How Can ICT Help Alleviate Poverty?

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

[source:  
http://www.developmentgateway.org/node/133831/sdm/docview?docid=547590
 ]


How Can ICT Help Alleviate Poverty?
Article by Earl Mardle

I'd like to turn that question around a little and ask, "Why is it so 
difficult to show that ICT can help alleviate poverty?"

The answer is, as usual, dependent on multiple factors, but in 
general, ICT projects to alleviate poverty have tended to see the 
technology either as a gateway to new incomegenerating employment 
opportunities through eCommerce for craft goods, or as a way into 
outsourcing markets, where very low wages will make them competitive. 
In other words, the projects attempt to find new ways for people in 
poverty to earn cash. My feeling is that these approaches miss two 
very important concepts.

The first is that lack of cash is the effect of poverty, not its 
cause. Poverty is bound up in the structures and processes of 
communities and the relations within them, and among those 
communities and other communities large and small. Attempts to 
eradicate poverty by increasing cash flow are starting at the wrong 
end.

The second concept that many poverty eradication projects ignore is 
that there are already functioning economies in every country, and 
the arrival of intelligently constituted ICT programmes can change 
the dynamics of those economies to the benefit of their participants.

Such programmes will be more likely to succeed where they target the 
inefficiencies of economies; disrupt outbound cash flows and, where 
possible, reverse them; extend the local horizons of economies and 
reconnect them with their lost constituents; and enable and 
facilitate group-forming and the circumvention of corruption... 

Download a complete copy of this article in PDF format. [from 
http://www.developmentgateway.org/node/133831/sdm/blob?pid=4374 ]