"Controlling the runaway horse " By Uday Mohan

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

[from Dawn's "IT: The Future of Pakistan" (23-24 Jan 2001)]


Controlling the runaway horse 


By Uday Mohan 

How will poor people gain access to crucial information and 
communication technologies (ICTs)? 

Before the internet came to Veerampattinam, a coastal village in 
southern India, the local fisher folk went to get their daily catch 
without knowing sea conditions or the location of fish shoals. Lives 
were sometimes lost because of particularly high waves and rough 
seas. But in late 1998, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation 
(MSSRF), an Indian research centre, installed a computer in a 
"village information shop" with financial assistance from the 
international Development Research Centre, Canada. 

Through a wireless local-area network based on radio frequencies, the 
computer makes available daily data on wave height and wind forecasts 
from a US navy website. 

This information is broadcast to the villagers in the early morning via loudspeakers on the roof of the information shop. 

Armed with this knowledge as well as with details about fish location, the fishermen now ply the seas in greater safety and with more efficiency. Not only has the internet-enabled computer made the main work of the villag
e easier, but it has also made information about prices, health and transportation facilities, and entitlement schemes accessible. Before the computer arrived, villagers were unaware of housing loans that they were entitl
ed to. Most fishermen in the village have now benefited from these low cost loans. 

The digital divide: Veerampattinam is one of many recent examples of the way the Internet has reached and benefited the poor in developing countries. But most of the world's poorer people have not been touched by this tec
hnology. 

Nua internet surveys estimates that as of June 2000, 333 million people worldwide were online: 76 million in Asia/Pacific; 13 million in South America; three million in Africa; two million in the Middle East. However, 72 
percent of all Internet subscribers reside in North America and Europe. 

The "digital divide" the gap in information and communication technologies that exists between technologically advanced and developing countries - is not only enormous, but it is also increasing, according to a recent Wor
ld Bank study. The study estimates that even East Asia, which is adopting ICTs at a rapid pace, will take another 40 years to catch up with the developed world. 

Access varies widely among and within developing countries as well. Gender, income, age, and other disparities also abound. In Ethiopia, for example, 98 percent of Internet users in 1998 were university graduates and 86 p
ercent were male. 

As ICTs begin to play a greater role in development, concerns are growing that women will be left out of the picture. Available data show that women account for 25 percent of ICT users in Brazil, 17 percent in South Afric
a, 7 percent in China, and 4 percent in Arab states. 

As the Internet becomes the norm for commerce and information exchange in the developed world, the poorer countries will have little choice but to try to bridge the digital divide in all its forms. The stakes involve not 
only social development and productivity growth, but also the burgeoning e-commerce sector, which is expected to reach between US$2 and 3 trillion in transactions in the next three years. 

Success stories: "Price information helps connect farmers to markets," says Mike Weber, professor and co-director of a food security programme run by the Department of Agricultural Economics at Michigan State University (
MSU), "and the more up-to-date the price information, the better for the farmer and the market." 

Weber's own group uses both low-and high-tech means to distribute prices. For the past ten years, the food security project has delivered weekly agricultural prices by newspaper and fax to government offices, the private 
sector, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Mozambique. 
Media Fax, a fax-based newspaper, provides the same information each 
week to a wider audience. NGOs make copies of the weekly price lists 
and distribute the information to farmers. 

Because satellites can bring ICTs to rural areas at a relatively low 
cost, some NGOs promote them to help fill the information and 
communication needs in developing countries. Volunteers in Technical 
Assistance (VITA), a US-based NGO, for example, links its satellite 
with ground terminals that enable users to send and receive stored e-
mails four to six times a day as the satellite passes overhead. Kept 
in a community centre or some other central location, each terminal 
is estimated to serve an area of roughly 10,000 people via the e-mail 
access it gives to schools, clinics, NGOs, business people, and 
individual users. 

Even the telephone can be a lifeline for the poor. In three years, 
GrameenPhone has put mobile phones in the hands of women in more than 
1,200 Bangladeshi villages. At the same time, GrameenPhone has 
secured more than 50 percent of the national, mostly urban, mobile 
phone market in Bangladesh, helping to assure its financial 
viability. In the villages, GrameenPhone works on the same principle 
as the Grameen Bank's microloan programme, giving rural women from 
landless households access to credit to purchase a mobile phone. 

The telephones generate substantial income for the "telephone women," 
whose earnings average $450 a year after expenses. Equally important, 
the telephones provide villagers with access to information and 
services that would otherwise remain far outside their reach. 

Overcoming barriers: "The countries that have been most successful in 
promoting ICT-based development," says Carlos Primo Braga, programme 
manager at InfoDev (the World Bank's Information for Development 
Program), "are those that have created a broad framework for 
fostering both competition and universal access. They've focused on 
expansion of the capacity to connect to ICTs, education to use that 
connectivity, appropriate content in the local language to make that 
connectivity useful, and competition to lower prices and increase 
market growth." 

But the most pressing and universal barrier remains money. Hans 
d'Orville, former director of the Information Technology for 
Development Programme at the United Nations Development Programme, 
estimates that a tele-centre that serves 2,000-6,000 people costs 
roughly $60,000-80,000. Even so, the picture may not be so daunting 
because costs are decreasing and new technical devices are emerging. 

"Medium-developed countries already have high TV penetration, and 
devices to access the Internet are going to fall below the cost of 
TVs," says Josh Calder, senior associate at Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a 
Washington, DC-based consulting firm that analyzes and forecasts ICT 
applications. 

Expensive, potentially disruptive, and extraordinarily beneficial, 
ICTs are here to stay. As Richard Heeks, senior lecturer in 
information systems and development at the University of Manchester, 
puts it, "Information and communication technology is a runaway 
horse, and the choice for the world's poorer nations is stark: stand 
by and watch it carry the richer nations forward, or jump on and hope 
to steer it as best they can." 




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Uday Mohan is Senior Editor at the International Food Policy Research 
Institute, Washington DC. IFPRI conducts research on policies to 
alleviate and prevent food insecurity, poverty and environmental 
degradation. 


http://www.dawn.com/events/infotech/it27.htm