ICT for rural areas (Mar. 29)

One of the strongholds of ICT for development (las week's topic) is their introduction into rural areas. The belief is that ICT has the power to improve living conditions in rural areas and that, given their special context (being far from urban centers and having low or no access to infrastructure), they should have high priority in terms of digital inclusion.

As an example, we discussed Mathur and Ambani's paper on the opportunities for growth that ICT has shown or has promised in rural India. The main barriers that must be brought down, they say, are: costs, illiteracy and lack of awareness. This is critical in a country like India where (in 2005) 66% of the population is rural, which creates a strong digital divide (while millions of Indians have Internet access, millions more do not even have electricity). Given India's compromise with becoming an important global player in the ICT (especially the software) industry, an interesting aspect has been a transition from adapting foreign ICT to developing indigenous ICT solutions for rural areas. Some of the examples that the paper covers are:
- the Simputer: essentially an Internet accessing device offered at USD 200. Sadly, or perhaps, predictably, the Simputer is no longer in production. At the time it was being developed several countries or institutions had in mind a USD 100 computer to give many more people access to the Internet (and other applications) but given the dynamic and quick obsolescence of technology, none of these efforts were really successful and the advent of Internet-capable mobile phones made them less appealing and even less powerful comparatively.
-e-Choupal: an inititative from ITC India which sets up access points for farmers to access weather reports, market prices, and farming practices, among others, in Hindi. While e-Choupal is still working, a recent study by Dangi & Singh (2010, AJEBA, Vol. 2, No. 2) claims that the effect has not been holistic, since it has not included social, cultural or ecological issues. Moreover, while ITC itself has benefited, together with most farmers using e-Choupal, it has actually been harmful for those farmers not using it, bringing into question the development goals themselves and potentially furthering the digital divide they aim to close.

In any case, through these and other examples, the authors claim that ICT can empower farmers to compete in a globalized economy, by giving them access to key (mostly market) information which enables them to follow best practices, determine prices, take part in supply chains without being subject to wholesalers or truckers, and create farming enterprises. But for this to work, they suggest a contextual approach, involving not just the technology but also government initiatives and strategy, development organizations (NGOs, donors, etc.), the private sector (to strengthen the financial sustainability of each project) and individual entrepreneurs in rural communities, which become the actual leaders and promoters of projects at the local level.

A more critical account of ICT for rural areas is given in a Grimes paper from 2000. Though in this early stage of Internet adoption options were still wide open, Grimes had already encountered an important shift from optimism to pessimism, given the lack of context in existing (and mostly failed) projects. For starters, while ICT can indeed be an opportunity for local farmers and cooperatives to access market information and shorten their "distance" to global markets (buyers, providers, farming practices, etc.), it is also the case that this access (as all communication) is in two ways and the globalized market also gains access to these local rural communities, not always in their benefit. This may, of course, be said in general of accessing globalized markets, while they enable access to foreign or distant markets, they also open the door for the influx of products and services from those same locations or others, which may hinder or eliminate local producers.

One of the main sources of failed initiatives, Grimes point out, has been an excessive emphasis on technology push, as opposed to demand pull. This is crucial in rural areas where users are, like we noted above, more illiterate, poorer and less aware of ICT and its potential. This creates a difficult situation, because in principle there would be little or no demand for ICT in this context and hence when presented with donations or government initiatives, local authorities, NGOs or in general groups wanting to introduce ICT to rural areas find it very hard not to fall into the temptation of making the investment and installing the ICT artifacts only to find out months or years later that they are not sustainable (funding always runs out without a sound financial structure or business plan) or simply not used. Telecenters are a clear example of this. While they are aimed at providing all ICT access in a single point, closer to the rural population, very often they become simply Internet Cafe's where people are taught how to access the Internet and how to use Word and Excel, which rarely contributes to true development of the community (despite having obvious benefits for some individual users, such as students) and seldom find financial sustainability, since people are not really in the position to pay for the access or the training offered initially for free. Grimes then suggests that besides the initial investments in infrastructure, all projects should take into consideration further transitions into development of locally useful services, on to building awareness, then to promoting adoption, then to achieving effective usage and ultimately generating competitive advantage. This means moving away from the problems that we have studied earlier in the course: first, assuming a "technological determinism" position (one which assumes that plugging-in ICT artifacts has deterministic and positive impacts); second, ignoring or not adequately taking into consideration the context in which the ICT is to be deployed. Quick fixes almost always lead to wasted investments, and yet they are still broadly present in (especially rural) ICT development plans of many countries, including Colombia.

In order for ICT to really have the power to change rural communities for the better, the potential risks or dangers should also be considered and the human dimension should be given prevalence. ICT should be placed, studied and designed in collaboration and in context (local community, providers, investors, donors, social workers, government authorities, universities) and training should go beyond the tools to cater to the real business and empowerment opportunities offered by ICT in the local context. This means that training should go beyond explaining the parts of a computer and the interaction with popular software or Internet services and include functional literacy improvement in information.processing, electronic participation and democracy, privacy and security, content generation, entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance, among others.