Information Technology and Development

A New Paradigm for Delivering the Internet to Rural Areas in Developing Countries

Jeffrey James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134340231
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Attempts to bring the benefits of information technology in the form of the internet to developing countries have, to date, foundered on the belief that this requires the beneficiaries to access the technology directly. As a result, the perceived huge benefits of such an enterprise have often failed to materialise.This original contribution to the

1 Introduction

The purpose of this book is to advance the case for a major change in the way that the Internet is currently delivered to rural areas of poor countries. Incorporating as it does, changes in assumptions, concepts, values and practices,¹ the proposed change, we feel, is akin to a paradigmatic shift in policy focus away from the dominant approach.²

In its simplest form, what this shift entails is almost a complete methodological reversal: from, on the one hand, a model based on largescale telecentres equipped with modern computers that are frequently financed by foreign capital, towards, on the other hand, an approach that, by contrast, provides Internet access primarily to local intermediaries, who are much better placed to provide information and services based on the Internet, in a form that is relevant to local circumstances (defined broadly to include incomes, customs, language and needs). What is provided to the rural inhabitants in the latter case is thus not individual access to computers with direct Internet connectivity, but rather the knowledge and services that are indirectly (via an intermediary) provided to meet the specific needs and challenges of the local community. In the following chapters, the argument in favour of the intermediary-based model is gradually advanced, with the goal, ultimately, of demonstrating just how powerful this approach could be if it is presented as an alternative paradigm, rather than, as now, a few isolated accounts of more or less randomly chosen examples.³

Competing concepts and their intellectual antecedents

The most general and conceptual section of the book is in Part I, which, apart from defining and comparing the competing models in a suitable degree of detail, also suggests (on the basis of rather limited evidence) that the telecentre-based alternative has not at all performed well. (For the purposes of this book, telecentres can be thought of as donor-funded, located in remote, or rural areas and offering a wide variety of technologies such as radio, fax, computers, e-mail and the Internet.) Far too often, for example, even freely available and Internet-connected computer equipment has remained largely idle, for reasons varying from a pronounced lack of user capabilities, to information and content that is irrelevant, in one way or another, to local needs and circumstances. What fundamentally underlies these disappointing experiences in our view, is a heavy reliance by the dominant approach on an outdated and discredited view of technology transfer to the industrial sector of developing countries. This is the sector, write Bell and Pavitt (1997: 83–4):

in which, at least relative to earlier expectations, disappointment at the realised extent of ‘catching up’ [to developed countries] over the last four or five decades is perhaps greatest.

Even at the beginning of that period, it was widely recognised that there were difficulties in transferring agricultural technologies from developed to developing countries. However, because industrial technology is less location-specific than agricultural technology, it was assumed that developing countries had much greater scope in industry than in agriculture for benefiting from the international diffusion of high-productivity technologies, which were already available in the advanced industrial countries … developing countries, it was argued, could benefit from the diffusion of industrial technologies without incurring the costs of technological innovation. Consequently, the expectation was that, given a reasonably rapid rate of investment in the physical capital in which the technologies were embodied (and ‘learning’ of the basic skills to operate them efficiently), developing countries would achieve high rates of growth of labour productivity in industry, and probably also of total factor productivity.

These authors conclude that the initial optimism about development via imported technology has turned out to be ‘profoundly misplaced’ and that policies based on these early views will continue to hinder rather than promote industrial development and ‘catching up’ (Bell and Pavitt 1997: 84).⁴ Adherence to this outdated and discredited view of technology transfer is, as we see it, the root cause of the problems that have already occurred in no small measure with the widespread introduction of computers in so-called ‘telecentres’ (see Chapter 3 for a more detailed development of this important point).

For all the criticisms that have been levelled at telecentres in rural areas of the Third World, these forms of individual Internet access (not to be confused with ownership), seem to be as popular as ever. In Latin America, for example, it appears that several ‘governments are setting up telecentres where people can surf the Internet, often free of charge, in an attempt to narrow the digital divide within their societies, which is perhaps larger than the gap that separates them from the industrialised world’ (Márquez 2003). As often occurred in the early practice of technology transfer to developing countries, however, the growth of hardware in this more recent context is likely to outrun by a good margin, the complementary inputs that are required. In Mexico, for example, ‘less than 10 per cent of the population knows how to use a computer … However, the government’s plan is to increase the number of people with access to the Internet from 6 to 30 million, out of a total population of over 100 million’ (Márquez 2003).

