Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development

This paper analyses the question of whether ICTs can help alleviate poverty in low-income countries, focusing particularly on the role of ICTs in assisting the development of small and micro-enterprises. It suggests that ICTs are more likely to play a role as a communication technology, rather than as an information processing or production technology. Given serious inequalities that constrain the use of ICT-based information by poor entrepreneurs, ICTs may have a greater role to play in giving 'voice' to the poor' i.e. making the poor information providers more than information recipients. The paper is critical of 'the ICT fetish' that dominates much of development thinking at present and turns the use of ICTs within development into an end in itself rather than a means of acheiving other development goals. It identifies a number of 'development opportunity costs' associated with this discourse and increased investment in ICTs at the expense of other sectors. Finally the following development priorities for Information, ICTs and Poverty are identified:

• the poor need knowledge to access, assess and apply existing information and need resources for action more than they need access to new information
• the poor need access to new locally-contextualised information more than access to existing information from an alien context. The information needs of the poor will be met more by informal, 'organic' information systems than formal, ICT-based information systems
• the poor need ICTs more to give them 'voice' than to give them 'hands', 'brains' or 'ears'.
• the poor need intelligent intermediaries to use ICTs
• the poor need 'community intermediaries' to use ICTs
• the poor will only reap the fullest benefits of ICTs when they own and control both the technology and its related know-how.