Bridging the digital divide: ICT is not the panacea

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

Title
Bridging the digital divide: ICT is not the panacea

Author/Contributor
Mike Chege [qwikmailz@yahoo.com]

Date added
2002-11-14

Date Modified
2002-11-14

Mike Chege argues that the choice between the provision of basic
needs versus the development of ICTs is a false dilemma. The
development of ICT capabilities cannot be separated from the process
of social and economic development in the 21st Century.


I can’t recall the details exactly, but a few years ago, a presenter
on a BBC science programme was welcomed into a house in Finland.
There seems to be nothing out of the ordinary about that, except for
the fact that the owner of the house was in New Zealand, or some
other far-flung location, at the time. He was able to let the BBC
presenter in by issuing commands over the Internet to his “smart”
house.

Such gee-whiz demonstrations of the promise of the Internet are
unlikely to cut much ice with sceptics, however. The world’s poor,
they will remind you, are more concerned about having enough to eat
and worry little about e-mail or surfing the World Wide Web. What the
sceptics are getting at is that given the choice between providing
for basic needs versus development of information and communications
technologies (ICTs), the development of ICT capabilities should not
be prioritised against basic needs. But as I hope to show in this
essay, the choice between the provision of basic needs versus
development of ICTs is a false dilemma. The development of ICT
capabilities cannot be separated from the process of social and
economic development in the 21st Century.

A Transformational Technology

Notwithstanding the dotcom shakeout in 2001, the Internet remains a
transformational technology. Certainly, many a prospectus during the
stock market bubble of the mid- to late-1990s, when it was raining
paper billionaires, must have described the Internet as a
transformational technology. But what does it mean?

The Internet is basically a communications medium. But it is quite
unlike other more traditional media such as television, radio, print,
and the telephone.

First, user choices with respect to television and radio are largely
“take it or leave it.” On the Internet, users are able to customize
the content they receive to their own needs. In this regard, the
Internet is similar to a library in which the user can make a request
that results in the production of books and other media relevant to
that request. Another way to describe it would be to say that the
Internet is based on “pull” technologies, where content isn’t
delivered until the user requests it. Broadcast media, on the other
hand, are based on “push” technologies because they send information
out regardless of whether anyone is tuned in.

Second, television and the telephone operate under a highly
centralized authority and infrastructure. By contrast, the Internet
is highly decentralized. Indeed, when the Internet was conceived
during the Cold War it was designed to operate without the need for a
central authority. Actually, the basic philosophy underlying the
Internet has been to push management decisions to as decentralized a
level as possible. Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, which eliminates
even the need for a central server, probably represents the epitome
of decentralization.

Third, media such as books and newspapers take a considerable amount
of capital to produce, and time to distribute. Although radio and
television have faster distribution times, costs are higher. The
capital costs of becoming an Internet publisher, on the other hand,
are relatively low and thus anyone can establish a global Web
presence at the cost of a few hundred dollars. In addition, once
start-up costs have been met, setting up new web pages, prices,
products, and information costs very little, and apart from the cost
of bandwidth, the costs for reproduction are practically nil since
you do not need to replicate a catalogue, a brochure or a flyer. Each
user generates his or her own copy when accessing your web server.

Fourth, the Internet allows hypertext publishing. Tim-Berners Lee at
the European Laboratory for Particle Physics was the brains behind
this aspect of the Internet which made the Web possible. The term
hypertext refers to the arrangement of information in which objects
(text, images, and sounds) can be linked to each other in a manner
that permits the user to move seamlessly from one object to another.
For example, while reading a document about World Music, you might
click on the name of the Malian musician Salif Keita, which might
lead you to a video clip of Salif Keita in concert. Clicking on
another icon might cause a photograph of the musician to appear.

Finally, while traditional methods of communication have been
primarily one-to-many, the Internet is not only one-to-many but also
one-to-one and many-to-many.

To elaborate, one-to-many connectivity refers to the ability to allow
a single user to receive information and content from a large number
of different sources, and for the user to transmit his or her content
to a large number of recipients. Broadcast media such as television
and radio as well as print are one-to-many: one broadcast station or
publisher sends to many recipients. When a single user can engage
with others in a one-to-one mode we call this one-to-one. Telephony
is inherently one-to-one. Finally, when multiple users can engage
with many others we call this many-to-many. The Internet is the only
medium that is one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. The
Internet is also synchronous as well as asynchronous. This means that
it can allow exchanges to take place in real-time, and it can also
allow exchanges to take place with a time delay. Teleconferencing is
synchronous while e-mail is asynchronous.

In conclusion, the Internet is a highly convenient medium. Given the
vast information resources and high level of interactivity that it
offers, as well as its speed and global reach, it is no wonder that
the Internet is considered a transformational technology.

How Can The Internet and ICTs Benefit The Poor?

However, to ask the obvious question, in what concrete ways can ICTs
and the Internet benefit the two-thirds of humanity who are more
concerned about their next meal than about e-mail or eBay?

