Information and communication technologies for development and poverty reduction: the potential of telecommunications.
Máximo Torero; Joachim von Braun; Eds. (2006)
This book attempts to shed light in how ICT affect economic development in low-income countries, how it affects poor people in these countries and what policies and poverty programs facilitate its potential to enhance development and the inclusion of poor constituents.
Poverty is looked at from the perspective and “livelihood security” which comprises income – determined by physical and human capital, labour, social networks, rights and powers, and access to public goods – and risk (or vulnerability), which is a function of local and international conditions, human behaviour and the probability of shocks affecting income such as illness, loss of employment, natural disasters and so on.
Because telephony is the primary infrastructure that facilitates ICT access this volume largely focuses in telephony as a proxy for ICT more generally. The authors contend that ICTs may contribute to poverty alleviation through the following avenues:
Making markets more accessible to both households and small enterprises.
Improving the quality of public goods provision, such as health services.
Improving the quality of human resources, primarily through education services.
Allowing more effective utilization of existing social networks, or extending them.
Creating new institutional arrangements to strength the rights and powers of poor people and communities.
Further findings suggest that:
As social networks improve, the transmission and usage of ICT should have significant impact on urban-rural information flows, bringing in better trading opportunities for example, or greater credit availability.
The reduction of the information gap at lower cost is of central importance to the poor. The welfare effect of rural telephone use is verified by the perceptions of rural users of its benefits, the high demand for service, the substantial consumer surplus associated with the telephone use, the willingness to pay for the service on the part of rural households, and results from econometric analyses. These positive effects can be expanded by increasing rural service access, adapting new technologies- such as those provided by telephone- more innovatively.
Policy problems such as access and price remain and barriers to ICT effectiveness fall into three categories: barrier involving skill levels, barriers involving the ICT use for development related purposes and barriers related to content relevance. Given these barriers, rural ICT expansion may require complementary measures, such as computer and Internet skills training, web pages designed to direct users to locally relevant content, or access that targets specific groups. In many low-income-country contexts, access to telephones is the basis of pro-poor ICT growth because specialised skills are not needed and because telephone access forms a platform for more advanced ICT adoption.
ICT can be a powerful tool for improving the quality and efficiency of government services, such as in health and education. However, a clear gap still exists in the use of ICT for the deliver of public goods. Some positive cases exist, however, poor people are still excluded from many public services, and ICT has not been adapted to the appropriate delivery of pro-poor public goods in general. On the whole, ICT is still developed by and marketed in high-income countries and innovation and adaptation are not occurring in low-income countries because institutions and markets lack the required capacity.
For potential benefits of ICT to be realised in developing countries many prerequisites need to be put into place: prompt deregulation, effective competition among service providers, free movement and adoptions of technologies, targeted and competitive subsidies to reduce the real gap, and institutional arrangements to increase the use of ICT in the provision of public goods. Access to information through ICT is not only a question of connectivity but also of capability to use the new tools and relevant content provided in accessible and useful forms. We should not overlook the needs for all three “Cs” progress in tandem.
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