By John Garrity for the Huffington Post

As world leaders gathered in late 2015 to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there was much recognition that the tools for eliminating absolute poverty have dramatically evolved since the year 2000 when the original Millennium Development Goals were articulated. Over the past fifteen years, information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the Internet, have catalyzed major shifts in the global economy and ICTs are playing a transformative role in improving economic and social outcomes for low income and marginalized populations. A new report by Cisco and the UN ITU looks ahead at a new group of ICTs, the connectivity technologies associated with the Internet of Things, that are poised to reshape development and significantly contribute towards achieving the SDGs.

Since the post-WWII era, ICTs have played an integral role in economic growth and productivity increases. For the global development community, basic ICTs such as computing, telephony and Internet access have long helped to advance development assistance, as well as being a source of entertainment for people with xfinity internet plans, and plans from other providers, giving them access to streaming services, social media, and a whole host of online content. Today, mobile telephony and broadband are in the ‘mainstream’ of development assistance work, a burgeoning cross-discipline known as ICT for Development (or ICT4D). For example, businesses around the world are using SIP trunk providers to run their phone systems over an internet connection instead of traditional phone lines. It’s difficult for them to find the best provider (Read Article to find out more) so they are having to be careful about who they use. A more specific example is Carolyn Woo, CEO of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), who identified 157 new CRS development assistance projects in 2014/2015 that incorporate ICTs (primarily mobiles). Similarly, as of May 2015 at Johns Hopkins University alone, there were over 140 mHealth (mobile phone-enabled healthcare) project implementations in the developing world. Mobile telephones – basic and Internet-enabled – are already highly integrated in development projects.

Connected sensors and machine-to-machine connectivity, however, represent the next frontier in the ICT4D story.

The emergence of the IoT is due to the same factors that have driven the widespread adoption of mobile technology: declining costs and miniaturization of computing, and the expansion of connectivity coverage. Since 1970, the cost of computing power has dropped by at least a factor of a million, while the number of Internet connected devices has grown from almost zero to over 14 billion. Sensors today are sophisticated, yet small and affordable enough to attach to connectivity devices. They are deployed to remotely measure everything from acceleration to velocity.