First, there are the economic benefits. Besides, providing business
with the opportunity to access real-time market information, improve
internal efficiencies, and complete business transactions
electronically, ICTs can reduce costs and provide a further channel
to market goods and services.

A popular example is the small company from Tanzania which replaced
$20 faxes with 10 cent e-mails and saw its telecommunications bill go
from over $500 per month to $45 per month. Then there is CiraNet
Pharma, an ambitious Egyptian business-to-business (B2B) portal
launched in 2001 to connect domestic pharmaceutical manufacturers,
distributors, and retailers. In the business-to-consumer (B2C)
segment you will find examples like EthioGift.com which sells gifts,
including sheep and goats, over the Internet, and Ecosandals.com
which sells “akala” sandals. Then there is PeopLink, a non-profit
organization which posts digital images of products made by community-
based artisan producer groups on the Internet to attract retail and
wholesale buyers in the industrialized countries.

But all these examples pale in comparison to India, the Digital
Economy’s poster child. Just as factory jobs have migrated from the
West to low-cost locations like China, clerical jobs have also been
migrating to low-cost locations like India. Over the last few years,
companies like GE, British Airways, and Amazon.com have been shifting
much of their back-office work from their home bases to India, often
making savings of 40-60% in the process. This back-office work
includes call-centre services such as telemarketing and customer
support, and such tasks as medical transcription, insurance claims
processing, finance and accounting, and any other labour-intensive
work. In fact, as The Economist magazine (May 5th – 11th, 2001)
points out, the services performed can be extended to any service
that is deliverable over fibre-optic wire.

According to the National Association of Software and Service
Companies (Nasscom), India’s main association of ICT companies, in
the year 2000 back-office work generated revenues of over $533
million and employed 45,000 people. These revenues increased
considerably in 2001-2002 amounting to $1.5 billion while offering
employment to over 70,000 people. Nasscom expects that this growth
will continue and by 2003, the market for outsourced business
processes should bring in more than $4 billion to the Indian economy!
Meanwhile, Gartner Research expects the global outsourcing market to
grow from $119 billion in 2000 to $243.5 billion in 2005 at a 14.4
percent compounded annual growth rate.

With the on-going deregulation of the telecoms sector in India and
the recent legalisation of Internet telephony, India seems poised to
capture an even bigger chunk of the global outsourcing market.
Incidentally, with ever more businesses turning to business process
outsourcing, it is no wonder that schools have sprung up in India to
train young men and women to speak in an American accent, the better
to handle calls from the U.S. which accounts for 80 per cent of
India’s call centre business.

E-Mail To The Rescue

Next comes the health sector. The Internet, it has been said, is the
quickest and cheapest way yet devised of disseminating medical
research. Using services such as HealthNet, doctors in poor countries
can easily and cheaply keep up to speed with the latest developments
in their field as well as seek help from their peers. A dramatic
example of the latter is the doctor in Kenya who solved a life-
threatening case of malaria with complications by using the low-cost
e-mail service provided by HealthNet to contact experts in the US who
quickly developed a specialized drug treatment programme.

ICTs can also facilitate the tracking of diseases. Throughout Africa,
for instance, outbreaks of meningitis are tracked over the Internet
so that epidemics can be stopped early. In addition, ICTs can assist
in spreading public health information and allowing health care
professionals to extend their reach through telemedicine into the
remotest and most underserved areas.

Third is education. ICTs can make it easier to deliver education and
training to a broader segment of the population. The African Virtual
University (AVU) is a distance-learning network established to serve
the countries of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The AVU, which is partly
financed by the World Bank, uses satellites to broadcast televised
courses to students in SSA countries who communicate with teachers by
e-mail, fax, and telephone. The AVU has just completed a pilot phase
during which it has delivered over 3500 hours of instruction to
approximately 23,000 students in SSA.

Finally, we come to what has been dubbed “e-government.” E-government
initiatives focus on transparent and accountable governance by
providing citizens with direct access to information and public
services. One instance is the state of Andhra Pradesh in India where
the Computer-aided Administration of Registration (CARD) system
compresses and simplifies the cumbersome process of property title
searches and real estate transfers. With CARD, all documents are
scanned, recorded, and stored on Oracle relational databases.
Transactions that used to take weeks now take minutes while cutting
corrupt brokers and middlemen out of the loop. And rather than adding
to the stacks of battered ledger books, the state now has a neat
collection of CDs that can be viewed and searched any which way for
any relevant real estate information. Since its inauguration in 1998,
CARD has been responsible for the digital recording of over a million
documents.

Meanwhile, a UN report on e-government initiatives shows that while
61 of the 190 UN member states scored above the mean global index of
1.62 with respect to providing some degree of information and
services online, the US was the only country to register an index
score above 3.00. Predictably, the poorer nations scored least well,
with no African country managing to reach the mean global index.

