[Telecentres] >>: Economist: skeptical take on telecenters & ICT4D

[Andy Carvin]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping to draft a letter to the editor in response to the latest 
issue of The Economist. I would suggest others in our group do the same. 
While the article makes some good points, it oversimplifies the issue 
and uses selective reasoning. I am sure that if many of us wrote 
letters, some of them would be published... -andy

Mikhail Doroshevich wrote:
> Behind the digital divide
> Mar 10th 2005
> The Economist
> 
> 
> Development: Much is made of the “digital divide” between rich and poor.
> 
> What do people on the ground think about it?
> 
> IN THE village of Embalam in southern India, about 15 miles outside the 
> town of Pondicherry, Arumugam and his wife, Thillan, sit on the red
> earth 
> in front of their thatch hut. She is 50 years old; he is not sure, but 
> thinks he is around 75. Arumugam is unemployed. He used to work as a 
> drum-beater at funerals, but then he was injured, and now he has trouble
> 
> walking. Thillan makes a little money as a part-time agricultural 
> labourer—about 30 rupees ($0.70) a day, ten days a month. Other than
> that, 
> they get by on meagre (and sporadic) government disability payments.
> 
> In the new India of cybercafés and software tycoons, Arumugam and
> Thillan, 
> and the millions of other villagers around the country like them, seem
> like 
> anachronisms. But just a few steps outside their section of the
> village—a 
> section known as the “colony”, where the untouchables traditionally 
> live—the sheen of India's technology boom is more evident in a green
> room 
> equipped with five computers, state-of-the-art solar cells and a
> wireless 
> connection to the internet. This is the village's Knowledge Centre, one
> of 
> 12 in the region set up by a local non-profit organisation, the M. S. 
> Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF). The centres, established with
> the 
> aid of international donor agencies and local government support, offer 
> villagers a range of information, including market prices for crops, job
> 
> listings, details of government welfare schemes, and health advice.
> 
> A conservative estimate of the cost of the equipment in the Embalam
> centre 
> is 200,000 rupees ($4,500), or around 55 years' earnings for Thillan. 
> Annual running costs are extra. When asked about the centre, Thillan 
> laughs. “I don't know anything about that,” she says. “It has no
> connection 
> to my life. We're just sitting here in our house trying to survive.”
> 
> Scenes like these, played out around the developing world, have led to 
> something of a backlash against rural deployments of new information and
> 
> communications technologies, or ICTs, as they are known in the jargon of
> 
> development experts. In the 1990s, at the height of the technology boom,
> 
> rural ICTs were heralded as catalysts for “leapfrog development”, 
> “information societies” and a host of other digital-age panaceas for 
> poverty. Now they have largely fallen out of favour: none other than
> Bill 
> Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, derides them as distractions from the 
> real problems of development. “Do people have a clear view of what it
> means 
> to live on $1 a day?” he asked at a conference on the digital divide in 
> 2000. “About 99% of the benefits of having a PC come when you've
> provided 
> reasonable health and literacy to the person who's going to sit down and
> 
> use it.” That is why, even though Mr Gates made his fortune from
> computers, 
> the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now the richest charity in the
> world, 
> concentrates on improving health in poor countries.
> 
> The backlash against ICTs is understandable. Set alongside the medieval 
> living conditions in much of the developing world, it seems foolhardy to
> 
> throw money at fancy computers and internet links. Far better, it would 
> appear, to spend scarce resources on combating AIDS, say, or on better 
> sanitation facilities. Indeed, this was the conclusion reached by the 
> recently concluded Copenhagen Consensus project, which brought together
> a 
> group of leading economists to prioritise how the world's development 
> resources should be spent (see articles). The panel came up with 17 
> priorities: spending more on ICTs was not even on the list.
> 
> Still, it may be somewhat hasty to write off rural technology
> altogether. 
> Charles Kenny, a senior economist at the World Bank who has studied the 
> role of ICTs in development, says that traditional cost-benefit 
> calculations are in the best of cases “an art, not a science”. With
> ICTs, 
> he adds, the picture is further muddied by the newness of the
> technologies; 
> economists simply do not know how to quantify the benefits of the
> internet.
> 
> The view from the ground
> 
> Given the paucity of data, then, and even of sound methodologies for 
> collecting the data, an alternative way to evaluate the role of ICTs in 
> development is simply to ask rural residents what they think. Applied in
> 
> rural India, in the villages served by the MSSRF, this approach reveals
> a 
> more nuanced picture than that suggested by the sceptics, though not an 
> entirely contradictory one.
> 
> Villagers like Arumugam and Thillan—older, illiterate and lower 
> caste—appear to have little enthusiasm for technology. Indeed, Thillan,
> who 
> lives barely a five-minute walk from the village's Knowledge Centre,
> says 
> she did not even know about its existence until two months ago (even
> though 
> the centre has been open for several years). When Thillan and a group of
> 
> eight neighbours are asked for their development priorities—a common
> man's 
> version of the Copenhagen Consensus—they list sanitation, land, health, 
> education, transport, jobs—the list goes on and on, but it does not
> include 
> computers, or even telephones. They are not so much sceptical of ICTs as
> 
> oblivious; ICTs are irrelevant to their lives. This attitude is echoed
> by 
> many villagers at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. In the 
> fishing community of Veerapatinam, the site of another MSSRF centre, 
> Thuradi, aged 45, sits on the beach sorting through his catch. “I'm 
> illiterate,” he says, when asked about the centre. “I don't know how to
> use 
> a computer, and I have to fish all day.”
