Understading poverty, reduction and role of ICTs
Poverty and ICT use is extraordinarily diverse and mediated through local circumstances and social networks. Rather than trying to isolate specific and direct impacts of ICTs on poverty, we look at the broader processes and conditions in which they are operating and make comparisons across sites. The analysis has been shaped by the important themes that emerged from a preliminary look at the data. Some of the themes are empowerment, learning and education and social networks

What is poverty?
Researchers work to develop detailed pictures of how poverty is understood, experienced and lived in their locality. They do this by investigating the question ‘What is poverty?’ throughout their research, using methods such as interviews and conversations, observations, diaries, mind mapping and PRA (participatory rural appraisal) exercises. The focus is on how people expressed their own understanding and experience of poverty. Many local understanding of poverty are contentious, either for participants or project workers or both. For example, in numerous cases poverty is identified as having too many daughters and not enough sons, thus incurring dowry costs and forfeiting income.Project workers,whose centres represented a direct intervention in such social norms, are implicitly contesting these views of poverty. In this context, local definitions of poverty are not uncontested truths; they become part of the learning processes around the ICT centres through group discussions, research, changes that arise from centre activities, training and general social interaction.

It is also important to recognize that poverty is always relative poverty. The programme was remitted to explore ICTs and poverty reduction among the very poorest communities but participants themselves drew many distinctions between different kinds and degrees of poverty. Moreover, poverty changes over time, and insecurity is itself a crucial aspect of poverty. Different kinds of poverty cannot always meaningfully be ranked quantitatively into poorest and less poor, while official poverty classifications and people’s declarations of poverty are not a reliable guide to who is and isn’t poor. Finally, people at different levels or kinds of poverty do not generally live in different worlds – they lead interconnected lives.

Poverty and participation
In order to achieve participation,local ICT initiatives, be they centres, studios, networks or any other variation, have to understand and deal with certain basic structures of poverty that materially prevent people from accessing ICTs or that prevent them from seeing the relevance of ICTs in improving their conditions. It is the poorest and most marginalized people who most clearly articulate these themes though confronted, at many different levels of poverty.

• Restriction to daily needs and daily labour: Women frequently pointed to lack of time to participate in centres after attending to household work; many people say they cannot forego any potential earnings in order to participate in a centre:

“I did not have lunch today as I have only small quantity of food hence I did not eat. I kept it for my children. They can’t tolerate hunger.”
Under this situation I feel it is difficult for Mrs. Natesan to learn computer. She is working as a servant maid and earning USD 4 per month and her husband is doing laundry work. He is earning USD 300 month which is not sufficient to run the family. If she is to learn computer she feels it would be difficult to make ends meet. (Fieldnotes from Tamil Nadu)

• Mobility: Participation of the rural poor may involve enormous costs in time and transport. Women are often dealing with restrictions on their mobility: in Seelampur and Sitakund, for example, Muslim women cannot travel or use public spaces without socially acceptable reasons. Hindu fishing communities in Sitakund are amongst the poorest and most marginalized within the programme. They are geographically remote, with poor transport; the level of poverty made travel prohibitively expensive and only justified if there was direct monetary benefit; inhabitants have the lowest caste status within the Hindu population and are ostracized and exploited by surrounding Muslim villages. The idea of participating in an ICT centre was almost inconceivable, though some of the young men expressed interest.
• Marginalization: The poorest often fear that ICTs and ICT centres are not places for people like them: the very factors that structured their poverty – caste, illiteracy, gender – also seemed to exclude them by definition from prestigious modern technologies. People often assume that both ICTs and ICT centres are only for educated people; illiterate people frequently asked if they were only open to the literate. Moreover, the design of the centres themselves could suggest that it was not for them.:

People used to fear entering the ICT centre. Not only the centre is equipped with computers but the outlook of the centre must have given an expression that the centre is meant for some one better than themselves. The centres are well furnished with marble flooring… (Darjeeling fieldnotes)

• Relevance and practical outcomes: given these problems of access, particularly for the poorest and most marginalized, the relevance of ICTs to their conditions is harder to demonstrate, and has to be demonstrated in terms of direct practical outcomes.

While the Darjeeling site researcher was interviewing in a remote Himalayan village, one participant Vijay stormed off angrily and said:

"[With full of action - angry man]. What will poor people do by learning computers? If we go to learn computers who will feed our stomach? Poor peoples spend their life as a labourer. None of us here has time for computer. Will starve if we don't work for a day. Anyway what is the use of learning computers? Hey Nima lets go for work, why do we need to waste our time here? We are not going to benefit anything out of it. It's the same old thing, they simply document, nothing will happen practically..."

