UN General Assembly
2019

Luckily for us, technological advances are short- circuiting the path that leads us out of poverty, and it is no longer the long and tortuous road it used to be. A mere 20 years ago, mobile phones were a rarity that some feared would become a developed-world status symbol and another sign of the technology gap between rich and poor. Today the poorest person in the most inaccessible place in the poorest country has a mobile phone — often a smartphone. In many ways, that has transformed our lives. In the year 2000 in Ghana, there were 90,000 mobile-phone subscribers; today there are more than 41 million. That has led to a remarkable change in the communications within our country and with the outside world. A sizeable and growing proportion of the population has been and continues to be brought into the formal banking sector by the mobile phone.