How can ICT help alleviate poverty



How Can ICT Help Alleviate Poverty?

I’d like to turn that question around a little and ask, “Why is it so difficult to show that ICT can help alleviate poverty?”

The answer is, as usual, dependent on multiple factors, but in general, ICT projects to alleviate poverty have tended to see the technology either as a gateway to new income-generating employment opportunities through eCommerce for craft goods, or as a way into outsourcing markets, where very low wages will make them competitive. In other words, the projects attempt to find new ways for people in poverty to earn cash. My feeling is that these approaches miss two very important concepts.

The first is that lack of cash is the effect of poverty, not its cause. Poverty is bound up in the structures and processes of communities and the relations within them, and among those communities and other communities large and small. Attempts to eradicate poverty by increasing cash flow are starting at the wrong end.

The second concept that many poverty eradication projects ignore is that there are already functioning economies in every country, and the arrival of intelligently constituted ICT programmes can change the dynamics of those economies to the benefit of their participants.

Such programmes will be more likely to succeed where they target the inefficiencies of economies; disrupt outbound cash flows and, where possible, reverse them; extend the local horizons of economies and reconnect them with their lost constituents; and enable and facilitate group-forming and the circumvention of corruption.

Poverty Is Not Lack Of Money But Lack Of Power

Attempting to “provide people with new sources of income” to alleviate poverty or to look for ways in which the access to ICT can be a tool for generating income for people who currently have none, engages the wrong processes to achieve the outcome. This approach equates to attempting to fix the U.S. economy by rigging other factors to increase the value of shares; it is pushing on a string.[1] Economies everywhere operate through myriad transactions, of which only a small proportion are financial; this is even more pronounced in those economies where cash is extremely limited.

The Queen of England never carries any cash, nor does she ever hand over a credit card, or indeed any kind of card, in a transaction. This is partly because she has minders who take care of the small change, but more importantly, because of her position and privilege, others are more than willing to give her everything she desires. She has vast wealth and needs no cash; this is normal and can be seen everywhere.

The Bernie Ebbers Factor

Former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers was a regular beneficiary of IPO’s during the Internet bubble. His money was no better than anyone else’s, yet consistently he was offered many opportunities to “get in on the ground floor” of the latest hot property. What did he bring to the deal? Plainly his money had no extra value, but, as the CEO of a very large business, he brought much needed credibility to many companies whose business plans were illusory if not actually delusional. The fact that he had “bought into the company” was a win-win for everyone involved except those who bought his shares from him. These unearned, in fact fraudulent, benefits were not available to the rest of us at any price.

The Grubman Model [2]

While many of us use our economic power to obtain lower costs for the goods and services we pay for, stock market analyst Jack Grubman is now at least as famous for squeezing his boss to put in a good word for his children at a fancy kindergarten where, presumably, the costs of the care will have been rather higher than average. To someone used to the power of status and its lingering effects, this apparently silly financial decision makes perfect sense. Grubman understood that the support networks surrounding socially powerful schools, and their value in accumulating and applying economic power, far exceed the extra costs of the day care and outweigh the supposed benefits of good education or high level skills.

While we “accept” that these factors operate at the highest socio-economic levels, we are less sanguine when we see them at work further down the tree. For example, if you give a young poor man in New York the choice of a training program or a pair of the latest Nikes, he will understand that his immediate survivability depends more on his status than on his knowledge. He will probably take the shoes because status in the U.S. is conferred by conspicuous consumption. This calculus applies from Wall Street to the New Guinea Highlands where the local “Big Man” asserts and defends his status by accumulating and dispensing the largest feasts. The only significant difference is that in New Guinea the direct beneficiaries are the members of the community rather than the “Big Man” himself.

However, to propose an introduction of ICT into such an environment without taking into account the broad economic factors that it will engage is a recipe for failure.

Income, cash and assets, are only the signifiers of economic power that actually resides in a network of relationships. Poverty is the signifier that economic power is either very small or completely absent. No practical amount of money will make the slightest bit of difference to that because without economic power the money cannot be leveraged into wealth. What is much more likely is that it will be stolen, misappropriated, or finessed away by those whose power is greater. While economists and politicians assure us that wealth is the result of skills, effort, thrift, and wise investment, the reality is that money is the result of economic power, and it cannot be bought at any meaningful price. Even those with plenty of cash have to tolerate the demeaning title of nouveau riche for a couple of generations.

