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

Emerging Lessons
The need for ICT-related assistance in developing countries is incontrovertible. And if the exponential growth in requests for NetCorps interns is any guide, the NetCorps idea has tremendous potential. While it is still early days in the evolution of the NetCorps concept, a number of issues are beginning to emerge that offer lessons for the future.

Duration of Assignments
The Canadian program makes interns available for approximately six months. The duration of their assignments was determined by the funding available, rather than by the particular need to be addressed. ICT assignments could very well be shorter or longer. Most volunteer-sending agencies make two year placements because of the time required for a volunteer to settle in and become part of a community. There are cost considerations as well: plane tickets amortized over two year assignments are less expensive than those amortized over a shorter period. Canada World Youth, on the other hand, is a short-term exchange program and in the normal course of events makes postings of six to eight months. The observation here is not that assignments should be shorter or longer, but that in future iterations of the program, they should be tailored to the need of the host, and should not override the programming experience and principles of the sending agency.

Requests
Because of the enormous amount of positive publicity given to ICTs, many Southern governments and organizations have begun to address the issue as a matter of urgent priority without understanding fully what the technology can and cannot do for them, or what it costs to set up and maintain. Unlike any other area in which volunteer-sending organizations currently operate, requests for NetCorps interns are proliferating almost exponentially. It is becoming increasingly important, therefore, that requests be carefully screened for two reasons. First, it is important - as in any posting - to ensure a good match between the need and the person who will be sent to address it. Second, and perhaps more important, it is incumbent upon the supplying agency to ensure the developmental validity and the opportunity cost of the request.

Many current requests, for example, are for assistance in the establishment of websites. The Internet is already littered with websites that are not being used or maintained because of an inadequate communications infrastructure, or because of inadequate interest, time and expertise. Established as prestige symbols, they can become the opposite; created to facilitate communication, they can become a drag on resources. In other instances, requests may make eminent sense, but the hardware and/or software may not be available to support the plan. Sending an intern will no doubt reveal the shortage, but it will not solve the problem and could lead to frustration on all sides. The development aspect of a posting must therefore be kept front and centre and it should be clear that the results will have a net positive effect on the recipient organization rather than the opposite.

Given the potential growth in ICT placements, this suggests that special expertise must be developed in the field to ensure that requests are developmentally sound, that they are feasible, and that they are described in terms that will optimize the potential for an appropriate placement. The quality of requests can be enhanced in a variety of ways:

by involving current and previous volunteers in screening and refining them;

by making on-line expertise available to requesting agencies to help them in refining their proposed solution to a problem;

by hiring ICT experts in volunteer-sending agencies to review requests and assist in refining them;

by involving local ICT-related consulting firms to assist in reviewing requests.

Recruitment and Skill Assessment
Recruitment for NetCorps placements is not as straightforward as for other types of assignments. A public health department requesting an individual with a specific degree and specified experience will have a fairly good idea in professional terms of what it is getting when the volunteer arrives. Where ICTs are concerned, however, formal qualifications may be irrelevant to the skills and experience that an individual brings to an assignment. Many young people today have become highly skilled in programming, networking, software application and computer maintenance on their own, with friends, and through informal associations and news groups. Understanding what skills an applicant might bring to an assignment, therefore, is not always something that can be determined by reading a curriculum vitae.

CWY has engaged a technical expert who has developed a series of on-line tests, and who can communicate directly with potential applicants to determine what they know and what they can and cannot do. In a highly technical and emergent discipline where the formal qualifications may be less important than the informal, good skill assessment is important to making an assignment work - from the point of view of both host agency and the volunteer. As time passes, the development of common assessment criteria and standards will become more important to ensuring successful placements.

The catchment area for potential recruits is large, but the uptake may not be as great as originally imagined. Those with marketable ICT skills and qualifications are in great demand from industry and government, and remuneration at the entry level is high. It is too early in the development of NetCorps Canada International and NetCorps Americas to generalize, but it may become necessary to give such initiatives a higher promotional profile in some industrialized countries.

Gender
Although it is too soon to make any firm conclusion, there may an inherent gender imbalance in NetCorps-type initiatives, simply because there are more males than females involved in ICT-related technologies. This may be offset by a somewhat higher female rate of application to volunteer-sending organizations. It could also be offset by affirmative action. Rather than imposing an artificial and possibly limiting gender balance on the supply side, however, it might be more developmentally effective to place the emphasis on the demand side. This would mean ensuring that there is gender awareness and balance in the organizations to which volunteers are assigned, and ensuring that gender issues are fully considered and optimized in the work they do.

To reverse an old saying, this may be easier done than said. In its telecentre project in Egypt, UNV is finding that most of the users are women, including most of those who want training. Where women face gender-based equity obstacles, ICTs may become important empowering tools. On the Internet, nobody has to know that you are a woman.

Training
While ICT postings may appear to be clear and well structured on paper, many turn out to be very unstructured, and added to the dislocation and cross-cultural stress of any posting, such assignments are always the most difficult to carry out successfully.