Hopes, aspirations and change
The very idea of 'poverty reduction' depends on understanding how people formulate and act upon aspirations, concepts of social change and images of the possibilities open to them. These themes are also crucial for understanding how people relate to ICT centres and skills. For most participants, access to ICTs represents real or symbolic access to modernity, the future, education and knowledge, and therefore ICT centres constitute a space into which people can project and develop a sense of change and possibility.

However, there is a considerable gap between these aspirations and people's knowledge of this 'modern world' in which they want their children to establish themselves. Both parents and children have little direct experience of offices, professions and the range of modern work. In general, young people are literate but their parents (or mothers) are not, and have no personal understanding of the kinds of skills they believe to be necessary. They, therefore, find it difficult to articulate precisely how education or information translates into improvement or jobs, or to assess the quality of education and to make informed choices over their very considerable investments in education.

Young people feel they are growing up in a world where they expect to be literate, to be knowledgeable and educated, to move beyond restrictive family and community norms in order to lead more autonomous lives, and to have a higher status within their communities. ICT centres fit these aspirations particularly closely, both because of the modern and prestige associations of new technologies and skills and because the ICT centres themselves tend to be perceived as free spaces in which people can develop autonomy and confidence.

ICT centres are intervening in diverse structures of poverty as well as wide ranging conceptions of poverty and poverty reduction within poor communities. Members of the community themselves draw widely different connections between poverty and ICTs, which also change over time and as they become involved with ICTs and ICT centres. Moreover, different ICTs and combinations of ICTs are connected to poverty in different ways. The central lesson learned from the programme is that it is counterproductive to look for direct impacts of specific ICTs on specific poverty conditions. The most promising poverty reduction processes often arose from combinations of different media and channels of communication; and these processes are often indirect and subtle, mediated through different social networks, organizations and attitudes. Moreover, the shift from direct impacts to media mixes and mediated processes parallels the experience of many participants in ICT centres: they often start by looking for direct material benefits but found themselves engaged in processes of innovation and exploration whose benefits were more subtle and long term.

Direct and indirect 'impacts'
For some people, particularly amongst the poorest, the relevance of ICTs is judged almost entirely in terms of their capacity to generate income or employment in the short term. Those with a longer term view connect ICTs to poverty reduction in terms of education: securing ICT skills is a route to better jobs in the future, directly or by continuing into higher education. As a wall poster for a private computer school in rural Tamil Nadu put it, 'Computer education: boon for middle class': ICT skills and certificates are seen as (a necessary) part of a broader and long term strategy for social advancement.

All the local initiatives are careful not to feed the inflated promises of ICTs by making it clear to participants that computer skills do not guarantee jobs, though it was often difficult to counter these expectations. In fact, the more direct connections between ICTs and income generation are often the least promising. In the case of computers, for example, mastering basic computer literacy plus Microsoft Word, and learning to type curriculum vitae (CVs) and letters, is increasingly seen as essential for future employment for the next generation. It is central to aspirations to white collar jobs, and some young people reported failing to get jobs because of lack of computer skills. However, this has little relevance to the very poor and agricultural population who do not see this route as realistically open to them.

Several of the local initiatives focus specifically on income generating activities and direct employment benefits from ICTs.

The project workers have moved away from direct intervention in income generation in response to the ways the participants themselves are engaging with the ICTs. They only returned to an explicit focus on income generating activities later in the initiative, on the basis of the confidence, social and technical skills and freedom for autonomous activity that the young women have built up through their experiences at the centre. As in most centres, the most important impacts on women's prospects of employment emerged from providing a space that acted as information exchange, and support network, and developed a range of interrelated social, technical and economic skills and experience.

Contrasts between more or less direct ICT impacts on poverty are evident in everyday use and content. This is particularly clear in the case of computing and Internet; the disjuncture was less clear in radio and video, and perhaps least of all where there is a clear mix of media.

All the centres involve some element of structured computer training which taught basic computer literacy as well as Microsoft Office and Internet functions. This is essential partly because it corresponded to people's understandings of what 'learning ICTs' means and it can impact on their lives: it means learning the functions which are associated with getting jobs or advancing into higher education (word processing, including CV writing; and spreadsheets). This also includes the skills essential to feeling comfortable on a computer (mouse and keyboard skills, and ability to save and organize files, to understand the 'topography' of the computer - where things are). This is the basic sense of 'using computers' that is associated with getting certificates from computer schools or centres, and with possessing credentials that are accepted by employers. This approach to computing is also associated with learning other valuable and marketable skills, above all English and secretarial skills.

However, even within this kind of ICT use, people's encounter with computers rapidly diversifies. Learning to use the mouse through drawing and games rapidly develops an excitement about multi-media possibilities and an exploration of visual skills and pleasures. Using PowerPoint in order to teach all of Office gets people involved in sequencing images and texts, which can develop into narratives and - in some sites - into giving presentations to the rest of the group. In the case of less literate people, seeing one's name on the monitor is a primarily visual experience, more to do with drawing and self-expression than with office skills.