Critics might argue the when you’re being stalked by the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse (war, civil strife, hunger, and disease),
access to government information online or offline, may not be a
priority. But, as Charlie Taylor points out in a NUA Internet Surveys
(nua.net) editorial on the e-government gap, e-government is about
more than just the ability to pay your taxes online or apply for a
driving license over the Internet. E-government is also about giving
citizens access to information which allows them to make informed
decisions on subjects that affect their lives. “The Digital Divide
doesn’t just stop people in so-called “developing” nations from
taking part in the wired world; it also restricts them from assessing
important information relevant to their lives.”

What Needs To Be Done?

Once we have understood the significance of bridging the Digital
Divide, we naturally ask: “What can be done about it?”

A key constraint to ICT and Internet penetration in most developing
countries is the lack of an appropriate regulatory and policy
framework for a competitive telecoms sector. It is therefore
necessary for developing countries to introduce regulatory and policy
regimes that will attract private investment and foster efficiency
amongst infrastructure providers.

Secondly, in order to minimise the danger that private sector
programmes will widen the digital divide within countries by
providing access to the middle and upper classes while ignoring the
lower classes, governments may institute some Universal Service
Obligations as part of the license, just as they already do with
mobile telephony providers who are often required to provide rural
access to their services.

But throwing computers and modems at people (as someone colourfully
put it) will not in itself bridge the Digital Divide. Other important
issues that need to be addressed include digital literacy (overcoming
computer anxiety and improving computer and keyboarding skills) and
the motivation to use the Internet. ICT training and local content
development are two ways to overcome these barriers. A good example
of this is the Information Village Project. The project, started with
a $120,000 grant from the International Development Research Centre,
Canada, is an intranet linking ten villages near Pondicherry, India
with computers, providing locally relevant information on product
prices, input costs, healthcare, weather, and fishing conditions.

Local volunteers gather up information and feed it into the intranet
in the local language (Tamil). There is also a multimedia component
so as not to alienate illiterate users. Most of the operators and
volunteers providing primary information are women and their role in
the project thus raises their status in the community.

Since most of the villages lack telephone lines and experience
erratic power supply, the project uses a hybrid wired and wireless
network with fixed-line telephones at one end and Motorola VHF duplex
devices at the other. To overcome the electricity constraint, the
project uses solar power in conjunction with the mains.

Ted Turner once remarked that there was no point in giving people
computers when they had no electricity. But as the Information
Village Project and another Indian creation, the Simputer, show, with
determination, it is possible to circumvent infrastructural
limitations. The Simputer (short for Simple, Inexpensive,
Multilingual computer) is a hand-held, battery-powered computer that
reads out the text found on web pages in native Indian languages. The
Simputer runs on the free or open-source Linux operating system. The
Simputer costs $200 but is designed for shared use, which is
facilitated by smart cards. Therefore, a group of 10 farmers could
get together and buy one, bringing the cost down to $20 per head.

Users can also connect video cameras, keyboards, printers, scanners,
and hard disk drives to the Simputer. This means that people in the
cities could also find the Simputer useful.

Finally, efforts to bridge the Digital Divide should be top-down as
well as bottom-up. Bottom-up approaches may rely on local
“champions.” These are people or organizations rooted in the
community who can foster community buy-in and adoption of ICT
projects.

ICT is not a Panacea

However, when all is said and done, ICT is not a cure-all.
Governments must still undertake the hard work of reforming the
administrative culture to make it more transparent and accountable,
ensuring an effective legal system, opening up markets to foreign
trade and investment, improving education, and assisting the
development of well-functioning financial markets. All these
measures, however, presume the existence of governments that are
committed to economic development and not narrow self-interest. The
goal is what Chandrababu Naidu, the “laptop” chief minister of Andhra
Pradesh, likes to call “SMART” governance: Simple, Moral,
Accountable, Responsive, and Transparent governance.

In conclusion, to quote from a report by the Digital Opportunity Task
Force (DOT Force), bridging the Digital Divide is not something that
happens after addressing the “core” development challenges; it is a
key component of addressing those challenges in the 21st century.
There is no dichotomy between the Digital Divide and the broader
social and economic divides which the development process should
address. Failure to address the Digital Divide will only exacerbate
the existing social and economic inequalities between countries and
communities.

Links

    * www.comminit.com/pds11-2001/sld-3357.html (“Changing Rural
Lives”: learn more about the Information Village Project)
    *
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan003984.p
df (Download the Global Survey of E-government report)
    * www.expresscomputeronline.com/20020218/focus1.shtml (“BPO is
new pie-in-sky for India Inc.”)
    * www.nasscom.org/artdisplay.asp?art_id=504 (“IT-enabled services
market - Unlimited opportunities lie ahead”)
    * www.simputer.org (for more info and how to get hold of one)
* www.iicd.org/stories/ (ICT success stories)

Mike Chege is an associate in a Kenyan consultancy, ZIC Consultants.
His main interests are business planning, entrepreneurship, and
Internet advocacy. Mike is also a columnist for PC World East Africa.
Mike can be reached at qwikmailz@yahoo.com. November 2002.


source: http://www.iconnect-
online.org/base/ic_show_news?sc=107&id=1966