The upshot of this in poor communities is that access to technologies that apply leverage is much more likely to be appropriated by those who already have the power. After all, if the village council or the headman does not approve the project, it will not succeed. I am aware of projects that from the outside look like valiant attempts to alleviate poverty but which, on closer investigation, turn out to be more exploitative than the original situation.

Because widespread access to information networks is inherently disruptive of both economic and political power, project designs need to account for that by ensuring that the outcomes are attractive enough to those already in power to enable the secondary and tertiary effects of information access to take hold in the whole community.

Under-supply of Inefficiency

Western post-industrial planners tend to equate quantity of output with efficiency and assume therefore that third world ways of working are inefficient because their output quantities are small. This is based on an assumption that surplus production becomes a tradeable commodity that can bring greater wealth. However, this process also depends on access to much larger markets; it is assumed that ICT can provide that access while other technologies can convert subsistence production to surplus production and that the two will work together. Since ICT is at its best a huge accelerator of information transfer and able to either circumvent or obliterate the many inefficiencies of traditional western management processes,[3] the assumption is that similar things can be achieved in developing countries by applying the same tools.

I suggest that the whole foundation of that assumption is false.[4]

Studies in the 1970s and the 1990s[5] found that agribusiness uses oil at about 10 percent efficiency, converting 10 calories of fuel to one calorie of food on the table. Researcher Vandana Shiva[6] found that even the least productive pre-industrial system of rice cultivation averaged 8.3 calories of output for each calorie of input; the most efficient averaged 20 calories for each calorie of input.

While improving the efficiency of industrial production processes should be child’s play, and computers can play a vital role, improving subsistence economies’ ratios is vastly more difficult. I contend that this high efficiency applies to most areas of social and economic life in developing communities and can be expressed in terms of the amount of waste materials generated by those economies. The smaller the midden, the more efficient the process, and the harder it is to make a difference with technology of any kind, let alone ICT.

The Jhai Foundation Remote Villages project[7] is an excellent example of ICT targeting a structural inefficiency. The roads in rural Laos are mostly dirt and, in the monsoon season, communication across the network slows by nearly 100 percent. An economy dependent on such roads for all its communication and that finds its network unreliable or totally “down” for several months a year is structurally locked into its current paradigm. There is zero chance that the community could afford to build weatherproof roads, so the Jhai project aims to replace a significant proportion of traffic along those roads with a weatherproof, wireless network.

The village communities have realised that they can transform their local economy through ICT by being able to check ahead for road conditions, schedule and co-ordinate deliveries during ‘road open” periods, and continue to trade by exchanging ownership of goods without taking possession until the road is open again. Because the necessary networks of trust and reputation (another very efficient economic tool) already exist among those communities, this approach has a good chance of reducing poverty by increasing economic activity without engaging any new players at all.

You Can’t Follow Money in a Subsistence Economy

One of the major difficulties in determining what, if any, impact ICT has on the economic well-being in developing communities is that, even more than in capitalist and mixed economies, the traceable component (money) is frequently very small and, for a number of reasons, often disappears altogether. A development worker with whom I have a lot of contact once laughed out loud at my suggestion that spreadsheets could be used for keeping accurate business records. In the communities in which he works, businesses keep at least three sets of books and hope never to show any of them to anyone.

The reality is that the measurable parts of most economies tell us very little about what is happening in them, and this is doubly so in communities where cash is in short supply. Dependence on measurements of financial changes may be looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. On the other hand, a significant part of every economy is the maintenance and growth of human networks supported by regular and efficient communication among many participants, an excellent description of the environment in which ICT’s are most effective. By concentrating on communication opportunities rather than cash flows, we might get a more rational form of ICT assault on poverty.

Necessity is NOT the Mother of Invention

The controversial Tim Flannery’s Future Eaters looks at two societies that reveal important truths about poverty. When discovered by Europeans, the peoples of Easter Island and Tasmania were in the latter stages of economic catastrophe: their natural resources had either been exhausted, as in Easter Island, or had become otherwise unavailable to them, as in Tasmania.

