Can mobile phones end extreme poverty? Jeffrey Sachs thinks so.

International economist and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs weighs in:

If every village had wireless connectivity, and it had computers in the schools, in the clinics, in the community centers, in the farmer cooperatives; if community health workers and agriculture workers were carrying their cell phones, interconnected with the computers, there'd be no such thing as economic isolation anymore.

I don't think we're doing yet everything that can be done to use the power of wireless broadband and all that it will bring. But I see it before my eyes, in just the last few years, making a decisive difference. And now in every village where I go, someone's got a cell phone, somebody can make an emergency call, someone can find out the price on the market, someone can start a business empowered by the fact that they can reach a customer or a supplier, someone can drive a taxi or a truck for that reason as well. Everything is changing.