Info wrote:
Putting a cellular phone in the hands of people who can barely put food on the table or live in sub par housing conditions, fighting aides, and worst of all, about to be left of out the 21st century digital workforce is just crazy. Cellular phones and pagers have been in the poorest hands for almost a decade now, has having a cellular phone helped their conditions, no.
Actually, that's not true at all. Projects like the GrameenPhone initiative are very well documented. Thousands of uneducated women in Bangladeshi villages now have successful careers - and financial independence - because of the mobile phones they've received through the program and the mobile services they're offering to their villages. The program is now expanding into Uganda and Rwanda, and hopefully will be successful there as well.
I think it's really unproductive for us to adopt a binary mindset in which it's either mobile phones OR computers. Just because The Economist says that we should ignore computers and focus only on mobile phones doesn't mean we're right if we reply by saying the opposite.
There's a reason why the notion of ICT for development is called ICT for development rather than PCs for development or smartphones for Development. The goal here isn't to take one particular technology and force it onto the world. The goal should be to address the world's most pressing development needs and identify solutions that, if appropriate, can select from a _spectrum_ of ICTs, from mobile phones to computers to community radio and everything in between.
The Economist article makes a big mistake by assuming that ICT4D activists are all trying to push computers as a solution in itself; it's misleading and naive. Activists are also pushing for more affordable, stable mobile phone networks, low power fm radio, solar-powered technology, and many other ICTs. The key is to identify _appropriate_ technologies for solving different development challenges and finding sustainable, scalable ways of implementing them. So for some communities, that may be computers first; for others it'll be another technology.
So let's not do what The Economist did and adopt an either/or approach to the issue. No one type of ICT will solve all the world's problems, so let's try to find the most appropriate uses for them from one context to the next....
-- ----------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
