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.
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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.
Wealth is the cause for the development of Internet access
This is historically true, because most of the countries, which have a high level of Internet users today, were wealthy already 20 years ago. The argument is also supported by the fact that the digital divide within countries runs along traditional inequalities, which are mostly related to financial differences. There are different rates of Internet access between white Americans and those whose ancestors originate from Africa and also between men and women, between working people and the unemployed.
The importance of wealth is also shown by an analysis of Internet costs. Dial-up Internet tariff for 30 hours per month was 131$ in Niger in 2001, 172$ in the Central African Republic and 22$ in the United States. The averages for the world regions were 52$ for Africa, 33$ for the Americas, 41$ for Asia, 38$ for Europe and 86$ for Oceania (ITU 2002). This data, however, still ignores the income differences within the regions. In order to have comparable data, the prices for Internet access were divided by the gross national income. The result is shown in Figure 2. Only if the relation between monthly access costs and the annual GNI is in the lower percentage area, is there a significant share of Internet users among the population.
Figure 2. Relative costs (share of average GNI) and Internet access
However, a straightforward causal relationship between wealth and Internet access cannot be proven. The lower Internet access in disadvantaged groups is also correlated to a deficit in education and that might be seen as well as a reason for lower rates of access. Wealth may be seen as a necessary but not as a sufficient prerequisite for the creation of an information society.
Internet access is the cause for wealth
This is the position of many hardware and software providers. In recent years and even beyond the dot-com crash, they have been very successfully propagating the opinion that developing countries can catch up only if they are provided with the opportunities of the information age. “ICT for development” was the motto of innumerable non-profit initiatives, which started programmes delivering Internet to the poor. However, help is often not as altruistic as it may seem at first sight. Western countries use development assistance to support their own industries. The “computers for the poor” initiatives added the feature that a large number of credulous people made themselves (unintentionally) promoters of a monopolistic company. Microsoft was spread by these initiatives throughout the world. Industry was very aware of these advantages. For example the World Economic Forum created the so-called CEO charter for digital development, a “private sector commitment to transparently allocate human, in-kind or financial resources to reduce poverty in developing countries and disadvantaged communities through the use of information technology”. The signature of the charter included the commitment to spend no less than 20% of corporate citizenship and/or philanthropy budgets to promote social, economic and educational progress in developing countries and communities through information and communication technologies. It is not surprising that the list of signatories was dominated by the IT industry. However, the proof that provision of Internet access substantially improves the situation of the poor is still missing and, besides, there was a similar discussion when the telephone came up.
In what ways can information and communication technology improve human life?
ICT tools enable both economic and social development. This affects many aspects of our lives. For example, through the development of ICT, policy-makers, educators, students, entrepreneurs, business leaders and the regular citizen will have tools that:
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link hospitals, schools and libraries to the Internet to engage in information exchanges;
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develop training programmes at telecentres or training materials focused on technical skill development;
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promote democracy and participation in civil society such as online “town squares” where the community can exchange relevant information;
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help develop and grow the local economy by providing an electronic link between local businesses or consumers to exchange information and conduct business.
In addition, economic development can be propelled by the growth of ICT. A nation’s competitiveness is tied to its capacity for ICT creation and application. Information and communication technologies represent two key factors:
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Infrastructure enables the development and growth of market sectors,
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ICT is a market sector and service in its own right.
Wealth and Internet call for each other
There is reasonable evidence for this hypothesis. On the one hand, it is not possible to deny that the information society cannot develop without the availability of financial resources and on the other hand, it is obvious that in a modern society, information technology helps to support economic and administrative processes significantly. One of the most important innovations is business-to-business electronic commerce, which lowered transaction costs. The assumption of a weak mutual causality between wealth and the development of the information society would lead to a moderate and very specific application of the IT provision in development programmes.
Internet access and equality
The wealth of nations is not related to equality in a straightforward way but countries with too much inequality are not among the richer ones.
Therefore it is not surprising that the relationship between equality within a society and the share of the population accessing the Internet shows a similar pattern. The countries with a high Gini index, indicating low equality, have a low number of Internet users. They are in a situation in which the large majority of the population cannot afford hardware and software, and the governments have not the resources to start support actions in order to provide public access for the poor.
