Welcome to the home of the WishVast Venture, an ICT (information and communications technology) fueled social entrepreneurship project. Please view our video for a quick overview of the concept. About WishVast Our team represents a uniquely
interdisciplinary group of engineers, IT enthusiasts, and teaching and learning
experts, and what we've done over the past four months has been to develop a
solution for a problem in Eastern Africa and other developing regions. This problem basically boils down to three things: a lack of
availability of information in developing regions, a lack of trust or
especially a lack of ease in building trust in these regions, and the fact that
individuals are spending too much money and time on many common day-to-day
tasks with returns that are not very good. Our solution addresses all of these problems by considering the
following facts:
Stemming from the translation of the word "Trust" in Hindi,
"WishVast" is a social network that facilitates the creation of trust
and transmission of information between knowledgeable participants. Think about the rating system on eBay for a minute. Imagine yourself looking for a Canon Digital SLR worth a thousand dollars or maybe a motorcycle worth even more. Would you buy something like that from a seller that you've never heard of and that has no ratings? From what you can tell based on their ebay profile, they have never sold anything to anyone before. Are you going to trust them? I hope you would be at least be skeptical. It is perfectly sensible not to trust somebody with no ratings! This is why eBay created the rating system. It engenders trust among people who do not know each other. eBay had to do it. It was such a good idea that now it has spread to Amazon and Froogle, and Hotels.com and untold numbers of other sites that allow people to rate the products and experiences that they receive from businesses. Imagine how successful all these businesses would be if the customers could not trust anybody. This is the situation described in a recent study of women agro-entrepreneurs done in Tanzania by researchers from Penn State (see: Repository). People looking to expand their economic networks just don't know enough about other people. But the people they do know: the people they meet, see, and work with everyday, they trust. They look to these people for advice, new business, and help through tough times. This is social capital, and like economic capital, the more, the better. So in a disconnected rural community, people don't have reputations that are known outside their own local network and are limited in their ability to grow social capital. So naturally and sensibly, they are hesitant to trust people with whom they have never done business. Why would they risk their hard-earned income on someone with an unknown capacity to meet their expectations? They wouldn't, and our research says... they don't. WishVast is designed specifically to address this issue. It can allow people to connect with potential business partners, clients and customers, and then to build and recognize trust among participants with the ratings they share, This is all uniquely accessible entirely through widely-available, and widely-used cell-phone text messages. Ultimately, the goal of WishVast is to help expand current limited social and economic network by gaining new business, simply put, market inclusion. When people meet other people who can add value to their current offerings... well... business is more successful. And it's on a cell phone because...? |