The Internet in Development Projects

Support for the poor or subsidies for the computer providers?

Thomas Schauer The Global Society Dialogue Germany

The article asks whether the boom of IT projects in development assistance really supports the poor in developing countries or whether it is just one more case of hidden selfishness of the Western countries...

Some striking facts
About 770 million humans on Earth are undernourished and 11 million children die from malnutrition every year. 1,000 million people are overweight and 300 million are clinically obese. The Germans (80 million people) spend about 2,500 million US dollars annually for pet food and accessories.

The three wealthiest people on our planet, Bill Gates, W. Buffett and A. Gardner, had a cumulative fortune of 121,000 million dollars in 2001, which equals the gross national income of the 125 million inhabitants in the three states Congo, Burundi and Ethiopia for a period of 10 years.

The average US-American causes 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, the average citizen in Sierra Leone only 100 kg. The average US-American produces CO2 emissions for 78 years, the Sierra Leone citizen only for 37 years because life expectancy of people in Sierra Leone is less than half of the life expectancy of people in the US.

Internet, wealth and hidden agendas
It is not surprising that the world-wide differences in wealth correspond also to a different degree of availability of information technologies. Whereas in some countries there is already a majority of the population using the Internet, there are others in which the technology is hardly present. Details about the correlation between Internet access and overall wealth are shown in Figure 1. There is a large digital divide related to the income divide.

Figure 1. Gross national income and Internet access
The figure includes more than 150 countries - most of them (the dots are overlapping) have neither the Internet nor general wealth. In principle, there are four relationships possible between Internet access and wealth. And the decision which one we assume to be true has large impact on development concepts.

• Wealth is the cause for the development of Internet access.
• Internet access is the cause for wealth.
• Internet access and wealth call for each other.
• Internet and wealth have no causal relationship.

Statistical analysis itself does not answer the question. The Internet has not existed for sufficiently long, and it is not possible to examine whether poor countries which have put a focus on overall development (wealth first!) subsequently have better opportunities to create an information society or whether the strategy should be to invest massively into the IT infrastructure in order to create subsequent wealth. So it is only possible to make some considerations of plausibility.

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