ICT for Development: Empowerment or exploitation?
- Has for background a rights-based approach to development
- Looks at the value of ICTs from a rights and empowerment perspective
- based on the Reflect ICTs project, with pilots in Burundi, India and Uganda
Quote from the report:
"ICTs can be used to strengthen local traditions and cultures of communication, but only by design: people need to appropriate the technology and give it functions which suit their needs and motivations. This requires sensitivity to the communication practices and prejudices of the people in question, both in the way the technologies are designed and marketed, and the way that they are chosen and introduced within a project."
This is missing from many projects. Donors are in a hurry to show results and they don't want to spend time doing truly participatory needs assessments. There is an assumption that ICTs on their own are "empowering" so that if you build telecenters, people will just come. I don't think it works that way. It's not that simple.
I liked the fact that the document is written for non-techies (probably by non-techies as well), but the appendix providing details about the various ICTs is so simplistic that I don't know who is going to learn much out of that. I was specifically looking for some mention of power issues (meaning "energy" issues) but power in this document refers only to power relations in the context of "empowerment" vs. "exploitation".
Thursday, October 28, 2004
ICT for Development - Online Discourse | incommunicado
A post to another blog area... related to the Incommunicado Work conference of June 16-17, 2005.
A post to another blog area... related to the Incommunicado Work conference of June 16-17, 2005.
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Enlace Quiché: Using ICT Tools to Support Intercultural Bilingual Education
Interesting project - valuable lessons about how projects can lead to follow-on activities and then the creation of an NGO that is going to continue activities beyond the initial project's duration and funding.
Interesting project - valuable lessons about how projects can lead to follow-on activities and then the creation of an NGO that is going to continue activities beyond the initial project's duration and funding.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
The Asia Foundation: Utilizing ICT to Address Human Trafficking
Human trafficking seems to be the "political correct" modern day bureaucratic terminology to refer to slavery. If you refer to slavery, it's likely that people will think you're talking about something that ended a long time ago, so perhaps it's best to call it human trafficking. There are actually many forms of modern slavery, and human trafficking has been getting an increasing amount of attention from development agencies in the past few years.
The Asia Foundation started a program to look at how ICTs can be used to address human trafficking. The answers are not simple and there are numerous challenges and opportunities to explore.
1. Low levels of ICT capacity among groups fighting human trafficking. Many NGOs in developing countries are getting connected and increasing their IT capabilities. There is no reason for those addressing human trafficking to be left behind.
2. Sensitive nature of transfer of information over insecure channels
That is indeed a serious issue, but there are many human rights organizations that have been dealing with other sensitive issues and they may have important lessons to share about how to handle communications and sensitive data.
3. Lack of accurate data to convince policy makers of the nature and scope of the problem. Databases built on rigorous methodologies for capturing the nature and scope of the problem in specific countries would be quite helpful.
See also the Anti-Trafficking in Person In Asia Web Portal at http://www.TIPinAsia.info
Human trafficking seems to be the "political correct" modern day bureaucratic terminology to refer to slavery. If you refer to slavery, it's likely that people will think you're talking about something that ended a long time ago, so perhaps it's best to call it human trafficking. There are actually many forms of modern slavery, and human trafficking has been getting an increasing amount of attention from development agencies in the past few years.
The Asia Foundation started a program to look at how ICTs can be used to address human trafficking. The answers are not simple and there are numerous challenges and opportunities to explore.
1. Low levels of ICT capacity among groups fighting human trafficking. Many NGOs in developing countries are getting connected and increasing their IT capabilities. There is no reason for those addressing human trafficking to be left behind.
2. Sensitive nature of transfer of information over insecure channels
That is indeed a serious issue, but there are many human rights organizations that have been dealing with other sensitive issues and they may have important lessons to share about how to handle communications and sensitive data.
3. Lack of accurate data to convince policy makers of the nature and scope of the problem. Databases built on rigorous methodologies for capturing the nature and scope of the problem in specific countries would be quite helpful.
See also the Anti-Trafficking in Person In Asia Web Portal at http://www.TIPinAsia.info
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