> 
> But surely technology can provide information for the likes of Thuradi, 
> even if he does not sit down in front of the computers himself? Among
> other 
> things, the centre in this village offers information on wave heights
> and 
> weather patterns (information that Thuradi says is already available on 
> television). Some years ago, the centre also used satellites to map the 
> movements of large schools of fish in the ocean. But according to
> another 
> fisherman, this only benefited the rich: poor fishermen, lacking
> motorboats 
> and navigation equipment, could not travel far enough, or determine
> their 
> location precisely enough, to use the maps.
> 
> Such stories bring to mind the uneven results of earlier technology-led 
> development efforts. Development experts are familiar with the notion of
> 
> “rusting tractors”—a semi-apocryphal reference to imported agricultural 
> technologies that littered poor countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Mr
> Kenny 
> says he similarly anticipates “a fair number of dusty rooms with old 
> computers piled up in them around the countryside.”
> 
> That may well be true, but it does not mean that the money being
> channelled 
> to rural technology is going entirely unappreciated. Rural ICTs appear 
> particularly useful to the literate, to the wealthier and to the 
> younger—those, in other words, who sit at the top of the socio-economic 
> hierarchy. In the 12 villages surrounding Pondicherry, students are
> among 
> the most frequent users of the Knowledge Centres; they look up exam 
> results, learn computer skills and look for jobs. Farmers who own land
> or 
> cattle, and who are therefore relatively well-off, get veterinary 
> information and data on crop prices.
> 	
> 
> “I'm illiterate,” says one fisherman. “I don't know how to use a
> computer, 
> and I have to fish all day.”
> 
> Outside the Embalam colony, at a village teashop up the road from the 
> temple, Kumar, the 35-year-old shop owner, speaks glowingly about the 
> centre's role in disseminating crop prices and information on government
> 
> welfare schemes, and says the Knowledge Centre has made his village 
> “famous”. He cites the dignitaries from development organisations and 
> governments who have visited; he also points to the fact that people
> from 
> 25 surrounding villages come to use the centre, transforming Embalam
> into 
> something of a local information hub.
> 
> At the centre itself, Kasthuri, a female volunteer who helps run the
> place, 
> says that the status of women in Embalam has improved as a result of
> using 
> the computers. “Before, we were just sitting at home,” she says. “Now we
> 
> feel empowered and more in control.” Some economists might dismiss such 
> sentiments as woolly headed. But they are indicators of a sense of civic
> 
> pride and social inclusiveness that less conventional economists might
> term 
> human development or well-being.
> 
> A question of priorities
> 
> Given the mixed opinions on the ground, then, the real issue is not
> whether 
> investing in ICTs can help development (it can, in some cases, and for
> some 
> people), but whether the overall benefits of doing so outweigh those of 
> investing in, say, education or health. Leonard Waverman of the London 
> Business School has compared the impact on GDP of increases in
> teledensity 
> (the number of telephones per 100 people) and the primary-school
> completion 
> rate. He found that an increase of 100 basis points in teledensity
> raised 
> GDP by about twice as much as the same increase in primary-school 
> completion. As Dr Waverman acknowledges, however, his calculations do
> not 
> take into account the respective investment costs—and it is the cost of 
> ICTs that makes people such as Mr Gates so sceptical of their
> applicability 
> to the developing world.
> 
> Indeed, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the Indian Institute of 
> Technology in Chennai (formerly Madras), argues that cost is the
> “deciding 
> factor” in determining whether the digital divide will ever be bridged.
> To 
> that end, Dr Jhunjhunwala and his colleagues are working on a number of 
> low-cost devices, including a remote banking machine and a fixed
> wireless 
> system that cuts the cost of access by more than half. But such
> innovation 
> takes time and is itself expensive.
> 
> Perhaps a more immediate way of addressing the cost of technology is to 
> rely on older, more proven means of delivering information. Radios, for 
> example, are already being used by many development organisations; their
> 
> cost (under $10) is a fraction of the investment (at least $800)
> required 
> for a telephone line. In Embalam and Veerapatinam, few people actually
> ever 
> sit at a computer; they receive much of their information from
> loudspeakers 
> on top of the Knowledge Centre, or from a newsletter printed at the
> centre 
> and delivered around the village. Such old-fashioned methods of 
> communication can be connected to an internet hub located further
> upstream; 
> these hybrid networks may well represent the future of technology in the
> 
> developing world.
> 
> But for now, it seems that the most cost-effective way of providing 
> information over the proverbial “last mile” is often decidedly low-tech.
> On 
> December 26th 2004, villagers in Veerapatinam had occasion to marvel at
> the 
> reliability of a truly old-fashioned source of information. As the Asian
> 
> tsunami swept towards the south Indian shoreline, over a thousand
> villagers 
> were gathered safely inland around the temple well. About an hour and a 
> half before the tsunami, the waters in the well had started bubbling and
> 
> rising to the surface; by the time the wave hit, a whirlpool had formed
> and 
> the villagers had left the beach to watch this strange phenomenon.
> 
> Nearby villages suffered heavy casualties, but in Veerapatinam only one 
> person died out of a total population of 6,200. The villagers attribute 
> their fortuitous escape to divine intervention, not technology. Ravi, a 
> well-dressed man standing outside the Knowledge Centre, says the
> villagers 
> received no warning over the speakers. “We owe everything to Her,” he
> says, 
> referring to the temple deity. “I'm telling you honestly,” he says. “The
> 
> information came from Her.”
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
-----------------------------------
Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldivide.net
http://www.tsunami-info.org
Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com
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