, cracked highways and other monuments to the failure of aid. So what guarantee is there that the computer generation won't create the its own white elephants, albeit on a micro scale? There isn't and we could. But as Brown points out, earlier development failures grew out of the aid community's partnership with engineers. "IT, in contrast, was developed by the marketing people, so there's a reasonable chance that we'll hear what people actually want and then get it right."