User:Connie L Crosby/Next 3B

Next 3B is a collaboration between a telecommunications company ("telecom"), business, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and governments seeking to address the needs of the next 3 billion people who will join the Internet by 2025. The majority of these people will use mobile devices to access the Internet and will be in developing countries. It is an initiative of Tata Communications Ltd. using a business collaboration method following a Creating Shared Value approach. At the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting closing plenary in September 2015, Tata Communications and MasterCard announced a CGI Commitment to Action to financially empower 25,000 women in developing countries, part of a larger vision to ultimately reach 100 million women.

Mobile Internet in Developing Countries
Adoption of the mobile Internet in developing nations faces two types of challenges :
 * infrastructure issues including Internet access, and
 * access to affordable and sustainable data plans from Internet service providers.

Digital enablement issues are focused on the human aspect including illiteracy, digital literacy, lack of available content in local languages, limited education of the very poor.

According to Pew Research Center:

The lowest internet rates are in some of the poorest countries surveyed. Just 8% of Pakistanis and 11% of Bangladeshis either say they access the internet at least occasionally or own a smartphone. Two-in-ten or fewer have access in Uganda (15%), Tanzania (19%) and India (20%).

"Overall we find that computer ownership, age, English language ability and education have the biggest impact on whether or not someone uses the internet."

Next 3B is concerned with the societal and practical aspects of access to technology generally, and specifically for girls and women. 300 million fewer women own smartphones than men (see Women as Focus).

Women as Focus
Women have less access to technology and smartphones than men, particularly in the developing world. Next 3B looks to empower 100 million women throughout the developing world by providing them with smartphones and mobile applications.

In an October 5, 2015 article for the Huffington Post, Eleanor Goldberg explains: "Giving a woman in a developing country access to such technology plays a key role in her educational development, financial independence and overall well-being." She goes on to explain: "Mobile technology also plays a pivotal role in bringing education to people in need who wouldn’t otherwise have access to reading material." A 2014 UNESCO report also found that reading through smartphones allows women to find ways to read without the worry of finding paper books. Women read six times as much as men.

Business Models
The Next 3B partnerships looks for new business models that are scalable to serve the needs in this emerging market while also having an impact on social change at the grassroots level. Through partnerships between telecom and other businesses, and non-traditional collaborations with NGOs and government, Next 3B looks to create new business models that are adapted to local needs, and offer content and services that are relevant, accessible, and available to users in their own language.

Within the telecom industry, Next 3B also looks to support the economic case to expand networks to cover these underserved populations and explore alternative models for data plans and content funding.

Access to cheaper smartphones can be used to advance access to online financial transactions in addition to education and health resources in what Forbes calls Compassionate Capitalism: "Salgame said maturation of both smartphone technology and microfinance lending have converged so that poor families (and data show it’s primarily women who are drivers of poverty alleviation) now have access to cheap mobile phones where they easily can conduct online banking and transactions. They can use phones for advancing health and education, growing lifespans and enriching minds. This is compassionate capitalism."

First Initiative
The first initiative of Next 3B was launched on September 30, 2015 at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting in New York  It was created as a CGI Commitment to Action  pledged to CGI projects that would financially empower 25,000 women in Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria and India through smartphones. Partners include Tata Communications, Mastercard, Kiva, Tone, Trickle Up and Brightstar.

Next 3B held a workshop to discover local needs for their first pilot of their CGI commitment in Odisha State (formerly Orissa), India in February 2016.

Participants are in a program implementing the Graduation Approach as a successful way to assist the very poor to “establish sustainable self-employment activities and generate lasting improvements in their well-being.“ The Graduation Approach “targets the poorest members in a village and provides a productive asset grant, training and support, life skills coaching, temporary cash consumption support, and typically access to savings accounts and health information or services.“

Partners
The following partners have been named to date :
 * Tata Communications ("founding partner")
 * Mastercard ("founding partner")
 * Kiva
 * Tone
 * Trickle Up
 * Brightstar