Perspectives on ICTs: In the context
of Development
Sundeep Sahay
Technology historically implicated in development
processes
Riding concern of “technology transfer” in development agendas
Implications of modernization, replication of growth process
In the 1960s/70s, the focus was primarily on agricultural technologies to
aid productivity gains in agriculture
Today, the focus is very mucn on ICTs and surrounding knowledge
capital
Some historical debates: Small is beautiful
• Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (E.F. Schumacher, 1973)
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Considered as one of the top 100 most influential books written since World War II
Championing of small, appropriate technologies with a people focus,
Standing in contrast to phrases such as "bigger is better".
Emphasized «enoughness» - later termed as Buddhist economics
• Written as a critique of Western economics during the energy crises of the 1970s
• Describes "The Problem of Production", arguing that the modern economy is unsustainable.
Natural resources like fossil fuels are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be
treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion.
• Faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an
activity, blasts notions that "growth is good", and that "bigger is better", and questions the
appropriateness of using mass production in developing countries, promoting instead
"production by the masses". “The aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being
with the minimum amount of consumption“, and the "philosophy of materialism" to take second
place to ideals such as justice, harmony, beauty, and health.
Some historical debates: Appropriate Technology
• Appropriate technology is small-scale technology. It is simple enough that people can
manage it directly and on a local level. Appropriate technology makes use of skills and
technology that are available in a local community to supply basic human needs, such as gas
and electricity, water, food, and waste disposal.
• Represents an ideological movement encompassing technological choice and application that is
small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy efficient, environmentally sound, people
centred and locally autonomous.
• Originally articulated as intermediate technology by Schumacher.
• Some appropriate technology applications include: bike- and hand-powered water pumps, selfpowered equipment, self-contained solar lamps and streetlights, and passive solar building
designs
• Today appropriate technology is often developed using open source principles, which have led
to open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) and thus many of the plans of the technology
can be freely found on the Internet
Some contemporary debates: Frugal innovation
• «Doing more with less»
• Technological innovation will not materialize if not
accompanied with social and institutional innovation
• Innovation only takes place at the intersections of the
technical, social and institutional spheres
• Some interesting examples:
– Grameen bank, Bangladesh
– Electric Rickshaws, India
– Various implications for ICTs
Modes of adoption of technologies in developing
countries
• Dominant model is of technology transfer or diffusion of technology
• Aim is to take a technology developed in the West, replicate and
drop it in the context of developing countries
• Assumes knowledge is generated at the core, not the periphery
• The periphery are only passive recipients of the technology
• Various critiques to this model:
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Parachuting
Design from nowhere
Decontextualized design
Design-actuality gaps
Alternative model: Technology translation
• Technology can never be replicated directly from one context to
another
• It is translated, as it moves through the various steps from one
context to another
• With every move, new socio-technical networks are formed,
which also redefines the artefact itself
• ICTs are more susceptible to such redefinition, as they are more
«interpretively flexible»
• Draws heavily on concepts from Actor Network Theory
• Example: Leopoldo PhD thesis from Mozambique
Centrality of ICTs in Contemporary Development
Processes
• PM, Mozambique: My country has recently adopted its national ICT policy, …ICTs have
become an indispensable lever for a country’s development. In today’s world, it is the ability to
efficiently and effectively use ICTs that plays an increasingly important role for a country’s
relevance.
• Lidia Brito, Mozambican Minister for Higher Education, S&T: […] GovNet is
a clear step forward in our efforts to make ICT a decisive tool to streamline Government
operations to make service delivery more efficient and cost-effective, thus bringing
Government closer to its clients: the citizens and businesses. This is in line with the letter and
spirit of Mozambique’s ICT Policy and Strategy as well as with that of the Public Sector Reform
Program. as a powerful enabler of development”.
• Tanzania’s Development Vision 2025 “The necessary condition for the nation to
achieve rapid overall development to meet the development challenges of the 21st century is
to ensure that all national sectors make full use of ICT”..
Some more of the same…
• South Africa’s President, Mr. Mbeki: “Good IT infrastructure is
present in South Africa, a country blessed with a Government that knows
that the future will be based on IT”
• World Economic Forum: One of the main lessons of neoclassical growth
theory is that, in the long run, an economy cannot grow unless
technological progress occurs.
• Digital India launched by the GoI to ensure that Government services are
made available to citizens electronically by improving online infrastructure
and by increasing Internet connectivity or by making the country digitally
empowered in the field of technology. The initiative includes plans to
connect rural areas with high speed networks.Digital India consists of three
core components: Creation of digital infrastructure; Delivery of services
digitally; and, Digital literacy.
Some implications
• Knowledge society, information society, digital society, esociety, e-government, connected society and many other
synonymns
• Provides a clear statement on development agendas
• Provides a strong basis to legitimize directing budgets towards
ICT based agenda
• Symbolism – of modernization and growth, and absence of it
of underdevelopment and poverty
• In summary: ICT4D is politically loaded, full of financial, social
and development implications
Despite this…..
