the digital war on poverty

The digital divide（數碼鴻溝）is beginning to close. The flow of digital information（數字訊息的流動）-- through mobile phones, text messaging, and the Internet（手機 / 短訊 / 互聯網）-- is now reaching the world's masses, even in the poorest countries, bringing with it a revolution in economics, politics, and society.
Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation, especially rural isolation. But mobile phones and wireless Internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time.
The digital divide is ending not through a burst of civic responsibility, but mainly through market forces. Mobile phone technology is so powerful, and costs so little per unit of data transmission, that it has proved possible to sell mobile phone access to the poor. There are now more than 3.3 billion subscribers in the world, roughly one for every two people on the planet.
......
Education will be similarly transformed. Throughout the world, schools at all levels wil go global, joining together in worldwide digital education networks（全球數字教育網絡）. Children in the United States will learn about Africa, China, and India not only from books and videos, but also through direct links across classrooms in different parts of the world. Students will share ideas through live chats, shared curricula, joint projects, and videos, photos, and text sent over the digital network.
Universities, too, will have global classes, with students joining lectures, discussion groups, and research teams from a dozen or more universities at a time. This past year, my own university -- Columbia University in New York City -- teamed up with universities in Ecuador, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, France, Ethiopia, Malaysia, India, Canada, Singapore, and China in a "Global Classroom" that simultaneously connected hundreds of students on more than a dozen campuses in an exciting course on global sustainable development.
In my book The End of Poverty, I wrote that extreme poverty can be ended by the year 2025. a rash predication, perhaps, given global violence, climate change, and threats to food, energy, and water supplies. But digital information technologies（數碼訊息技術）, if deployed cooperatively and globally, will be our most important new tools, because they will enable us to join together globally in markets, social networks, and cooperative efforts to solve our common problems.
（Jeffrey Sachs）