Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development: Learning from Experience

ed from a broader development strategy, such as calls for connectivity in every village by date X, are probably of limited use. 3. ICTs enable change; they do not create it. Pro-poor change in developing countries occurs through some combination of increased resources and capacities of individuals and institutions; greater efficiency and transparency of firms, markets and government institutions; an easing of national or global structural constraints; and concerted action on the part of key individuals and groups. ICTs can contribute to, or create the conditions for, many of these aspects of change, but they do not automatically cause change to happen. Furthermore, ICT-enabled change can be both good and bad. ICTs can open markets and increase competition, but that competition will not automatically be beneficial to developing-country producers. ICTs can further the advantages of already-powerful individuals and groups. 4. ICT strategies are effective, sustainable, and worth the effort only if they are integrally linked to broader and more comprehensive development and poverty-reduction strategies. By themselves, ICT strategies or “e-strategies” are often of little use and can even be counterproductive, both by obscuring the importance of the broader strategic priorities upon which any ICT strategy depends and by diverting scarce resources, including the time, attention and capacity of government decision makers, away from those broader priorities. As a tool for mobilizing enthusiasm and support for those more fundamental and often more difficult choices by highlighting the opportunities for economic growth and poverty reduction afforded by ICTs if those more fundamental choices are properly addressed, an emphasis on ICTs can be of value. Yet the considerable recent attention given to “e-strategies,” and the disturbing fact that some developing countries have several different “e-strategy” documents emerging from different donor projects, raises concern about the value of these exercises and their potential to divert resources, energies, and political will away from other more pressing issues. 5. “Mainstreaming” ICTs in donor programs means subordinating them as tools of other, more fundamental objectives, not inserting them everywhere. The concern with “mainstreaming” arises in part from the widespread perception that ICT-for-development programs were often set apart from, and not