Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Centre for Civic Media travelled to Baba Dogo slum in Nairobi with a preconceived set of notions about the electricity needs of the people there. The realities surprised him – electricity was already available, and people chose to charge their cell phones for a cost equivalent to 200 litres of clean water, than purchase clean drinking water. He observed that cell phones were ‘indispensable infrastructure’ of the developing world. Read more here.