Empowering the Poor. Information and Communications Technology for Governance and Poverty Reduction: A Study of Rural Development Projects in India
Harris, R and Rajora R. (2006)
This report sets out to examine the application of large-scale approaches to the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for electronic governance and poverty reduction. We pose the question, if ICTs can be used to reduce poverty, why in India are they not being used more extensively to do so? The study examined 18 development projects in India that make use of ICTs in the form of community telecentres for the benefit of the poor.
The objective was to evaluate them along key constructs relating to their potential for scaling up. These were:
Project Design
Community Participation
Project Outcomes
and their contextual Political Economy (policy environment, social environment)
Questionnaires were completed by 2,156 users of the telecentres and interviews were conducted with project stakeholders and personnel. A typical survey respondent was a 30-something, male farm worker, with some schooling, representing a socially-marginalized community and earning close to US$ 2 per day.
The study sought to understand the factors that influence how and why the projects might or might not scale up into widespread implementations once they had established themselves as being capable of delivering beneficial outcomes in a sustainable manner. It was recognised that external factors such as political will, social awareness, business imperatives and the availability of resources will affect the rate at which ICTs are made available to wider audiences of poor rural populations. Projects have the ability to influence these external factors but at the same time they are not dependent on these factors being in their favour.
However, the pre-condition for scaling up is to have a successful project, and the key component of that success in terms of scaling it up appears to be the extent to which the recipient community accepts the project within its day to-day life. Furthermore, it has emerged that the most effective way of achieving community acceptance lies in the quality of the staff at the centres with whom the community interacts.
Project characteristics which generated desirable outcomes:
projects that were formed within public-private partnerships, where the telecentre operator had a financial incentive to succeed, possibly under a franchise arrangement;
centres that delivered a wider range of integrated useful services, including e-government, agricultural support, education, trade facilitation, health and entertainment;
projects that participated closely with their beneficiary communities, in a bottom-up mode of design;
projects that targeted low cost technology;
projects that engaged in capacity building at all levels of stakeholder engagement, from institutional to local.
The implications for practice are that while useful information services are a prerequisite for successfully operating ICT implementations in the form of community telecentres, in themselves they are insufficient. The additional key ingredient seems to be the skills and characteristics of the staff in the centres in their dealings with the community. This may have been overlooked by project designers and operators. There is very little literature on how to manage the face-to-face relationship between community telecentres and their clients. In many projects it is left to chance; a low priority task sometimes assumed to be within the capabilities of local volunteers, even schoolchildren. Yet our evidence suggests a far higher priority for the selection, training, support and development of such personnel if it is intended that the project would eventually be scaled into a wider implementation.
Technologies and the information they deliver are key ingredients, but telecentres act as conduits for community development and their social role in terms of fostering productive relationships with poor people appears to be at least as important as their substantive role of delivering information services. Scaling rural ICT projects for poverty reduction, then, depends on the project providing useful services, but it also depends on doing it with effective staff that can achieve high levels of community acceptance. |
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