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 Perspective
Information for development
When talking about information for development it may be useful to first outline what we are talking about
When talking about information for development it may be useful to first outline what we are talking about. The notion ‘information’ has (at least) two aspects: the content of the information, that is, what sort of information are we talking about, and the delivery mechanism, including the target audience, the technology used and the sustainability of the operation. The notion ‘development’ has, of course, a range of aspects, including the development strategy, the policy and socio-economic environment, the institutional environment and governance, and the delivery mechanism, including target systems, target audience, and the actors and institutions involved in the developmental process.
Strategic analysis
In order to produce a development strategy one needs to define the system one is talking about, identify subsystems relevant to the analysis, perform strength-weakness-opportunity-threat (SWOT) analyses for each of those subsystems (or ‘segments’) and environments, define the situation one would like to reach at some stage in the future, and then design a ‘roadmap’ for implementing the strategy. Although it is not the intention of this paper to elaborate extensively on the notion of ‘strategic analysis’, I will briefly discuss the stages of such an analysis, as it may be relevant to actors involved in the developmental process.
The first stage of a strategic analysis is to define what one is talking about. This may be an entire country or region, in which case the analysis obviously would be very complex, or it may be a rural area somewhere in South Asia, in which case the analysis may be less complex, although not necessarily very much so. In the case of a country or region, one would need information on an aggregate or macro-economic level and one would probably address policy makers at the national level as the primary target audience. In the case of a rural area somewhere in South Asia, one would need information on natural resources and socio-economic parameters, such as income and income distribution, language, caste, class, and the role of gender, whereas the target audience may be district-level planning officers or extension agents, or farmers organizations. It is important to note that one should not only define what comprises the system, but also what is not part of it and how the system interacts with the environment. In figure 1, the system is represented by a rectangle, and the area outside the rectangle is the environment.
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