Dear GKD members,
As a graduate student studying education and development issues, and as
someone who managed a computer science education project in Nepal recently,
I have been reading the latest GKD e-mails with interest, especially around
the issue of the 'digital divide'. I am excited by the prospects of what
IT technology can do for development practice, and to that end I have two
comments that pick up on John Lawrence's question "is this the only, or
even the major dimension on which we should judge the so called divide?
. In my observation in Nepal, the logistics of reaching people, as Peter
Knight says, "located in remote rural areas, with limited or no access to
formal educational systems, health care, potable water, electricity, or
jobs related to the new information economy" are formidable but are not at
the core of " what has been described as the 'digital divide'." If the
problem of the 'digital divide' is framed in terms of technical
considerations alone, this potentially limits how IT technologies could be
useful in development efforts. I would encourage us to widen our thinking
about the 'digital divide' in two ways:
1) Apart from bringing electricity, phone lines, literacy and numeracy
among other things to villages in Nepal that have not changed for likely
over one hundred years, IT technology will only be used and abused by those
who are already privileged as is from what I can tell the general trend
within development. This usually means those living in urban centres,
males, high caste, those already educated, those with higher incomes and
those with access to institutional forms of political governance or the
elaborate patronage system. Margaret Grieco mentioned there were political
and economic consequences to individual access, and this should be
emphasized to a greater extent. Though Richard Heeks cites a study from
Trinidad and Tobago suggesting more people had access to the Internet there
than what household connections indicate, this may not tell us the nature
of this access, such as who actually has access, which households these are
or in what parts of the country they are. A useful question is 'Who has
access to IT technology, who controls that access and to whose
benefit?' Caution is needed to guard the 'digital divide' from occupying
the same spot as other socio-economic and political divides, as is
certainly the growing case within Nepal.
2) Remote villages in Nepal are decidedly not Western in culture, but are
culturally typified by collective-identities, extended kinship structures,
flexible notions of time and are generally more integrated in cultural
composition. The emergence of IT technology in a cultural milieu that is
not information centred but agrarian, and is not part of the new economy
because it is barely a part of Nepal's national economy, requires more than
a phone jack regardless of how subsidized it is. IT technologies could
represent another means of bringing Western culture and its forms of
modernity into as of yet unreached regions of the developing world, a
process that has been sometimes beneficial but often ruinous for indigenous
culture, knowledge, social, economic and political structures. This is not
to glorify indigenous culture, but the complex question of culture,
cultural change and impact cannot be ignored when considering the 'digital
divide'.
I think IT technology should be explored for its use in development work,
and efforts by those in the North or the South to overcome technical
obstacles with workable solutions should be supported. What I am urging is
a balanced perspective that retains questions of equity and culture along
side of the technical, sustainable, fundable, researchable, etc., so that
development really works because it is liberating and empowering for everyone.
Robert Krech
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