Can computers and cell phones help lift up the world's poorest? Not alone, but they can help connect poor people to the information they need to learn how to stop being poor, says Alex Steffen, editor of a new reference book called "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century."

The book went on sale this week and has already cracked Amazon.com's best sellers list. (It was No. 19 when we last checked — below Barack Obama's new book but ahead of "French Women Don't Get Fat.")

"Worldchanging" is a 600-page guide to efforts at changing the world — whether it's preventing diseases, using less energy, empowering girls in developing countries or narrowing the planet's rich-poor gap.

asap spoke to Steffen about one facet specifically — technology. He reports that small-scale merchants in Kenya use cell phones to check market prices and slum-dwellers in Brazil can search for jobs online at free community computing centers. But, overall, don't high-tech solutions require massive capital investment? For people who might be struggling with more basic problems like getting clean water, is going online really the answer?

Here's what Steffen had to say.

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asap: How can technology help the world's poorest?

Steffen: One of the most exciting trends in the Global South is leapfrogging. Leapfrogging is when a group of people decide to embrace the latest technology or tool without going through the steps that other people had to go through to get that technology or tool. So, for example, when you talk about phones, if you're a developing-world city, you don't need to build a telegraph and then a primitive landline system and then an advanced landline system in order to get a cell phone. You just need to put up a cell phone tower.

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asap: But you do need to put up the cell phone tower. So, doesn't "leapfrogging" still require enormous capital investment, whether it's the towers, or -- for computers — putting in broadband capability and those sorts of things?

Steffen: Of course these things do require money. But on the one hand, many of these things are far cheaper than their older competitors would've been. It's a lot cheaper to put up a few cell phone towers than it is to run a wire to every house in a city. ...

Solar power in many places that have no electrical grid is already much cheaper than building an electrical grid and providing power to people from, say, a coal-fired plant.

In a similar way, there are now computers and software that are being designed specifically to be inexpensive or even free, and thus readily accessible to large numbers of people.

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asap: Why is it important for poor communities to be online when they may have other, more pressing issues like access to clean water or curtailing disease?

Steffen: One of the biggest forms of poverty in the world today is poverty of information access. One of the things that's wrong in the world is not just that people are poor, but they don't have access to the kind of knowledge that would help them stop being poor.

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asap: Can you give examples?

Steffen: One of them is basic public health information -- so if you have a community with an exploding population, here's how to handle your waste safely so that people don't get cholera and dysentery, here's how to provide clean water more safely so that people will not get sick from their water supply, here's how to irrigate more effectively. ...

The only way that a lot people will have access to these things is if they are connected to electronic sources of information. ...

A second thing is that it empowers people who are in rural communities especially to skip the middlemen who otherwise would take advantage of them and pay them low prices for their crops and other goods and then get higher prices in a nearby city. (Instead), they can just go online and see immediately what's the price of coffee or rice or goats today and get a much fairer deal. In fact, they can even form more direct connections to urban markets.

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asap: Is technology by itself an answer, or does it have to go hand-in-hand with political reform and reducing corruption in some of these countries?

Steffen: "Worldchanging" has one message -- it's that everything has to go hand-and-hand. None of these answers work by themselves. Technology by itself can't fix the world's problems. But, technology deployed in democratic and fair ways with the goal of raising people into a state of freedom and sustainable prosperity can be totally revolutionary.

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Stephanie Hoo is asap's business writer.

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