The overriding characteristic of both societies was a deep and very practical aversion to change, experimentation, novelty, and innovation. When the margin of survival is very slim, the economy cannot afford to fail even once; failure would cause total collapse. It is therefore quite reasonable that poor communities will be very cautious of the supposed benefits of ICT. This factor will be compounded by the very patchy record of success in the implementation of ICT in the West, allied with the very spectacular failures of the late 1990s. If the inventors and proponents of the technology cannot figure out how it is supposed to work, those on whom it is being pressed will tend to see themselves less as beneficiaries than as guinea pigs.

A colleague of mine expressed it thus, “Technology innovation is a high risk business; if you are unwilling to face a lot of failures, the pace of innovation will be slowed.” I have no argument with that conclusion, but innovation and serial failure is not a luxury that poor economies can afford. Where failure risks serious loss of face for critical members of the community, where it risks a community’s being branded as an “unreliable” partner for funding bodies and NGO’s, where it risks the total loss of scarce community resources and the opportunity costs in terms of blighted lives, adverse health impacts, and lost education, etc., the commitment to the “vision” espoused by the ICT evangelist may be greatly attenuated. It will be, at best, carefully isolated from the community that it is supposed to serve, further undermining its chances of success in alleviating poverty.

One problem is that merely gaining access to the technology is expensive, both in financial and other resource terms (see my comments here); another problem is that the ROI is close to trivial unless the people who matter to the economy are also connected. Metcalfe’s Law applies at any scale: if one person in a local economy has email, its value is very limited; if half of all the people in the economy have that access, the value of the tool increases very rapidly. Unfortunately, many projects are designed so that the people who would most benefit from emailing each other have to sit in the same room to do it. If ICT is to accelerate economies, the economies in which it will work best are those in which people have the greatest interaction -- their local economies -- and to do that, projects will need to take ICT to the user, not force the user to come to them.

A subsistence economy operating close to the edge of survivability will also be operating at quite high levels of efficiency and may only be able to make use of the new technologies by re-engineering itself, as my colleague Cornelio Hopmann has pointed out in his paper on this subject, to conform to the requirements and capacities of the technology. This has been the experience in the West, and it will probably be even more important in developing communities, as long as we fail to investigate and understand in advance the appropriate areas in which ICT might be able to generate benefits.

Communities everywhere know very well what their communication needs are and where they could be improved, and their particular life experiences will condition both what they consider important and what they will require to effect change. By designing ICT projects to intersect with those requirements and generating visible, accessible benefits that make sense to the communities involved, development agencies will have a better chance of being able to define and measure success.

The Case Of Elizabeth Smart

For much of 2002 the U.S. was very disturbed by the kidnapping of 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her home in Los Angeles. Nine months later she was found and rescued by the police. But when she was discovered, she denied her own name and did not wish to be “rescued” from her abductors. Here is a young girl who was taken from a middle-class background with all of its benefits, privileges, and assumptions who, after less than a year of powerlessness and assault, had become so acculturated to her new life that she was not able to act in her own best interests.

Now consider a process that has gone on not for a few months, but for whole generations, where entire communities have been held permanently in bondage and oppression, poverty, and powerlessness, ingrained with endless propaganda that not only is this their lot in life but that they have deserved the treatment, either through some accident of birth or some act by an ancestor whose debt remains unpaid and which is their inheritance. Some valiant attempts have been made in India to release families from the bondage of indentured labour where crushing debts can be paid off with pitifully small amounts of money. An unexpected outcome of this has been that many released families are then evicted from the only homes they have and find themselves unable to survive in the open market, returning quite quickly to a new bondage just to get a roof over their heads and food on their tables.

To expect that mere access to a technology will overcome these kinds of burdens is not rational. It demands a set of assumptions that adhere to the technology instead of growing from the community. Consequently we find any number of business models based on the idea that, because of their very low wage costs, people will be able to learn enough skills to “digitise legacy documents” or “learn programming languages and sell their skills in the outsourcing market” or some other analogue of a Western, post-industrial dot-com model, instead of dealing with the economic realities of the communities in which the beneficiaries live and attempting to apply to them the capacities that ICT can generate.

A great deal of literature on this subject deals either with the above kinds of fantasies or throws up its hands in despair. I believe that both are wrong and that there are practical and effective applications of ICT to poverty alleviation and examples of them in many places, but I also believe that it is much too soon to tell whether we can impact poverty through these technologies because the effects are second- and third-order emergent processes operating at a community or regional level, not immediate, first-order benefits to individuals who gain access or the basic skills.