Figure 3. Equality and Internet access
The Global Information society - a Fairy Tale?
A prominent opinion today is that IT is an enabling technology, which gives tremendous chances to the disadvantaged and promotes equality and democracy. Historically, one technology, which is known to have had such an effect of empowering the poor, was printing. Information technology could also have this effect if it were available as easily and cheaply as books, if adequate training were provided, and if there were sufficient content of interest.
Figure 4. Website of the Gyandoot service
Information technology is not affordable for many people
The situation is even worse than expected. The IT-market is a global market with prices, which differ less than prices for bread, or books in different countries. And the global hardware and software providers are partially in a monopolist situation and enforce their pricing regime (i.e. Microsoft licensing including online registration).
The fact that the costs for IT-infrastructure are poorly adapted to local markets makes the relative position of people in developing countries worse than in developed ones. They are starting the “race to the moon” not from Cape Canaveral or Baikonur, but from the Marianas Trench. In addition, locally generated obstacles prevent access. In many developing countries, Internet fees are even in absolute figures higher than in OECD states.
People in the low income countries have fallen back behind the rest of the world. Of course, lack of valuable information is a main problem. But how best to provide it? The availability of devices that can provide information is shown in the table 1. Why should we focus on that technology which is least available and why should we try to use just this for bridging the gap between the rich and the poor? If the Internet were to serve as a leapfrogging tool, it would have to be usable by the illiterate (37% of adults in the low income countries). But Western companies have no incentive to produce such features for people who cannot pay much anyway.
Table. 1: Availability of technologies in low income countries,
devices per 1000 people (World Bank 2003)
Projects are often far from the real life and interests of the poor
Problems with Internet access are widespread: many reports by involved people support this. For example, in Costa Rica, there is a project “Lincos”, which aims to help some of the poorest towns to escape from their isolation. The project is run with an Internet trailer, protected by a tent. The project turned out to be highly beneficial for the wealthy coffee farmers, who started to enter into e-commerce. They checked the coffee prices and created websites. The poor hardly used the opportunity - and if they did so, they preferred pornographic sites. Such results are similar world-wide, whether one looks at an Internet café in Irkutsk/Russia, where rich youngsters play online-games and some girls write emails to the “West”, or whether one visits a point of access in Aydin/Turkey, where the PC terminals are separated by walls on the left, on the right and behind the user. A short look at the browsing history shows that the main interest of the previous users was related to pornography. There is hardly anybody sitting at the computers learning English online, studying mathematics, doing paid work for Western companies, collecting environmental information or anything else that the sponsors of “computers for the poor” would expect. Generally, not enough educational information is presented on the web, and if it partly is, many people face a language barrier. And even if this barrier were overcome, it would be evident that many of the poor are not familiar with the Western type of abstract learning culture.
There are not only problems with Internet services. Other approaches face similar problems. For example Gyandoot experiment. This is an Intranet based government-to-citizen service (Figure 4) delivery portal in India. The services include price information on agricultural products, help with legal affairs, employment news, grievance redressal (guaranteed answer by the district administration within 7 days), matrimonial service, free rural newspaper, Hindi language e-mail service and e-learning material. The service is delivered by distributed kiosks (Soochanalayas). In an examination a research team travelled to these kiosks and wanted to obtain information both from the staff at the sites and from the users. The results were very surprising: 9 kiosks were found closed during regular working hours, in 3 of these cases, the soochaks could be found and opened the facilities for demonstration for a moment. In the 16 places, which were open, there was another surprise: there were practically no users at the soochanalayas on all days of the survey. The study team had to travel to common meeting points in the villages to locate the users of Gyandoot services. With considerable effort, the team could locate 32 users in all and obtain responses from them. The users were mainly farmers, located closely to the soochanalayas and the service, which was ranked highest, was the information about prices for agricultural goods. The project also registered that the revenues from the Gyandoot services were not adequate to breakeven. Some of the main conclusions were:
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Gyandoot has not succeeded in attracting the rural poor to the soochanalayas. Even services like issuance of caste, domicile and income certificates have not enthused them, as there are better delivery mechanisms for these certificates in place today (caste certificates are issued in schools). Clearly, the rural poor do not perceive Gyandoot as a platform for them to seek services from the government, even when they have a need.