The emerging paradigm and its intellectual antecedents

The emerging paradigm, by contrast, contains a very different (and more widely accepted) set of intellectual antecedents, which, in numerous ways, bring far more of the local setting to bear on the problem of delivering the benefits of the Internet to a vast rural population. One such antecedent, for example, is the literature on technological blending, which, when applied to the case of community radio, enables a vast audience to benefit from the combination of new technology (the Internet) and the ‘old’ means of communication (such as the radio). The latter is an existing resource owned by a relatively high proportion of rural residents in many developing countries, that can be used to enormous effect in combination with the Internet, when the ‘blend’ is carefully designed (Chapter 4 contains a detailed discussion of what this design means in practical terms). Girard (2003: 11) has usefully compared this function of the local radio with the underlying logic of the telecentre approach to Internet delivery. Thus:

In the same way that a single cyber cafe or telecentre with a few computers can be an efficient way of increasing the number of people connected, providing access for dozens of people with only a few computers, a radio station with thousands of listeners that makes active use of the Internet can address the problem of access to the Internet’s wealth of information with a tactic of digital multiplication, multiplying the impact of its Internet connection.

Another major characteristic of the new approach which has clear intellectual antecedents is the centrality it ascribes to the role played by the local community in the Internet delivery process. The antecedents I am referring to here, consist, for example, of the general models in the literature on agriculture and development, such as ‘farmer-first- and-last’ and farming systems research.⁵ These models share a focus on a so-called ‘bottom-up’ approach to policy, which starts from the initial need to understand the requirements of potential beneficiaries and the context in which they live and work. (The contrasting ‘top-down’ approach in these literatures has much in common with the telecentre model that we are here seeking to supplant.) The emerging paradigm, we should emphasize, has no less an affinity with the highly influential and ongoing debate about the role of participatory approaches to development. As defined by the World Bank (1994: 7):

Participatory development is a process through which stakeholders influence and share control over development initiatives, and the decisions and resources which affect them. There is significant evidence that participation can, in many circumstances improve the quality, effectiveness and sustainability of projects … Community participation strategies are found to be particularly important in reaching the poor.

Nowhere in the book is participatory development in this sense, better exemplified than in the Kothmale Internet Project (Chapter 4), but it also plays an important part in one of our other major case studies, the Gyandoot Project in Dhar District, India (Chapter 7). Yet, for all the considerable attention that these and other cases (such as n-Logue in Chapter 8) have received individually, no coherent alternative to the prevailing approach has thus far emerged. Much of this, we feel, has to do with the highly fragmented way in which the literature has evolved over time, with the result that the impact as a whole is much less than the sum of its many constituent parts.

Fragmentation of the emerging paradigm

The essential problem we are dealing with here is that practitioners working to bring the Internet to the rural areas by means of local intermediaries, often tend to lose sight of the larger picture into which their own specific contributions can be fitted. Although community radio is one of the most promising ways in which the Internet can be brought to rural areas, for example, the literature on this particular topic almost never refers to similar types of intermediation that are taking place in other related areas, such as telephones or kiosks.⁶

Our task here is thus to integrate these diverse areas of Internet-based intermediation into a coherent whole that carries more weight than a mere succession of unconnected anecdotes.⁷ Fundamentally, what defines the integrated concept, or paradigm, is the role of an intermediary who, on the one hand, is well-versed in the use of the Internet and, on the other hand, is able to devise means of ensuring that the benefits of this technology are passed on to the local community (with whom the intermediary is also well acquainted). Chapters 4 and 5 discuss these (often imaginative) mechanisms in the realm of mass communications, while Chapters 7 and 8 cover the (equally imaginative) possibilities afforded by rural Internet kiosks (i.e. face-to-face forms of intermediation).