Developing Economic Power Through ICT Access

Disrupting the Outflow

The number of companies that have been able to create from scratch a business via the application of ICT can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Practically every dot-com dream has fallen by the wayside. Some of the few apparently successful ones are online tools such as eBay, which takes great advantage of the end-to-end nature of the Internet. But even that is not apparently a replicable model. It seems that on the Net there is probably only room, and need, for one eBay.[8] I suspect that the problem is, as usual, that proponents of eCommerce see its global wood and miss the local trees completely.

A major problem for economies in developing countries is that hard-earned funds are continuously and effectively siphoned off, first to larger regional centres and then to multinational organisations. The problem is so serious that three years ago financier George Soros was concerned that the unrelenting flow of funds from the periphery of the global economy to its very few centres was both unsustainable and a threat to long-term stability.[9] However you view the theory, the reality is that cash that remains in a local economy is worth vastly more than cash that flows out of it. This is true in developed economies (San Francisco’s Next-generation Cities 415 Forum[10] was founded on the strategy that $1 spent locally is worth $5 spent outside the community) and even more so in developing economies.

So tools such as local banking and micro-finance services delivered reliably in small communities have substantial potential, especially if they can draw on the diaspora as a source of both remittances and connections. Tools that enable distributed rather than centralised markets to act efficiently (village to village to village rather than village to regional centre for example) will tend to disrupt the flow of funds out of the community.

Other applications that help to recharge the human capital are equally valuable. It is characteristic of communities in a spiral of increasing poverty that, along with money, the most able people also leave their communities in search of better things elsewhere. While many of those people fail miserably, many also succeed comparatively well. Ventures such as Ethiogift[11] then become powerful tools to reconstitute local communities by enabling inbound, cultural commerce. ECommerce that doesn’t bother about trying to negotiate the byzantine world of global exports, but instead offers the ability for departed family to contribute a sacrificial goat to a celebration or buy a traditional marriage bed, has a double benefit: not only do the funds flow into the community, but the goods and services are delivered there as well.

The most powerful tools of all, however, are those that will support the growth and development of cartels among local producers.

Towards Cartels

Grameen Phone

Grameen phone (GP) has been held up as an example of the power of ICT to deliver economic benefits to impoverished communities for half a decade now and, interestingly, remains almost unduplicated; I strongly suspect that is because it draws so heavily on the unique factor of the British colonial railway system. But it also bears consideration for the kinds of economic benefits it delivers that fall into the three orders that I mentioned above.

Technology Providers

The first-order benefit is that GP introduces a completely new kind of enterprise into a community. By providing the network access and the micro-loan to buy a handset, it enables people to become telecommunications providers to their villages. Since these services have a real economic and social benefit, people are prepared to pay above the marginal cost of service, and small but profitable businesses are created where none existed before. This is a definite plus, but it has to be carefully managed; if GP provided, say, 20 handset loans to a village of 100 people, the business model would quickly fail. The transition from a rent on scarcity to a sustainable business to the kind of gross oversupply that global telecoms firms are currently battling could happen very quickly in impoverished communities.

Access businesses have therefore a very limited role in poverty alleviation, and in many communities, communally-owned services may be the only viable option.

Diaspora Reconnection

The reconnection with the diaspora has been a major contributor to the success of the GP model. Many people have gone to richer nations in search of opportunity and, until the advent of local calling capability, have remained detached from their parent communities, not least because illiteracy at home has meant that communication is at best very slow and highly mediated. Being able to talk and hear how the family is actually doing has helped repair stretched connections and, at least as importantly, enabled the timely remittance of funds.

These remittances are very important to many economies, even those as apparently developed as Mexico, where the second largest source of foreign exchange is family remittances. The importance of this second-order process to the viability of the GP model is borne out by the percentage of inbound calls which, at last report, was around 60 percent.

This suggests that the model has another slightly rickety leg to its viability: the 40 percent of traffic being locally generated is the contribution of the indigenous economy to the process but is less likely to support a business at this stage.

Market Knowledge

The most hopeful part of the model has been the growing reliance of local producers on timely and accurate market information to help them plan their business activities. This is generally portrayed as the watermelon grower who used to load his bicycle with fruit and push it half a day to the market where he was obliged to accept almost any price being offered because there is no point in pushing the perishable load home again. Using GP he can now call ahead and find out what the market for his product is like and decide on that basis whether the trip to the market is worth his while.

