While many young tech wizards strive to invent the next iPad, Umar Saif is working to bring Internet-style networking to millions of Pakistanis who don’t have access to the Web. He could shake up the country’s politics in the process.

Saif’s efforts recently earned him recognition by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of the world’s top young technology innovators, a significant feat in a country better known as a home to Islamist militants than to cutting-edge researchers.

Technological progress faces immense hurdles in Pakistan, with its pervasive insecurity, shoddy public education system, struggling economy and chronic electricity shortages. The country has fallen far behind neighboring India, which has a flourishing tech industry.

Given that many Pakistanis still struggle to get enough food and clean water — much less a computer or smart phone — much of Saif’s research in Pakistan centers around giving ordinary citizens new ways to use one thing that many do have: a basic cell phone.

The trigger for his research was a 2005 earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir that killed 80,000 people and caused widespread destruction. The disaster coincided with his return to Pakistan after getting a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Cambridge.

Realizing that rescue workers were having trouble coordinating, Saif, 32, devised a computer program that allowed people to send a text message — or SMS — to thousands of people at once. Users send a text to a specific phone number to sign up for the program, and then can message all the subscribers, allowing users to engage in the kind of social networking possible on the Internet.

It has since blossomed into a commercial enterprise called SMS-all that is used by at least 2.5 million people who have sent nearly 4 billion text messages.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: sfexaminer.com