What Can ICTs Do for the Rural Poor?

At the World Summit on Information Society, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) held a roundtable session entitled, "Six years of bridging the rural digital divide." Alfonso Gumucio Dagron opened with a keynote speech focused on how to fight rural poverty in respect to the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). He started off by saying that there are three "wrong" assumptions: 1) development is a matter of technology; 2) development is a matter of information; and 3) information technologies are equal to development. He suggests that these assumptions are "leading the camp of the official representation at the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS)."

Gumucio Dagron contends that "many governments and agencies have remained hard of hearing or completely deaf to the argument that the “digital divide” is a social divide, an economic divide, a cultural divide and a political divide..." He suggests that technology gaps are another issue "if we are looking at ICTs supporting sustainable social development, access to computers and Internet is far from being the answer."

The speech included a historic overview of development in the context of how technologies have "failed" the poor. In the fifties and sixties new technologies were developed as a way to produce more crops yet "little consideration was given to how the international market operates, who fixes the process, and who, in the end, benefits from the work of those poor peasants that are now living in worse conditions that 40 years ago." In the seventies and eighties, development organisations focused on information and knowledge as important to helping the poor improve their standard of living. In this instance they "did not take into consideration the local knowledge cumulated over hundreds of years, by cultures that were alive and well while pests ravaged Europe."

Other reasons Gumucio Dagron gives for how ICT's do not help the economically poor are, for example, that "participatory approaches" seldom involve communities in the decision making process because there are "clashes with institutional agendas and the 'annual report' syndrome." Further, "The discourse on ICTs for development is often well crafted for institutional reports, but seldom corresponds to what is really happening on the ground." And, "For one success story of ICTs in development, there are fifty failures." According to Gumacio Dagron, 90% of the contents of the World Wide Web is irrelevant to 90% of the population of the Third World. "Largely in English, contents have little to do with the interests of the poor in developing countries."

According to Gumacio Dagron, ICT's can contribute to the development of the rural poor, if the following conditions are met:

1. ownership and appropriation with participation from the beginning of each project.
2. local contents (farmers need to know the price of their crops at the city market, if there is a veterinarian at a walking distance, or if the local government has credits available for them.")
3. language and cultural pertinence (information in their own language, and presented in a layout that they can understand and that is culturally appropriate. Language is the vehicle that communities use to communicate; but it is also the essence of their identity.)
4. convergence and networking (both essential for sustainability of the communication process.)
5. appropriate technology, also relates to sustainability.

ICT's need to be "envisioned from the perspective of users and through their active participation." He suggests creating a "smaller world with bigger communities" and that "communication –which implies participation, sharing of knowledge in a horizontal way, and respect for diversity and culture- is key to social change."

The keynote address ends with this last statement "If I had to synthesise the substance of the above participatory approach in one sentence this would be: leave access behind and adopt process, mind more about contents and less about machines."