At the same time, the more creative uses of ICTs generate problems. They can require considerable technical skills on the part of staff and trainers, as well as time to develop structured programmes and support project work. It is clear that this approach was much better developed in the community radio and video projects, and needs to be extended to computing and Internet. This is particularly true where there were status differences of gender or education. Interestingly, in Sitakund, participants are extremely vocal in criticizing staff who imposed their authority not only by their attitude but also by structuring classes too formally.

Finally, innovative use of ICTs can be challenging to the wider community. For instance, parents questioned why they were paying even nominal fees for their daughters to participate in frivolous activities like listening to CDs that seemed to have little to do with serious education.

Empowerment
As the initiatives have developed, the notion of 'empowerment' has emerged as a useful term to describe the positive effects of the introduction of community multimedia centres. At the same time, it is a dangerously broad and over simplistic way to describe those same, often contradictory effects - particularly for women. Project staff and participants widely regarded this term as expressing the benefits of their interventions in the broadest and deepest form, and closest to the personal experiences of beneficiaries. It served as a useful way of collecting together data that indicated the ways in which communities or individuals became somehow 'empowered' to operate outside of their traditional spheres of activity, or to challenge restrictive social norms. In this respect, empowerment refers broadly to the challenging of social norms, shifts in power relations, an increase in perceived opportunity, and increases in 'confidence' (mainly of individuals) and the consequences that arise from this. We might define empowerment in this context as the confidence and capabilities to express oneself and to act effectively in the social world.


Yasmin narrated how different she feels today than when she had come from her village. She recalled the incident when she had come first time to the centre with her cousin and had cried when could not use mouse and this made her feel so depressed that she thought that her education till 10th has no relevance and use when she can not apply that for using something that everyone is using so confidently. She gained so much confidence and feels so motivated that, now, she is determined to acquire economic independence in 10 days time and has postponed her plans to go back to her village. She said, "Now I have tested the test of confidence and chatting with other woman".

Now she has been looking for a job. She will get back to her village only after she gets job. Also shared how frustrated she had felt in the beginning days when she was not able to use computer and how due to her shy nature, and lack of confidence she missed her college opportunity.

It would be difficult, and in fact misguided, to separate out the various technical and social bases of Yasmin's confidence: mastering the mouse, chatting and being in the city: ICTs and spaces of sociability are closely interlinked in her's story. Both her regrets about her past and her new aspirations arise from a sense of the expanded possibilities that she can now contemplate on the basis of developing herself in a supportive but challenging environment.

Similar stories come from an essay writing exercise amongst participants in the Sitakund site, "Changes in you after coming to the centre". The researcher summarizes the confidence theme in the following way:

None of the male users mentioned any change in them in terms of raised confidence while each and every female user has mentioned that one of their major changes have been this rise of confidence level. 'But among these changes the most significant change in me has been that previously I used to feel some kind of a fear to get out of the house alone and I used to feel diffidence after coming to the centre. But now there is not a bit of that previous fear in me. This is the biggest change in me.'

Thus, the repeated stories of overcoming fears in order to use the mouse or to organize the files narrate both literal and symbolic. Finally, this engagement with new technologies has sometimes a dramatic impact on participants' social standing in their homes or community. Being seen to master prestigious new technologies changes participants' relationships with others.

At ICT Centre Seelampur, there are a number of examples to conclusively show that the participants have gained self-confidence in many ways. Now they have a say in their family. Their parents, husbands, in-laws and of course their siblings feel proud as they uses the most sophisticated technical device. They are also admired because they are coming out of home to know good things and exchanging information with others. Some of them are now the part of the decision-making unit in their family. They realized that women have the right to speak. In the society they have a distinct position, as they know computer, they interact directly with outsiders like us as well as UNESCO visitors. (Seelampur site)

We can not say that within a year of ICT use the social hierarchy in Baduria has changed, but all that we can repeat about the married women who had no right to say anything, now can give their opinion in a decision making. After coming to the centre and mixing with lot of women they have realized that they have the right to speak. (Baduria team)

As discussed in the section on social networks, a key issue for poor communities is whether ICTs and ICT centres are 'for them'; conversely, access to ICTs - as modern technologies for educated people - may mean a change in their perception of their own status. In an interview from Tansen, a young man shares how he was excluded by both poverty and caste from ever watching television; the ICT centre designates it as 'his' technology for the first time:

Voice and information
The general changes in confidence, status and self-expression translate unpredictably into direct impacts. The research experience has focused us on diverse processes rather than on specific pieces of information, accessed via ICTs, that had direct outcomes. For example, several of the Darjeeling centres gradually began to see themselves as spaces for information exchanges: people value them as places where ideas and information are accessed and exchanged through numerous channels - face to face interaction, print media, computers, public displays. The kind of information is equally diverse, including medical and educational facilities, HIV/AIDS awareness, training in stuffed-toy production and legal advice, or simply the possibility of sitting in a centre reading a newspaper or magazine. In terms of empowerment, the message is that people value the very idea of their right to free and transparent access to information and ideas.