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Although the grievance redressal service had received some initial attention, it is losing its sheen, as the citizens are not satisfied with the response times. This is a very serious and oft-repeated complaint from all users.
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The beneficiaries of mandi price service, which perhaps has the highest number of transactions registered, are only middlemen and medium to large-scale, educated farmers, who possess the ability to absorb the risks associated with quick decisions making, or can wait for favourable market conditions to happen. Even here some of these beneficiaries have complained about the lack of timeliness in updating the prices, which led them to making losses. While the proven and cost effective mechanisms like radio broadcast exist, should the district administration deploy expensive ICT channels at its own cost to serve communities which in no way can be considered as poor or backward? Further, number of transactions for this category of service is high only in comparison with those for the other services and is quite low in an absolute sense.
The relatively disappointing evaluation of the Gyandoot project does not prevent its use as a reference for the promotion of the new technologies. On the Gyandoot website, it is still presented as a success-story. The journalists and politicians are usually happy about instructive examples. In addition, the project had received the “Stockholm Challenge Award” ( Figure 5) and nobody would expect that the project selection process was a bit insufficient, as long as he does not have a closer look on the section “results”, which showed that they were judged from media reports.
Figure 5. Description of Gyandoot on the website of the Stockholm
Challenge Award
Design of the technology ignores the needs of poor countries
Most projects in developing countries provide the kind of equipment to the poor, which is produced and usually used in the industrialised countries, because the developing world has not yet succeeded in setting up its own computer industry. But often these devices are not designed for the use in the developing countries surroundings. The power breakdown is very frequent there and can last from hours to days. Sometimes there is air moisture, which makes it necessary to treat a CD-player with hair drier prior to use.
It is not only hardware, but also software that are inadequate for the needs of users in developing countries. Even the users in Western countries are not happy about the innumerable “goodies” of Microsoft software and the “help” function is of a quality which makes the user doubt whether he is able to understand written language. Website design also does not meet local needs. Internet users in developing countries have a slow Internet access. Websites with graphical content and high-resolution graphics that are no problem in Europe, make the sites for those people in developing countries practically inaccessible.
The organisations that deal with development assistance have to revise their concepts. After a phase of enthusiasm and the first disappointment about the technology, there is now a strong trend in literature, which searches for ways to make IT provision in rural areas in developing countries “sustainable” (meaning to guarantee their maintenance and a minimum of profitability). Prerequisites will be the adaptation of hardware, software and content to local needs. Until this is done, a step “back” can also be a step forward. Radio services and SMS-based services, television and books (a cheap technology with multi-user properties) can provide a lot of information more cost-efficiently than the “new technologies” in their present design.
References
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Amighetti, Andrea; Reader, Nicholas 2003: Internet project for poor attracts rich, Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 2003
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Centre for Electronic Commerce 2002: Rural cybercafes on Intranet, draft report from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
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Forbes 2002: World’s richest people http://wwwforbes.com
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ITU 2002: World Communication Development Report, ISBN 92-61-09831-2
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Schauer, Thomas 2003: The Sustainable Information Society, ISBN 3-89559-042-8 available in English, French, Russian and Romanian at http://www.global-society-dialogue.org
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Schauer, Thomas, Franz Josef Radermacher (Ed.) 2001: The Challenge of the Digital Divide - Promoting a Global Society Dialogue, ISBN 3-89559-236-6, http://www.global-society-dialogue.org
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Schauer, Thomas 2000: Lifestyles, Future Technologies and Sustainable Development, Protext Verlag Bonn, ISBN 3-929118-05-X, can be ordered free of charge at info@faw.uni-ulm.de
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UNFCCC 2003: Website of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change http://www.unfccc.org
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UNICEF 2003: http://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index_bigpicture.html
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WHO 2003: Obesity and Overweight,
http://www.who.org
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World Bank 2003: World Development Indicators, ISBN 0-8213-5422-1
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ZZF Zentralverband zoologischer Fachbetriebe Deutschlands 2002, Zahlen und Fakten http://www.zzf.de
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