In Zambia a street market vendor is paying for his order of Coca-Cola by text message. In Tanzania a candidate in the Presidential elections has been awarded his degree after completing it online through distance learning. In Nairobi, a daughter is sending money to her father in rural Kenya with prepaid ‘pay as you go’ airtime. And in Namibia schoolchildren are surfing the net, sending emails and writing essays thanks to FLOSS, open source software written by enthusiastic programmers who don’t want any payment.

New technology is changing the face of international development in ways that no one predicted. And in this issue of developments we ask how technology can fight poverty – from the fisherman using his mobile to check which market wants his catch to the Ethiopians taking to blogging to change global perceptions of their country. The net, of course, has long been touted as a revolutionary tool for international development, but the global explosion in mobile phone use means it has rapidly caught up. And mobile phones are easier to share, requiring much less time to use, are more portable and you don’t have to read or write to use them.

It took only five years from the first mobile phone call in Tanzania until the number of mobile phone subscribers per 100 people exceeded the number of fixed lines. In rich Britain, the same process took 15 years. And as Matthew Bishop of The Economist points out in this issue, a rise of 10 mobile phones per 100 people boosts the rate of growth of GDP by 0.6 percentage points a year.

But what about the role of the net and free software in fighting poverty? The print version of this issue came with a free CD offering a compilation of high quality FLOSS Open Source software – the software which runs on Windows but which is offering real possibilities to PC users in developing countries, especially in education. Read Bill Thompson's piece on FLOSS, Free software to go, to find out more. And to get your own version of Open Source software click here: www.theopencd.org.

This issue of Developments focuses on the exciting way new technology is changing the way development takes place – and no one can predict its future potential.

Martin Wroe, Malcolm Doney, Editors