Dear Colleagues, It would be good if we could agree on a few details.
1. The "poor" seem to cover a range of peoples. Some are so desperately poor that any kind of direct ownership, or even use, of ICT is impossible. 2. Simply because "ownership or direct use" of ICT is not relevant for a certain class of poor does not mean that the introduction of such technology into the proximate context of those people will not be helpful to their situation. It is not necessary for every citizen to become a doctor in order for the general state of health to rise with the introduction of some doctors and medical infrastructure. 3. If we want to discuss the *very* poor then ICT may not be very important; it may offer little in the way of short term improvements under any scenario. 4. If we want to discuss technology and business then we may be limited to discussing options which cannot reach the poorest people directly. We may be forced to deal with scenarios that necessarily involve the "less poor" or even the "elite" in any particular context. 5. Simply because #4 may be somewhat inevitable due to cost and skill shortages does not mean that ICT can't have a dramatic impact on the circumstances of the poor. For example, the introduction of telecommunications has clearly placed pressure on authoritarian political regimes. This is less true when the ownership and control of telecom is entirely in the hands of the state but it is clearly not necessary for a society to reach the point where everyone can afford a cell phone before liberalized telecom unleashes a torrential array of forces; most of which generate positive long term benefits for the poor. Outliers may muddy the statistics but they provide role models and more. Sure India is an outlier is many dimensions; it has enough poor people to rank low on lots of surveys; it has enough millionaire Ph.D.'s living in California to rank high on others. Big deal. It is a great role model. Nigerians are incredibly annoyed that India sells more software than they do and they can't quite figure out how that happened. South Africa may be so rich and powerful relative to most of Sub-Saharan Africa that it is hard to see how lessons from there can be applied elsewhere until you think globally and notice that there are already companies in SA that have "out grown" it and are seeking business opportunity in neighboring countries. Sure mega-centers "attract" capital and brainpower but they also aggregate resources as well, until a point where they inevitably "overflow" and seek opportunity elsewhere. One of the barriers to development across Sub-Saharan Africa is the inability of the individual countries to coordinate, so that from a business perspective the entire region can be addressed as a single economic opportunity. I think it is no surprise that satellite television and cellular networks are two businesses that have managed to grow pan-African footprints; because they can to some degree escape regulation, and they support business processes which are largely uninterested in "artificial" boundaries. Other industries will require more supportive governments before the good that they can do can migrate more easily. When we can get to a world with less artificial isolation then the poor will be less isolated as well. ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
