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Pencil Technologies Ltd is an ethical for-profit company whose mission is to alleviate poverty, improve education and strengthen the voice of the world's rural poor through the innovation of new information and communication technologies. Pencil believes that the alleviation of poverty is one of the most pressing uses of technology in the world today, and that the right technology can achieve meaningful change in the quality of lives. Pencil believes that education, in any and all its forms, it a critical underpinning for long-term advancement. Pencil believes that voice, the ability to speak and be heard, to collaborate as equals with those around and have a say in how your needs are addressed is an essential underpinning for the successful design of technology. Pencil believes that communication technology has a key part to play in all these. Pencil believes that a strong and vibrant market already exists among the poor for products and services that genuinely address their needs at a capital and operating cost that they can realistically afford, and that strengthening this market is an essential part (but only a part) of providing tools for advancement. In order to respond to these beliefs, Pencil Technologies Ltd operates on four key principles:
Participate Rural communities have very different needs for technology than wealthier urban communities. The most obvious is cost, with prices often needing to be 5% of the US price to achieve equivalence. Many other factors differ markedly, including ruggedness, ergonomics, cultural factors, language, power usage and lifetime. Several of the key design factors are not understood by the designers of technology, differ from community to community, and are not well-documented. Pencil believes a participatory approach to eliciting needs, testing ideas, refinining aesthetics and determining distribution is essential. Pencil is committed to working closely with rural communities to discover their need and focus design, and is committed to designing products in a way that can easily be customised by and for different communities. Innovate With new needs come new solutions. Particularly when judged against the cost of installing major infrastructure such as internet connectivity, cellphone towers and the like, the cost of radical redesign can be small compared to the savings it can provide. Pencil is committed to rethinking all aspects of technology to provide optimium products at affordable prices. We are rethinking not just the products themselves, but also their manufacture, to provide usability, maintainability and sustainability. Share Pencil believes a key part of alleviating poverty is ensuring that rural communities receive a greater return for their work and this requires access to a greater part of the value-chain. Portable skills, flexible technologies and access to markets, together with a good information-flow, can be instrumental in raising income levels and raise living standards. Pencil is committed to designing its products in a manner that will, over time, create stronger value-chains for the poor, enable participation in a greater proportion of the value-chain and facilitate access to global markets. Challenge Pencil believes there are many unhelpful assumptions commonly found in attitudes towards the rural poor. Pencil is committed to asking hard questions, testing reality on the ground, and challenging those assumptions found to be shaky. Why For-Profit? Pencil believes solutions to poverty cannot ignore the economic interests that contribute to it, nor the scale of work yet to be done. Pencil believes that to achieve a global impact requires that local impacts bring a real return to the poor and provide all who take part with a means to spread the benefits. Pencil believes that a for-profit approach is the right way to strengthen pro-poor economic ecosystems, to provide incentives for financial and human capital to address the pressing problems, and to grow a fund of opportunity that grows a wealth of solutions. |