• Knowledge society, information society, digital society, esociety, e-government, connected society and many other
synonymns
• Provides a clear statement on development agendas
• Provides a strong basis to legitimize directing budgets towards
ICT based agenda
• Symbolism – of modernization and growth, and absence of it
of underdevelopment and poverty
• In summary: ICT4D is politically loaded, full of financial, social
and development implications
Some implications
• Landscape of ICT4D projects littered with stories of failures
– Heeks (2002) Health ICT projects show 90% total or partial failures
– Often lessons not learnt – reinvent the same wheel of mistakes
• Not all doom and gloom, also some spectacular successes
– Computerization of Indian Railways, for example
• ICT4D research largely focused on ICT in developing countries, rather than ICT for
development
• Evaluation of ICT4D projects is a marginalized activity
• Primarily studied with respect to efficiency gains – time and money, not related to
development gains
• Development remains poorly theorized, as such the impacts of ICT on D remain largely
speculative and anecdotal.
Some important omissions
• Limited focus on
– Individuals
– Communities
– Indigeneous knowledge
• Dominant focus on efficiency concerns within business contexts,
important social concerns not considered
• Particularly relevant in contemporary times when confronted with
problems of migration, security, peace, conflict, etc
• ICTs need to play a central and senitively designed role, example
personal identification and surveillance
Some perspectives on ICTs for D
• “ICTs as conversion factors” (drawing from Sen’s Capability
Approach)
• ICTs as enablers of the network society and global
informational capaitalism (drawing from Castells)
• ICTs as makers of the Risk society
• Resilience ICTs (drawing from Heeks)
ICTs as Conversion factors
• Capability Approach helps develop a human centric approach
to technology
• Resources (marketable goods and services) have
characteristics that make them of interest to people, the
bicyle example
• The relation between a good or a resource and the
achievement of certain things with it represents a ‘conversion
factor’: the degree to which a person can transform a
resource into a functioning, and the skills needed to enable
this transformation
Types of conversion factors
• Personal conversion factors
• Social conversion factors
• Environmental conversion factors
For example, how much a bicycle contributes to a person's
mobility depends on their physical condition (personal
conversion factor), the social norms, for example whether
women are socially allowed to ride a bicycle (social conversion
factor), and the availability of decent roads or bike paths
(environmental conversion factors) to enable effective use of the
bike
The Choice Framework
STRUCTURE
• institutions and organisations
• discourses
• policies and programmes
• formal and informal laws
including:
- Norms on usage of space
Primary: Choice
• technologies and innovations
including: access to ICTs
- availability of ICTs
- affordability of ICTs
- skills needed for ICTs
CAPABILITIES
- Norms on usage of time
DEGREES OF
EMPOWERMENT
Secondary, as chosen
• existence of choice
•
easier communication
• sense of choice
•
increased knowledge
•
better/more social
relationships
•
healthy environment
•
increased income
•
increased mobility
•
more voice
•
more autonomy
•
etc.
• use of choice
• achievement of
choice
AGENCY
SR
He
CR
Age
ER
by individual, e.g.:
NR
Gender
Ethnicity
PsR
MR
etc.
GR
In
Ti
FR
Key:
ER = Educational Resources
SR = Social Resources
PsR = Psychological Resources NR = Natural Resources
In = Information
MR = Material Resources
FR = Financial Resources
GR = Geographical Resources
CR = Cultural Resources
He = Health
Ti = Time
(Kleine 2007, 2011, based on
Alsop & Heinsohn 2005, DFID
1999)
ACHIEVED FUNCTIONINGS
DEVELOPMENT
OUTCOMES
Manuel Castells as enablers of network society
 ICTs enable:
 Networks, involving horizontal flows of information
 Capitalism, a new form of economy based on information
 Globalisation – global connections of flows
 Helps highlight invisible elements – people, regions,
groups, diseases etc
 Provides guidelines on strategies for making the invisible
more invisible – by joining the network
 Fundamental role of identity in shaping social
transformation in contemporary society
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ICTs as makers of the Risk Society
 Ulrich Beck, a German Sociologist, has coined the term of risk
society
 In contemporary risk society, individuals always need to make
choices, often in conditions of uncertainty and incomplete
knowledge
 We need to make informed guestimates, processes shaped through
socio-political conditions
 ICTs help to manage risks, but also create their own risks – a
dialectical process
 Also, leads to many unintended or side effects
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Resilent ICTs
 Resilence – the ability to rebound after external shocks
 Very relevant in the development context, as experiencing
shocks which are political, technical, social, cultural,
institutional and various others
 Synonyms with various other concepts – robustness,
stable, sustainable and various others
 Especially relevant in the context of low resource contexts
Concluding remarks
 ICTs need to be theorized more explicitly, treated largely
as a black box
 ICTs need to be theorized within a development context,
inspired by theories of development