Village Voice: Towards Inclusive Information Technologies

This International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) briefing discusses the sustainability of information and communication technology (ICT) use in developing countries and how it works best when tailored to community needs. Approaches that "keep development concerns at their core and people as their central focus" factor in social realities, including how people already share knowledge and adapt to introduced technologies.

The document examines several ways in which development agencies use ICT to boost the reliability and availability of information, lower transaction costs, and provide more transparent and participatory access to institutions and media. As stated here, "Innovative local strategies can create new information flows and business models, and facilitate access to credit." For example, "e-Choupal in India, an Internet-based market pricing and farming information service covering 40,000 villages. Through links to microfinance schemes and circumvention of middlemen, e-Choupal is affecting traditional business structure." However, the economically poorest may still remain untouched by the technological advantage of marketing information if, for example, there is only one buyer in an area, and farmers build a relationship with this single buyer-agent who also acts as their source of credit and broker.

If ICT projects are designed as technology-led service provision rather than development-led, people-centred initiatives, they might fail or fail to be scalable because they do not foster demand. "Pilot projects supply equipment and Internet access without building community outreach services that work in conjunction to build local capacity, content and acceptance. The success of a pilot project is often hard to replicate because it is based on simplistic indicators such as user numbers, and contextual factors such as translation of materials into local languages are not taken into account."

National governments are planning ICT infrastructure, such as international cable links and mobile mast networks, to make more technology affordable. Now, as indicated here, ICT usage must be analysed and mainstreamed to address what services can be developed to increase the impacts of this usage on livelihoods. In doing so, projects introducing ICT to local communities need to pay active attention to the impact of that technology on that community’s ways of interacting. "Many recognise that mainstream development could play a part in reforming the ICT4D agenda by integrating ICTs with locally specific development processes and outcomes. Equally, the development community could learn from the profound influence on social structures that ICTs can have, along with the ethos of participation and empowerment that modern ICT tools encourage."

A number of projects that attempt to address livelihood, such as market information provision, also boost skills, such as the Linking Local Learners initiative in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Mixing methods and technologies in Uganda, the Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative (BROSDI) has established ‘on-demand’ agricultural extension services delivered by mobile phone. Used with both knowledge fairs and participatory Q&A radio programmes, these combine new with old technologies and face-to-face group discussion. The Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN) in East Africa and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in India develop participatory knowledge networking through an approach that builds community trust by involving existing social networks and empowers communities to drive their own information needs. Local outreach volunteers of ALIN - who both train and act as ‘infomediaries’ - are available to the communities, along with a wide range of ICT-based and traditional tools, including community radio and drama, focal groups, participatory video, computers with internet access, a cross-network online web portal, mobile text message services, and newsletters. Grameen Telecom in Bangladesh provides both telephone services and livelihoods to women who take microloans in order to participate in the Village Phone programme and become community phone ‘operators’. "Combining different technology components to generate fresh solutions, known as ‘mashups’, is becoming commonplace as more and more free-to-use component tools emerge." For example, in post-election Kenya, poll watchers reported human rights abuses using a text message system to create an on-going blog-style public record of Ushahidi (‘testimony’). Ushahidi software, which is free and open source, was developed in Kenya by combining a mobile text message receiving system with a feed to a website containing a Google map of the country, where reports are plotted.

The document calls for a "more nuanced set of monitoring and evaluating tools and frameworks" that will enable development organisations to measure the role of ICT in the success of projects. Rather than solely counting user numbers, it may be more telling to measure what a particular technology intervention is being used for, who is using it, or how it is helping to "build a more robust livelihood strategy build a more robust livelihood strategy". The document suggests carefully developing indicators: "it is useful to be explicit about the difference between output, outcome and development impact-based indicators. Outcomes and development impacts involve not only information, but also money, skills, motivation, confidence, trust and existing knowledge." Sustainability is recommended as a condition of project development, including the idea of developing a demand-driven model which incorporates creating a local wireless network as a way of spreading the costs of a satellite-based internet connection among businesses, schools, and hospitals.

Another recommended strategy to better understand the sociocultural contexts of communities they work in is to "analyse social network structures and provide a proxy for a ‘knowledge map’." This entails finding those structures that already act as information distribution networks - trusted source of new knowledge. "Practical techniques to perform the mapping have been pioneered by organisations such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). And there are a host of non-ICT workshop-based activities that can be used, such as the Net-map Toolbox to make social network mapping accessible to development practitioners. This kind of mapping vividly demonstrates how important ‘infomediaries’ are in disseminating new knowledge,6 and gives insight on power relations that can be used in avoiding technocratic ICT deployments."

The article concludes that "[i]ntegrating ICTs into development thinking now could create significantly more robust and diverse livelihoods in the [economically] poorer countries that need them....This requires moving towards providing a broad political economy of developmental ICT, which demands a mixture of disciplines working together – and, above all, marginalised people driving their own agenda."