All members of the Canadian coalition have lengthy experience in overseas placements and are well qualified to provide cross-cultural training, health briefings and the like. Where it is necessary, however, technical upgrading may be problematic. As one observer put it, 'three hours of training in website development will not equip a volunteer to work on the development of a database for Chile's trade with other countries.' An under-equipped intern will quickly become a disillusioned or angry intern. Canada World Youth, lead agency in the Canadian NetCorps coalition, says that

You cannot emphasize this training component too much, especially since we find that many of the interns, given their IT background, are very task-oriented. That is why we use a training for trainers model for the common training sessions. The interns are divided into small groups and have to train their peers - undertaking a needs assessment, planning the sessions together, implementing it and evaluating them. They are given feedback, not only on the sessions but on the entire planning process as well. A lot of time is also spent on demystifying the 'product output' approach to their internship. Instead we focus on building the long term capacity of the partner (i.e. It may be better to accomplish less but to do it in conjunction with local staff involved in IT) and connecting the IT work to the mission of the host organization.

Focus on Youth and 'Internships'
The Canadian scheme and others have focused on youth, limiting the age of participants. As with other types of volunteer placement, where development and cross-cultural learning are concerned, there is nothing magic about an emphasis on youth unless it is central to an organization's work (such as CWY), or unless youth have a special advantage. In the case of ICTs, young people do have a natural advantage, simply because of the generation gap that exists in the technology. Whether there is a pro-youth bias in any given program or not, it is more than likely that in the majority of placements for the next decade at least, young people will predominate.

It will perhaps be useful in expanding the scheme to think of the differences in meaning and understanding between the expressions 'intern', 'volunteer' and 'technical assistance'. 'Intern' emphasizes learning, as in 'junior doctor' or 'not fully qualified'* The word 'volunteer', as noted elsewhere, still causes a degree of angst within organizations who want to promote the professionalism of their personnel, and who understand that people living and working overseas on local terms and conditions usually return feeling that they have gained more than they have given. 'Cooperant' is a brave Canadian attempt to kill all linguistic and conceptual birds with one stone, although the word does not feature in many French or English dictionaries. In Spanish, 'cooperante' means someone working in development at lower levels and salaries. More anodyne, 'technical assistance' is devoid of ideas like 'exchange' and 'cross-cultural learning'. The term used will probably reflect the aims and objectives of the organization.

It is perhaps worth noting an observation in a background paper prepared by Industry Canada and UNV:

With the UN International Year of the Volunteer 2001 upon us, volunteerism is now being recognized as a critical component of a strong economy and society; the 'glue' that holds societies together. ICT opens up a new world of volunteer opportunities, including virtual volunteering, which can be realized through a Global NetCorps.

It might, in fact, be useful to distinguish more clearly between internships with a learning and youth focus, and longer-term placements that are more typical of most volunteer-sending organizations. If tailored specifically to students as a co-op program for which university credits were available, the former might help to solve some of the recruitment problem while creating real value-added where education is concerned.

Field Support
All personnel working in another country require various types of personal and professional support, and volunteer-sending agencies have well-developed systems for providing this. The professional support required by NetCorps-type volunteers, however, may differ from the norm. The potential for a mismatch between request and placement is relatively large, hence the arguments for good job scouting and specialized recruitment. With all the best efforts in these areas, however, there are two additional problems that will inevitably arise as a matter of course. One is the potential inadequacy of equipment, software and connectivity to support the job that a volunteer is expected to do. And this may not be discovered until the volunteer is in situ. Hardware may not be powerful enough to meet planned applications; it may break down; it may be absent. Volunteer-sending agencies are likely to find that a project support fund which can help to address such problems could make the difference between a successful assignment and a failure.

A partial solution would be to link placements with work being done by other international organizations on software development, the provision of hardware and the creation of telecentres. UNDP has numerous programs of this sort in developing countries. L'Organisation de la Francophonie has already placed some NetCorps Canada International interns in schools and pilot telecentres in Mali, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Mauritius. Pending receipt of financial support, it has plans to create 500 additional telecentres in the next five years. Undoubtedly many of these will require technical support which could be provided by NetCorps-type volunteers.

A second issue has to do with technical problems that do not relate to hardware. Volunteers are likely to encounter all sorts of glitches that could be answered in a few minutes by someone with the right experience. The nature of ICT assignments is such that reaching distant technical support should not be a major problem in principle. Having the expertise available, however, is another matter. Canadian coalition members have so far addressed this in a somewhat ad hoc manner. Some have told volunteers that they should develop their own assistance network before they leave home. Others have made arrangements for expertise to be available on call. Given the nature of the technology, the latter type of arrangement, possibly involving the private sector or returned volunteers, makes sense. It might be possible to create a network of qualified 'associate volunteers' (including people with disabilities that prevent their physical participation*) to assist in providing technical backup. But if it is to serve the needs of individuals with real problems, and living in 20 or 24 time zones, it needs to be established on a systematic basis.

A third issue has to do with other technical assistance that might be required in conjunction with an ICT-type assignment. Legal advice, financial and accounting advice or language training assistance could all be part of a necessary package required to make the ICT assignment successful.

Post-Assignment Follow-Up
Given the nature of the technology, there is no reason why many returned NetCorps volunteers could not maintain an on-going involvement with their host organization, providing on-line support long after they have left the field.

Evaluation and Sustainability
Because NetCorps-related efforts are so far in their early stages, it is too early to anticipate a comprehensive evaluation. Evaluation will, however, be important to ensuring that programs meet real needs and that they adapt in order to take account of lessons that are being learned. A key issue will undoubtedly relate to the issue of sustainability, mentioned above as a special problem in information and communications technologies. Evaluation, too often added to new initiatives as an afterthought, will also be important to maintaining and building support for the NetCorps concept.

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