11/27/10

Information technology in development: Mythbusting

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Over a span of five years I traveled to nearly 50 telecenters across South Asia and Africa. The vast majority looked a lot like the one in Retawadi. Locals rarely saw much value in the Internet, and telecenter operators couldn’t market even the paltry services available. Most suffered the same fate as the Retawadi telecenter, shutting down soon after they opened. Research on telecenters, though limited in rigor and scale, confirms my observations about consistent underperformance.
As I soon discovered, these mostly failed ventures reflect a larger pattern in technology and development, in which new technologies generate optimism and exuberance eventually dashed by disappointing realities.
That is Kentaro Toyama as the voice of reason . Responses to Ken’s piece ar, including bits by Nicholas Negroponte, Dean Karlan, and Jenny Aker.
Another bit I liked:
The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.
I claim some expertise, however small. My first job in development was building a study around telecenters in rural India in 2000 and 2001 for two professors. This was the height of the Internet bubble. Paul Samuelson called it “the most interesting research project he’d heard of in years.”
Let’s just say there the Internet research bubble popped too.
Ken is notable to me not simply for his great work, but as the first and last person who ever said to me, “I read your article in the Journal of Development Communications. This article–essentially my MA thesis–is not something I dare link to (for fear someone will read it).
But the main message is not far from one of Ken’s big myths: information and technology are not the bottlenecks.
Ken’s blog is
See Ken talk about ICT4D myths in this excellent YouTube talk:

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