ICT for Development and the Digital Divide

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been a key engine for the performance and growth of economies since the early 1970s, becoming perhaps the main technological enablers of economic globalization. More recently (particularly during the 1990s), these technologies were accepted as effective tools to help advance human development. While information has always been important for the advancement of humanity and of individuals, the difference today is that information is now viewed as a basic raw material and is consumed at an enormous scale in socio-economic processes, thus having important competitive value. For this type of consumption, ICTs are the tools of choice.

The United Nations has long recognized the need for timely and relevant information as a fundamental element of human development, and has already called for universal access to information and communication services as a basic development need. As in the business world, the rapid expansion of electronic networks and computing power offers cost-effective ways to produce, acquire, store, analyze and distribute information for development purposes. Scarce access to ICTs, however, makes it difficult for many in the developing world to have proper access to this information or, worse, to process and manage it.

The term "digital divide" has become widely used to denote the inequity in the opportunities presented by ICT and the digital revolution, whether for economic, social, cultural or political uses. The expanding digital divide is producing a new dimension of poverty - information poverty - highly significant and visible. The potential levels of the impact (present and future) derived from this technology-related gap are sufficiently serious to have placed the digital divide atop the international development agenda in the last two years.

With scarce resources available for very basic development needs, such as water and sanitation, education, food security, or income generation, many people wonder why bother to provide these new technologies, and whether they are not unnecessary luxuries in many contexts. It is not an "either-or" scenario anymore, as these technologies are nothing more than advanced information tools to be used if/when it is beneficial. Among a poor farmer's first priorities is to get sufficient food for his family; perhaps ICTs can help him find better prices for his products, enabling him to buy more (and higher quality) food. People from development countries know best when and whether ICTs are appropriate for them. Much will depend on the value they attach to information. Hardly anyone will question the value of basic education. Yet reading and writing are, at their core, skills to access and produce information. The issue of ICTs and the digital divide is ultimately about greater choices, as is human development.