This will work only up to a critical point, that is, where enough watermelon sellers have the same information and make similar decisions based on that data -- i.e., the prices are up today so we all take our melons to market tomorrow -- undermining the benefits of the market information very quickly. Some will, of course, try to game the market and reason that if prices are down, most of the competition will stay home tomorrow so it will be a good day for the few melon sellers who turn up.

But the real poverty alleviation and growth in economic power will come when the melon sellers stop calling the market and start calling each other to find out what each is planning to do. If they can start using the technology to manage the flow of product to the market they will gain a number of significant benefits. The first is that the supply can be permanently constrained while the prices will ensure that there is no loss of income (like the Big Six Model, which controls about 80 percent of the refined fuels market). The second benefit is that, by knowing ahead of time what the likely market conditions will be (the futures trading model), suppliers will be able to convert some of their efforts to other activities that may include improving their education, growing alternative crops, or reducing workloads.

There is no question that technologies can make this kind of impact on impoverished communities. Mohammed Bah Abba developed the Pot-in-Pot cooling system for perishable produce in Nigeria.

The impact of the Pot-in-Pot on individuals' lives is overwhelming. "Farmers are now able to sell on demand rather than 'rush sell' because of spoilage," says Abba, "and income levels have noticeably risen. Married women also have an important stake in the process, as they can sell food from their homes and overcome their age-old dependency on their husbands as the sole providers." In turn, and perhaps most significantly for the advancement of the female population, Abba's invention liberates girls from having to hawk food each day. Instead, they are now free to attend school, and the number of girls enrolling in village primary schools is rising.

These factors, coupled with the effect that the Pot-in-Pot has had in stemming disease and slowing the pace of the rural exodus to cities, are what, in Abba's words, "make the Pot-in-Pot a tangible and exciting solution to a severe local problem".

This is a perfect example of a technology changing crucial aspects of poverty, but it also changes the power structures and processes in the community. Releasing women from male domination and enabling girls to gain an education will disrupt the social and economic structures in which they operate, and the transfer of power will not be made without resistance. The Pot-in-Pot system has the great advantage that it is familiar technology to which women already have significant access; their ability to change their own lives by adopting it will be enhanced.

ICT, however, is a foreign technology and will be imported into communities via existing power structures and processes or not at all; it therefore will have to offer complex sets of benefits that advantage both the target group and the power-holders in first- or second-order ways and then be supported long enough to enable the third-order benefits to emerge. However, measuring ICT proposals against the kind of benefits generated by Pot-in-Pot systems might be a good reality check on economic and financial efficiency.

Smart Mobs

“Smart mobs” are a phenomenon identified by Howard Rheingold[12] as an emergent property of new ICT’s that results in an increasingly distributed decision-making process using publicly available networks to enable self-organising groups to meet evolving objectives negotiated without centralised control. Their emergence has been especially notable in the Philippines, where the campaign to unseat President Fidel Ramos was significantly aided by text messaging; similar campaigns have been conducted in Zimbabwe.

The deprivation to the control of the channels of production and distribution of music by commercial companies is another example, not so much in the downloading of MP3 files as in the informal boycott of the U.S. music industry through the same technology. Dana Blankenhorn, in an e-mail to Dave Farber's Interesting-People Archive, wrote, “I don't know if [Hilary] Rosen knows this.… But it's clear that RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] is becoming increasingly frustrated with what appears to be an unannounced, unsponsored, unorganised, unsupervised, grassroots yet surprisingly effective economic boycott of a huge industry, namely musical recording.”[13]

The process behind smart mobs appears to be less an outcome by which the participants formerly negotiate a decision than a consensus for action that arises from a critical mass of participants stating and supporting their intentions. As participants see that their position is shared by others, they become more inclined to add their voice, while those who disagree either drift away or conform. Since no one person or group takes responsibility and there is no formal position agreed, there is no one with whom others can negotiate an alternative; they can only make their own case and hope to modify the outcome in their own favour.

We are in the early stages of the understanding of smart mobs, but it is interesting, and heartening, that poor communities are at least as able to make them work as richer ones and, because so much more of their communities depends on consensus building, it may be even more powerful for them.

The practical processes of smart mobs, however, demand easy, fast, affordable access to the network for every participant. For this reason I am sceptical of the benefits of projects that fail to distribute access to the technology as deeply into the community as possible. If people have to travel to the information rather than the information travelling to the people, they are dealing with a broken model for the application of networks in a community. We have yet to see many projects that effectively engage the possibilities of smart mobs, but buying cooperatives and selling cartels may reveal some of this set of possibilities.

