Narrowing The Digital Divide Notes On A Global Netcorps by Ian Smillie - October 1999

Information & Communications Technologies And Development

ICT and the Digital Divide
ICTs are technologies that support communication and the storage and transmission of information. ICT refers to both applications and networks, including broadcast, fixed, wireless and satellite telecommunications networks. Applications include the Internet, database management systems, geographic information systems, computer systems and technologies which allow voice and data communications. The rate of advancement of ICTs in recent years has been revolutionary. E-mail, video conferencing, the web, computer networks and CD-ROM are transforming ways in which governments, the private sector and individuals work. ICTs build new markets and new products as well as new productivity. They permit faster generation, manipulation and transmission of information. ICTs, therefore, offer special new opportunities and new challenges for development. As the 1998/99 World Bank World Development Report puts it:

The explosion of new knowledge, accelerating technological progress, and ever-increasing competition make life-long learning more important than ever... [The] new technology greatly facilitates the acquisition and absorption of knowledge, offering developing countries unprecedented opportunities to enhance educational systems, improve policy formation and execution, and widen the range of opportunities for business and the poor.

According to UNDP, 'ICTs, can involve more people, hitherto unreached or under serviced... ICTs allow access to information sources worldwide, promote networking transcending borders, languages and cultures, foster empowerment of communities, women, youth and socially disadvantaged groups... ICTs are indispensable to realise the global information society and the global knowledge society.'

So important have communication technologies become that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) now talks about the 'right to communicate'. Its Secretary General, Pekka Tarjanne, has said that in order for people to enjoy the benefits of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they must have access to basic communications and information services. 'Without action on the part of the world community,' he argues, 'there is a very real danger that the global information society will be global in name only; that the world will be divided into the "information rich" and the "information poor"; and that the gap between developed and developing countries will widen into an unbridgeable chasm.'

His worry has a real basis in fact. USAID has devoted $15 million over five years to Global Information Infrastructure (GII) technologies, aimed at extending full Internet connectivity to 20 or more African countries. Compare this with the $450 million invested by the state of North Carolina and the local telephone company in building the North Carolina Information Highway between 1994 and 1999, and with the $1 billion they expect to spend on it over the next nine years.

Most developing countries lack affordable access to basic information resources. This includes the technologies as well as the capacity to build, operate, manage and service them in instances where they are available. One of the key measures of telecommunications access is 'teledensity' - the number of main telephone lines per 100 people. Teledensity ranges from 99 in Monaco to only 0.07 in Cambodia. More than a quarter of ITU member states have a teledensity of less than one, and historically it has taken most countries fifty years to move from that threshold to a teledensity of 50.* Sri Lanka, considered to be better off than many developing countries with a teledensity of 2.8 and a reformed telecommunications industry, demonstrates various dimensions of the hardware problems alone. At the beginning of 1999, metro Colombo had only 240,000 telephone lines and 38,000 people with access to the Internet (via 10 service providers). While Internet connection has been rapid, it is limited by the number of phone lines, by congestion and bad design, by metered billing and high ISP charges. While the limitations in Colombo are enormous, they are infinitely worse in the rest of the country which combined has fewer phone lines than the capital, and which attracts little interest or support from ISPs.

Caveats and Dangers
The vast need notwithstanding, one of the greatest dangers in the promotion of ICTs, especially among Southern organizations with limited budgets, is that they will be drawn too early into the purchase of sophisticated technology that they can neither afford nor sustain, beguiled by the hope that it will solve problems that it cannot. As computer security network specialist Clifford Stoll suggests, 'Perhaps our networked world isn't a universal doorway to freedom. Might it be a distraction from reality? ... Nobody can offer utopia-on-a-stick, the glowing virtual community that enhances our world through discovery and close ties while transcending the coarseness of human nature.'

'Utopia-on-a-stick' is not a new phenomenon where ICTs are concerned. The London Times hailed the 1858 laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable saying that 'Since the discovery of Colombus, nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.' The telegraph would bring an end to war and promote 'the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth'. There were hundred-gun salutes in New York and Boston, parades, fireworks and special church services. 'Our whole country has been electrified by the successful laying of the Atlantic telegraph,' wrote the Scientific American.

Among the many lessons of technology in history, perhaps the most important is a warning about hubris: about excessive ambition, pride, arrogance. Among the many lessons available on the development process, the most important is that there are few quick solutions and no easy answers. Technology and development are not synonymous; the so-called transfer of technology from North to South has failed repeatedly because unsuitable technologies, unsuitable 'transfer' processes and inappropriate 'experts' have repeatedly been loaded holus bolus onto aircraft and shipped South, only to end their days as little more than memories contained in unread project reports.

Roger Harris, a member of the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak Faculty of Information Technology, warns of a 'cargo cult' growing up around information technology (IT). 'In order to avoid being seduced by IT and turning our fascination with it into an expensive cult, it is necessary to dispel the popular myth that spending more on IT will automatically, of itself, boost economic performance. The best computer technologies will always add unnecessary costs to a poorly managed organization. Spending more money on the most sophisticated technology will not bring desirable results unless it is accompanied by changes in the way things are done.'

And Richard Heeks argues that 'like any new technology, ICTs lend themselves to sweeping statements about what they can do for development. If the poor are considered overtly at all, the feeling is that they must gain eventually from adopting the technology because the technology is development.' He says that where ICTs are concerned, negative impacts and various kinds of failure have been downplayed: total failure, partial failure, replication failure, sustainability failure. He also talks about the opportunity cost: radio reaches 75% of the African population, the Internet reaches only 0.1%. Radio, TV and newspapers can and are being used to disseminate information to the poor, and what they lose in comparison with the interactivity and capacity of ICTs, they more than make up for in cost and coverage.

Management guru Peter Drucker says that 'What we call the Information Revolution is actually a Knowledge Revolution. What has made it possible to routinize processes is not the machinery; the computer is only the trigger. Software is the reorganization of traditional work, based on centuries of experience, through the application of knowledge, and especially of systematic, logical analysis. The key is not electronics; it is cognitive science.' One of the primary lessons for those interested in ICTs and development, therefore, is that given their cost, their fast-changing nature and the generally uncritical attention they currently attract in development circles, ICTs must be approached with care. Development issues must come first. The technology is a means to an end and not the end in itself. This theme will be repeated throughout the balance of the paper.

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