The material in Chapters (4–8) suggests that the basic idea of providing rural areas with benefits from the Internet in an indirect manner, rather than by means of direct access to a computer, does in fact have a wide range of applications. And by thus analytically consolidating so much relevant material (into an introductory classification system), we feel that there is now a much stronger basis on which to challenge the existing paradigm. For, we would do well in this regard to take into account the observation that

once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place … the act of judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.

(Kuhn 1970: 77)

As a by-product of integrating formerly separate (albeit closely related) bodies of literature into a distinct conceptual whole, we also gained a tentative insight into the factors that best seem to explain some of the more successful examples across (rather than within) the various categories described in Chapters 4–8. In particular, our impression is that the intermediary-based approach to Internet delivery, works best when it can be described as a distinctly local endeavour. By the term local in this context, we do not mean simply the absence of foreign, developed country sources of influence on the project. For that situation would be consistent with the use of entirely inappropriate local resources (inappropriate, i.e. from the point of view of undermining the prospect of a successful project outcome). By the term local, we refer instead to inputs that are effective, precisely because they exploit as fully as possible the advantages of the indigenous (such as knowledge of local needs and languages, designing innovations that fit in with local circumstances and so on).⁸ Thus, despite the functional differences between say Kothmale, Gyandoot and n-Logue, each project is imbued with a profoundly local character (be it an indigenous innovation, an initiative of state government or skilled volunteers on a radio browsing programme).

Priorities for future research

Let us return at this point to Kuhn’s observation that the decision to reject one particular paradigm invariably occurs at the same time as a decision to accept another and ‘the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with … each other’ (Kuhn 1970: 77).

In this book we have sought to construct a new paradigm and to compare it with the prevailing view of how the Internet should be brought to the rural areas of developing countries. By far the largest impediment to even a relatively crude comparison, however, is the almost total lack of quantitative data about the costs and benefits of telecentres on the one hand and intermediary-based Internet projects on the other. It follows from this lamentable state of affairs that, in order to conduct and compare social cost–benefit analyses of projects drawn from both paradigms, the necessary data will need to be collected in the field for each particular case. Even if only a sample of such cases is included, moreover, it is clear that this represents a major research topic and one that is perhaps best suited to an international organization (such as the World Bank) with extensive experience in the area. Ideally, of course, this research programme would include an exercise where the two paradigms are applied to the same project in a manner that is akin to a controlled experiment (and the outcomes can then be ascribed to paradigmatic differences as opposed to other factors). It is also clear that benefits from the Internet will need to be defined in some detail, given our emphasis below on Sen’s concept of functionings and its relation to well-being. The question, that is to say, is how individual functionings are enhanced (or hindered) by the application of information derived from the Internet.

Even if the results of this research do lend strong support to the new paradigm, however, much would need to be done in order to overcome the various barriers that prolong a possible transition from the existing paradigm. Perhaps the most useful (but by no means the only) endeavour in this regard, would be to draw up a manual for policy-makers who are interested in the application of the intermediary-based approach to the delivery of the Internet to rural areas. Such a manual would have to be based on the study of a large number of projects, with a focus on lessons to be drawn from failures as well as successes. And although we have been successful in uncovering a reasonably wide range of cases with the intention of showing that the new paradigm is capable of generalization across a number of different areas, there is no doubt that far more cases exist in the developing countries, some of which may even warrant changes in my initial classification of intermediary-based Internet projects.

In any event, it is crucial that any handbook or toolkit that results from the detailed study of individual projects, should explicitly deal with, rather than shy away from the pervasive bureaucratic and political obstacles that we shall encounter in the chapters that follow. In particular, it is of the utmost importance that projects be designed, taking those obstacles specifically into account, rather than hoping that they will not occur. Indeed, it may well turn out that the relatively successful projects are those that have best dealt, at various stages, with the range of bureaucratic and political obstacles that they confronted.

Ultimately, however, my hope is that this initial attempt to provide a generalized model for delivering the benefits of the Internet via intermediaries, will set in train a process of debate, criticism and a dialogue between practitioners on the one hand and the more academic research community on the other. For, as things now stand, there is little or no communication ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART I. Analytical foundations of a new paradigm
• PART II. Radios, telephones and Internet access
• PART III. Rural Internet access: Alternatives to radios and telephones
• Notes
• References
• Index