Over the last year or so, we have seen tremendous momentum towards the potential for mobile phones for development in low-income countries. This has followed a dramatic spread of phones throughout many areas where no prior method of electronic communication was stable.

It is not that everybody has a mobile phone yet—most of the poorest billion people in the world do not. But everywhere I’ve gone, even areas of extreme poverty, somebody local has a phone and many people have access to one. It’s clearly an expanding platform that gives us new reach.