'Technology without human touch is a mere technology'

What's driving innovations in global development?

Last week, we listed some of the most buzzed-about technologies that may help reduce poverty, improve health care and boost development around the globe. Our readers and followers on social media offered their take.

Innovations are mostly tools and are targeted for the elites, according to Jyoti Mukhia, an official at World Vision.

"The focus should be on converging tools with people," he said.

He added: "Technology without human touch is a mere technology. But we cannot negate the facts that technology did help us to shift our developmental paradigm and will continue to shift."

Caroline Kroeker-Falconi went further, arguing that technological tools are only one extremely limited category of drivers of innovation. She noted what she found to be the strongest drivers of innovation such as belief in change as well as an enabling environment for a multisector debate and real participation among stakeholders.

"Technology has a role of course, but the most effective is usually the most accessible and inexpensive" like mobile phones which Kroeker-Falconi said have revolutionized development.

Mobile technology is indeed the thing now, Nwoko Chiemela Joel suggested, as it has brought about innovations in many sectors such as commerce and communication.

"However, negative use of this supposedly aids to living might constitute an undoing to a free future," he wrote.

What do you think? Leave your comment below and join the growing conversation around this topic on LinkedIn.