Circumventing Corruption

One of the most pernicious contributors to poverty is corruption, in part because it is an efficient, unregulated market for the accumulation and exercise of power. Fully developed corruption efficiently skims exactly enough from every transaction to ensure that its victim population can just survive, but never prosper. As soon as the opportunity to accumulate resources arises, corruption steps in and appropriates the surplus value. The vulnerable point, however, is that corruption is an information-based process, depending both on who you know and on knowing where to find the right information to achieve your objectives. What ICTs can do, and are being employed to do in some economies, is to make the necessary information so broadly available that anyone with access to the technology can find and engage the information they need directly. By disintermediating the corrupt participants, the transaction ceases to be dependent on access to the right person and the full value can then flow to the rightful recipient.

Many of the developing world’s economies would be vastly less impaired if the billions of dollars in corrupt commissions and fees were made much harder to collect. Sadly, this damage is rarely even acknowledged, let alone redressed until the relevant regime falls from power amid a scramble then to “freeze” their ill-gotten assets. ICT, however, can play a significant role in raising the cost of corruption by applying to hitherto privileged information the same kind of processes that are currently driving to distraction the music industry, where new technologies have cracked open an industry that collected rents from behind high technological barriers.

If we replace “musical content” with direct access to legislation, online forms for collecting pensions or registering claims, licenses, etc., or better still, connecting communities of interest with each other and with the disinterested expertise they need to engage the processes of civil society, the individual’s transaction cost will fall and the corruption cost will tend to rise. If ICT programs can be structured to optimise these outcomes rather than simply finding new sources of cash, they will be much more likely to contribute to economic reform than a great deal of the best practice legislation that tries to do the same from the top down.

While eGovernance projects are very often separated from eCommerce projects, I believe that they are entwined in very important ways wherever corruption is endemic, and those projects that do not take account of the economic damage done by privileged “wheel greasers” of local communities miss the point.

Local Markets Empowered by ICT

Inter-city cell phone marketing network for women entrepreneurs in Madras, India. [14]

This project established a closed group communication network for community-based women’s organizations to promote inter-city direct sales of products made by artisans and skilled workers. This is accomplished by providing the community based organizations (CBOs) with communications links by way of cellular phones, to enable them to network for marketing their products. The existing CBOs are networked in such a way that they can inter-change their products for marketing; products made by CBOs in one city will be sent to a CBO in another city for marketing in their area. On an average, the production groups made a profit of Rs 1,100 (approx $25) and the marketing groups made a profit of Rs 605 (approx $12) during the first month of operation. 100 CBOs, with a minimum of 2000 families (population of about 10,000 people) are members of this network. Each CBO member in the network either produces or markets products that have a daily demand among target buyers, e.g., rice, washing soaps, shampoos, etc. This allows the CBOs to increase their turnover and provides scope for daily income.

This is a good example of the kind of application we should be looking for. Local actors are creating and marketing locally required products from local sources and distributing them through an enlarged, but still local, market through enhanced communications among the participants. More importantly, there are third-order effects beginning to show as the participating community controls the flow of products through the network, redistributing from areas of surplus to scarcity, and profiting from each handling while effectively excluding larger players from the process. The economic effects of increased power are beginning to show, and the use of ICT to control that power indicates a different kind of thinking than we have seen too often in the past. It will be interesting to see whether projects such as this can be replicated in other places and lead to permanent changes in the power structures and processes in their local economies, also known as poverty alleviation.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.[15]

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[1] From (Thanks to Bangla ICT group) Editorial Page Development of ICT sector By Apr 4, 2003, 11:02.

THE annual computer show organised by the Bangladesh Computer Samity (BCS) was held recently in Dhaka. But the shows are yet to provide substantial evidence that the country is well on its way to realising its potential in the vital information communications technology (ICT) sector.

However, it is probably still not too late to catch up with the projection earlier made that Bangladesh could earn at least $ 2 billion annually from this sector by the year 2006. Adoption of realistic policies and their sincere implementation at a faster speed at the field levels are of the greatest importance to reset ICT-related developments on the right track.

