Bono on How Technology Can Transform the World
52-year-old Irishman (born Paul Hewson) is also a technology investor and an activist who cofounded the ONE and (RED) organizations, which are devoted to eradicating extreme poverty and AIDS. He has spent years urging Western leaders to forgive the debts of poor nations and to increase funding for AIDS medicines in Africa. ..... antiretrovirals, a complex 15-drug AIDS regimen compressed into one pill a day (now saving eight million lives); the insecticide-treated bed net (cut malaria deaths by half in eight countries in Africa in the last three years); kids’ vaccinations (saved 5.5 million lives in the last decade); the mobile phone, the Internet, and spread of information—a deadly combination for dictators, for corruption. ...... In Africa, things are changing so rapidly. What’s been a slow march is suddenly picking up pace in ways we could not have imagined even 10 years ago. Innovations like farmers using mobile phones to check seed prices, for banking, for sending payments … to the macro effect we saw with the Arab Spring thanks to Facebook and Twitter. ......... Great ideas to me are like great melodies. They are instantly recognizable, memorable, and have some sort of inevitable arc ........ In the tech world, it’s hard to imagine there being any better form or function to a lot of Apple’s products. ........ The Apollo program in its day was 4 percent of the federal budget. All U.S. overseas assistance is just 1 percent, with 0.7 percent going to issues that affect the poorest people. I believe that extreme poverty is the biggest challenge we have. ........ You could boost farming productivity in Africa, which is twice as effective at reducing poverty as anything else. ..... Corruption is deadly, but there’s a vaccine for that too—it’s called transparency. Daylight. ....... we can end a few things that just don’t belong in the 21st century. Like AIDS, like malaria, like polio. ....... social movements are the things that make the real difference, people from different walks of life coming together to stand up for what they believe in. Whether they do it by marching, by writing, by tweeting, by posting, by singing, or by going to jail. ........ Collecting more data and more open data so we can drill down further on knowing what to do ..... Hundreds of thousands marched in the “Drop the Debt” campaign, and now an extra 51 million kids in Africa are going to school because of monies freed up by debt cancellation—it’s a staggering number
