Socio-economic benefits with more communications?

Many things have been written about the correlation existing between telecommunication industry and GDP of the country. Although this has been proven in various countries, my concern is more about what these services have achieved, in fact, to all society levels, specially when it comes to basic needs such as health and education.

Why I say this? Well, after more than 20 years of mobile services in Latin America, we can only see very few experimental/pilot success stories, and not a widespread implementation of the potential benefits in education and health efficiencies, that can be provided by the use of wireless technologies.

mHealth

Among the different countries, as expected, Mexico and Brazil are the ones who have been more active on the initiative, and the majority of the rest of the countries have at the most one implementation of mHealth, and surely, for PR purposes, to market "Social Responsibility" initiatives, and not for the actual benefits of the population. You can confirm this at the Connected Living tracker document produced by GSMA. Only a total of 95 implementations.

MLearning & mEducation:

The situation is even worse, according to the same source: only 40 deployments in South America. The potential of using mobile services to improve the quality of education has been neglected by a number of reasons, from technological (lack of connectivity, safety of carrying high tech-high cost products at dangerous locations, etc.) are hinderers of execution.

The bottom line:

But let's face it! There is a more important reason behind the ack of widespread of the potential use of wireless technologies to elevate the quality of living of its citizens. The point is really, is this something that will allow me as a government to look successful on my most important tasks? Or is it better for us, as Government, to continue "investing" in more populist measures that can "actually" give us more chance to be re-elected. Definitely no. The visibility for using these high tech solutions only impact a few number of the population, and they seldom understand what is happening to make the mHealth or mEducation service, better and more efficient. Also it is more visible with Brick and Mortar solutions, with spaces that people can touch and see. 

What to do? 

The South American governments need to get their act together, and start taking serioulsy for ways to improve the quality of service they are suppose to deliver. I would like to see the governments more worried on how to take advantage of the wireless services provided by the different operators to be more efficient, and stop worrying so much about the "level of signals", or bit-error-rate, or time it takes "to get a call answered by customer service". Don't get me wrong, these are also important, but there are more important thing that need to fixed, and are of the highest priorities, because these are basic human needs, and part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.