Recently, it was reported that a company in Bangladesh could successfully produce the entire software requirements of a large chain store in the USA. This news is inspirational but does not signify a breakthrough in IT exports. It indicates, however, that the country has acquired some capacities to take on IT products exports.

The crucial requirement is comparative advantage or competitiveness for the export orders to increase rapidly. The wages or salaries of ICT workers in Bangladesh are substantially lower compared to India, China and other countries and likely to remain that way in the near future. But to exploit this advantage into real competitiveness, Bangladesh requires quickly better conductivity to the international information superhighway. Presently, the links to that highway through satellite is proving to be hopelessly outdated. Data entry operations can be very lucrative for Bangladesh which with its huge number of educated but unemployed youth could carve out a niche in the worldwide data entry business by now. But at the moment it remains uncompetitive in this field as it lacks conductivity to the international fibre optic backbone that alone can ensure the desired speed of two-way data communication required by data entry customers abroad. Therefore, all constraints in the way of the establishment of this vital fibre optic connection need to be removed at the fastest…

The long term strategy for the sound development of the ICT sector calls for introduction of an appropriate education policy and its implementation from elementary to secondary and higher levels so that this policy can pay off by facilitating the creation of an able and big enough workforce for the ICT sector in the long run. Besides, non resident Bangladeshis (NRBs) should be encouraged with attractive incentives to set up software producing enterprises in Bangladesh. The ICT village plan also requires immediate implementation to boost export of ICT products. © 2003 by

[2] “Private Preschool Admissions: Grease and the City” - - Revelation that Citigroup chief executive Sanford I Weill pledged $1 million to 92nd Street after lobbying officials to admit two children of Jack B Grubman, Salomon Smith Barney analyst, to its preschool program raises questions about private school funding and influence of contributors; one surprising disclosure is that money is coming from bank itself, and therefore its shareholders, not its philanthropic foundation; incident apparently reflects normal, if somewhat distasteful, aspect of New York City independent school admission and funding policies (M) It came as no shock to a certain slice of New York society that Jack B. Grubman, the former star telecommunications analyst at Salomon Smith Barney, had pulled out all the stops to get his twins into preschool. Nor was it any surprise that he had asked his boss, Sanford I. Weill, chief of Salomon's parent, Citigroup, to make a few calls on behalf of his children, or that Mr. Weill complied.

[3] E.g., Australia a world leader in ICT productivity boost

[4]

[5] Horten, David C., The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, Pluto Press, 1999. Page 253, quoting John Steinhart and Carol Steinhart: “Energy Use in the USA Food System” Science 184, 1974, and quoting Robert McC Netting: Smallholders, Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture, Stanford University Press, 1993

[6] The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, p. 253, Quoting V. Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics, Third World Network, 1991.

[7]

[8] Internet power ”fails the poor,”

The power of the internet has been much vaunted as a way of enabling poorer countries to increase their share of trade with richer countries. As such, many countries have adopted - or are in the process of adopting - expensive technology infrastructure to harness that power, often egged on by software firms. But the reality of e-commerce is very different, according to a new report researched in Bangladesh, Kenya and South Africa and funded by the UK Department for International Development.

"We didn't find any big firms that are migrating to e-commerce in developing countries," John Humphrey from the Institute of Development Studies told BBC News Online.

"Over and over we are told that capitalising on personal contacts is the way to broaden business opportunities," said Robin Mansell, one of the report's authors. The problem, according to Ms Mansell, is that international trade rarely occurs between complete strangers. The internet and e-mail alone are unlikely to generate the type of trust needed for US buyers to take the plunge and source their wares from Africa or other unfamiliar trading partners.

After investigating 180 open e- marketplace websites and interviewing 74 managers of exporting firms, the report concluded that little business with new firms was being generated from business-to- business websites.

There are, of course, some shiny examples of newfound trading partners that have met courtesy of the world wide web. A small trading company in Nairobi, for example, is selling macadamia nuts to Switzerland, carrots to Romania and oranges to Ukraine. And an international avocado buyer in Chile has stumbled across a new supply source in South Africa, thanks to the power of the search engine.

But such success stories are likely to be confined to niche markets and remain small fry in terms of global trade, Mr Humphrey said.

[9] In his Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, 1998, he said, “The economies at the centre actually benefited from the (Asian) crisis, while the periphery is suffering from the outflow of capital and is wallowing in depression.…. The task now is to re-establish the flow or to find a way to inject liquidity directly into the periphery.”

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