Leela and her friend said that they have formed a SHG (self help group) after getting information from ICT centre. The SHG members originated because of the ICT centre. None of us knew each other before we actually met in the ICT centre. So the ICT centre has not only made us friends but has made us aware and given the ideas. The idea behind the SHG emerged within the users in the centre. We have also made a point that we have a meeting once a week in the ICT centre. The name of the SHG is the SAHAYATA, which they have associated with the ICT project. Deoki said, I have got more than what I expected from this centre. This centre has become an eye opener for not only the marginalized section of the community but even to the people who lacked information. (Darjeeling researcher notes)

Negotiating change
Empowerment is a way of defining changes that embrace peoples' sense of social agency, power relations within family and community, and the social norms that govern relationships and institutions. They embrace shifts in gender, caste, class and age divisions. Although participants generally describe increases in their confidence and in their opportunities and aspirations, they also have to deal with considerable tensions.

Social networks
Social exclusion is a major indicator of poverty and plays a central role in its reproduction as well. Inclusion in social networks provides vital access to information, social support, confidence and the ability to participate in collective life. Poorer people have fewer and narrower social connections, excluded by their conditions from the very social resources which might improve them.

Investigating social networks means studying 'Who is connected to whom?' What is the social and geographical range of people's connections? At what points and for what reasons are people prevented from making connections with others? How do people use their connections? Social networks are also part of understanding the flow of communications within communities and therefore the ways in which ICT initiatives connect to the community: how is information circulated? How do initiatives relate to existing social networks and to what extent are they accepted within the community?

What has emerged most strongly from the research experience has been the effectiveness of the ICT centres in expanding users' social networks. They do this in many ways.

• They provide legitimate spaces to socialise and work with different people, and in free and interesting situations.
• The centres act as 'hubs' where different social networks can intersect.
• Participation in ICT centres builds the confidence and skills to deal with new people and situations.
• Centres are connected to larger organizations, and attract visitors, giving a sense that the locale is connected to a wider world.

This exclusion from social and commercial networks, on the basis of gender restrictions on mobility, is repeated in many of the sites, in both Muslim and non-Muslim households. For example, in both Budikote and Tamil Nadu sites there is a clear distinction between women who were in SHGs and those who were not. Outside of SHGs, women are generally restricted to the immediate family, a few neighbours and some extended family, living and working in considerable isolation. Joining a SHG, and in these cases, by extension, an ICT initiative immediately expands the social networks to which they are connected not only to other members but also to committees and gatherings of other SHGs, to bank and government offices with which they have to deal and sometimes to the partner organizations that the SHGs and ICT initiatives are connected to.

Restricted social networks reflect social norms that narrow peoples' mobility, access to information and resources, and their ability to interact with others to gain support and to organize collectively. Conversely, interventions that expand social networks challenge the social norms - such as gender roles and caste exclusions - that restrict people's mobility and social connections.

• ICT centres are social centres: whatever else they do in the way of resource and skills access, the are places where people can meet, interact, work together and exchange information.
• While much literature has focused on how ICTs expand mediated information access and communication, much of the initiative's experience points in the opposite direction: ICT access produced increased face-to-face communication within local social networks.

Sustaining and embedding ICT initiatives in communities
Much of the research has focused on how ICT initiatives as organizations are connected to their communities. How can ICTs and ICT initiatives be made part of their communities? How can local groups and networks develop and sustain ICT use and ICT initiatives? How can they best organize in order to integrate local groups and networks, to develop a sense of community ownership and involvement?

These are really questions about developing initiatives that are sustainable in the widest sense of the term, not simply financially sustainable but also socially and technically sustainable: they need to be valued and integrated within the community so they can survive as social organizations; and they need local skills and motivation to keep them functioning.

In fact, the different aspects of sustainability are closely interrelated. For example, financial sustainability presumes that the initiative and its resources are socially valued so that people want to fund them; technical sustainability requires both financial support and social motivation.

Concluding observations
Last one year's research brings out briefly some significant findings on the impact of ICT interventions with respect to poverty, empowerment and social networks. It points to the role played by people's own understanding and perceptions about their situations and how they would want to change it. This is particularly so in relation to their experience of poverty. This has important lessons for ICT interventions that may be developed in the future in this region.