Grameenphone Ltd. of Bangladesh has been nominated for the GSMA Best Use of Mobile for Social and Economic Development award 2007 for its HealthLine Service initiative. The HealthLine Service, implemented in cooperation with the Telemedicine Reference Center Limited, is a 24-hour Medical Call Center manned by licensed physicians and can be reached by dialing 789 from any GP number.

Doctors are on hand 24 x 7 to answer questions on medical emergencies, faciliites, drugs, and lab tests. Registered users can speak directly with a doctor about their specific condition. In a country where hospitals are few and far between, and travel is often difficult and time-consuming, this is a huge social benefit.

Registration costs Tk300 per year (about $5), and calls cost Tk15 for 3 minutes, Tk5 for every minute thereafter. (Tk60=$1.)

I discussed a fledgling telemedicine program with GrameenPhone chairman Khalid Shams while researching the book, but didn’t mention it because the program was not taking hold. It just shows you how quickly things are changing — six months later, the nascent program is well-enough developed to catch the eyes of the global GSM Association.

In 2000, GrameenPhone won the GSM in the Community award for its village-phone service, which extends telecommunications into remote rural areas. Village-phone ladies borrown money from Grameen Bank to buy phones, then lease time to villagers to pay back the loans.

The award winner will be announced at the GSMA conference in Barcelona in mid February.

A very interesting opinion piece in the Jan. 29 Wall Street Journal notes that both the Nobel Prize winner in economics (Edmund Phelps) and peace (Muhammad Yunus) highlighted the impact of entrepreneurship in their Nobel addresses. “Phelp’s Prize” by Amar Bhide, a professor at Columbia University, and Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, picks at the open wound between plain-old entrepreneuers and social entrepreneurs. I basically agree with them, but I also beg to differ as I think they compare apples and oranges. (I don’t link to the article because I don’t have a subscription to wsj.com.)

Of the 35 winners in economics, 28 never mentioned the word “entrepreneur.” Phelps mentioned it 17 times–more than the total over the previous 19 years! Yunus mentions it 6 times. Twenty-three mentions in two Nobel speeches has to be a record. But it is almost as if the laureates had a different dictionary in front of them when choosing their words.

Phelps talks about a transformative entrepreneurship that is central to capitalism, by sparking growth of small businesses that become large commercial operations; Yunus talks about microloans that don’t involve economies of scale or lead to significant new enterprises. The writers ask, ” Can turning more beggars into basket weavers make Bangladesh less of a, well, basket case?”

Well, no–but. It’s a false dichotomy–and the writers know it. They note Bangladesh’s export-oriented garment industry as being “larger and more productive than individual craftsman,” which is true, as a way of saying that it is better to provide venture capital to growing businesses than seed capital to individuals. They also note that government reforms, such as those that are now propelling Vietnam to new heights, are more important than microloans. But because the Bangladesh government is intractably backward and corrupt and anti-private business, does that mean that Yunus’s loans are a bad thing? I think the writers are reacting to the hoopla rather than the reality.

I am not an unabashed proponent of microloans, because I agree with the writers that while they may lift individual families out of poverty, they do not scale an economy. But I do not think microloans are a bad thing–how could they be? Some, such as Alexander Cockburn in The Nation (“The Myth of Microloans”), paint microloans as the devil incarnate, due to farmer suicides in India.

To me, the issue is clear: Capital that helps people raise a cow and escape poverty is as good as capital that helps start an Apple Computer. Yes, there’s a difference of scale. But there’s also a difference of context. The two sources of capital are not comparable–one’s in America, one’s in Bangladesh. But that doesn’t mean they’re not both productive.

And what about microloans that help build a GrameenPhone, the largest and most successful business in Bangladesh? It would not have been built without microloans that allowed distribution into rural villages, because Grameen Bank would not have backed the project. Does that not count? The authors cannot take a potshot at Yunus’s track record without examining his full portfolio.Â

Straw-man arguments are not compelling. It’s not either-or. Let’s deal with the facts on the ground–and celebrate entrepreneurs and capital that builds businesses of all kinds.

More than two billion people in the world have a cellphone. But for the world’s largest mobile phone companies, a new race has begun for the next billion. Most growth will come from the developing world, which already has more cellphones than now exist in industrialized countries. In fact, more cellphones are bought every day in Africa than in North America. And microfinance, which has propelled companies such as GrameenPhone in Bangladesh to close to $1 billion in revenues, has a role to play.

Says David Keogh, deputy director of the Grameen Foundation’s Technology Centre in Seattle (as reported in the World’s Poorest Nations New Frontier for Cellphone Giants from the Toronto Globe and Mail):

“It’s a win-win-win model, all the way down. Worldwide, rural markets have not really been cracked open by the telecom operators, simply because they’re not willing to invest . . . what we’ve done with organizations such as MTN is to say, ‘you have a channel to market: it’s the microfinance sector.’” MTN Rwanda and MTN Uganda are replicating GrameenPhone’s phone-lady scheme to reach into rural villages.”