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ROUNDTABLE
Civil Society Outlook: Where Can ICT Contribute Most?
Commentaries from South Africa, India, Iran and Nicaragua
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Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the approach to development and changed how development professionals conduct business. In this roundtable, civil society leaders from South Africa, India, Iran, and Nicaragua provide a comparative perspective of how ICT is being used by non-profit organizations.
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 In your opinion, where can information and communication technologies (ICT) contribute most? How would you rate the success of ICT as an enabler to achieve the Millennium Development Goals? |
 South Africa: ICT is purported to have multiple functionalities that enables it to serve underpriviledged communities very effectively, provided they have access. Since ICTs have the capacity to make large volume educational resources available, that they can facilitate the delivery of educational resources on a large scale, reaching the remotest areas possible, facilitate effective self-directed learning at an individual level, all suggest that this capacity for supporting educational provision in the context of severe deprivation, has to be tried. However, access to resources alone do not make them effective tools for learning. An enabling environment to support the delivery of learning and teaching is absolutely critical alongside dedicated programs for skills development in the use of ICT as a learning enabler and high volume access to the technologies as well. Furthermore, dedicated attention to the creation of localized education content that accommodates learning in mother tongue is also important for such an integrated approach to ICT access and application for learning. For this reason, SchoolNet Africa has worked over time to develop a value chain model that takes into account a host of factors and prerequisites to make the education system work effectively and systemically using ICTs.
It would be unfair to judge the overall success of ICT as such an enabler at this point in time because it has not been tried to sufficient scale nor with sufficient commitment to reach the MDGs and the Education For All objectives particularly in Africa. However, where ICTs have been tried, albeit on a small scale, there have been relative successes, particularly in the schoolnet movement in Africa. I discuss this in my article in "Emerging Trends on School Networking" published by Commonwealth of Learning in 2005.
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| India: ICT, if used for establishing an effective knowledge connectivity system in rural areas to bridge the urban-rural digital divide, can make important contributions to achieving all the UN Millennium Development Goals, particularly in the areas of health, hunger, education and sustainable livelihoods. We have observed that bridging the digital divide is a powerful method of bridging the gender divide. India has a Right to Information Act and this can be made operational only through ICT and e-governance. |
| Iran: With access to resources such as the Internet, employment opportunities take significant leaps while at the same time promoting social and cultural development. The result is empowerment and a growing degree of equality. Location is no longer a barrier to prosperity since with a proper network we become each other’s neighbor, regardless of where we live. While ICTs can serve to promote the Millennium Development Goals individually, they are most significant in establishing a platform for the creation of global partnerships which are vital to achieving each goal. |
Nicaragua: Unless the critical factors essential to achieve the Millennium Development Goals have been identified and there are solid arguments and evidence to support the claim that ICT appropriation and usage will have a cost-effective positive impact, don’t even try (to achieve the MDGs through ICT). So many tried it, yet the amount of success measured in efficiency, effectiveness and impact until now is quite modest. I suspect that there are more stories (unfortunately mostly not published) about failure than the over-published few success stories. ICT may help to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the planning, administration, tracking and evaluation of projects and programs targeting the Millennium Development Goals, similar to usage of ICT in any business if the proper concepts and structures are in place. However, with respect to the use of ICT to directly reduce poverty, increase literacy, promote gender-equality or social justice, I have not seen convincing examples that have proved to be more efficient and cost-effective. This does not mean that ICT usage never yields desirable outcomes. It makes sense when it is used to reduce costs or to expand services which without ICT could not be offered at all or a higher cost.
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| What are some examples of challenges you have encountered in using ICT for development? What are innovative ways that you have managed to overcome them? |
South Africa: The biggest challenge we have faced is dealing with extension and sustainability of good projects using ICT for education once the pilot phase has been concluded and facilitation the integration of the projects into a national strategy with dedicated government budget support. A few schoolnets, which are part of the SchoolNet Africa network, have devised various ways to deal with matters of sustainability such as the provision of low cost Internet access to schools as a service provider, or allowing non-school based communities use the school-based cyber labs for a fee. Such examples are cited extensively in an African Schoolnet Toolkit recently published by Schoolnet Africa.
The other major challenge is to sustain the involvement of African teachers once they have gone through a phase of training on the use of ICT and then go back to their schools where access to ICT is either non-existent or available to a very limited extent. The issue of high volume access to ICT, in the school context in particular, has proven to be the one major challenge that we have to face in Africa. For this reason, SNA launched a Campaign for One Million PCs to highlight this need for large-scale access and to encourage national governments to take the lead in committing national budgets and partnering with the private sector and civil society in making IT happen in education. The Kenyan government has just announced a commitment of $1.2 million USD towards its budgThe requested resource (/editor/default/) is not availableet for ICT in education in Kenya. Similarly, in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, the government committed R500 million towards roll out of ICT to all schools in the province. This, coupled with a systematic program to train and retain teachers using ICT would mark a major step forward for African education.
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| India: The normal problems we have faced relate to both connectivity and content. Fortunately, a combination of wired and wireless technologies, and solar and renewable energies have helped to overcome the handicaps arising from inadequate telephone connection and power supply. We have found that for every problem, there is an affordable and implementable solution. It is this spirit which has made the Village Knowledge Centre Program effective. In the area of content, it is essential that generic information is converted into location-specific material. In other words, we have to add value to primary information to make it relevant to the needs of rural families based on ecological, economic and social factors. |
| Iran: One of the main challenges we faced was to find the most effective way in which ICTs can directly influence economic development in deprived regions of the country. As a result, we focused on entrepreneurship and how it can effectively harness the potential of ICTs. One specific example is the Zahedan IT Center, where innovative business models have used ICTs for the creation of employment opportunities for youth. |
| Nicaragua: Soon our national committee for support of the use of technology in education will discuss how to avoid the collapse of 128 computer labs installed in public primary and secondary schools. Here are the hard facts: 1. Nicaragua spends $54 per student a year in primary and $58 in secondary education. This amounts to $0.27 and $0.29 per school day (assuming 200 days per year); 2. teachers are paid between $0.52 and $0.58 per class-hour with group-sizes between 35 to 60 students; 3. a single hour of a single computer takes at least $0.38 let alone in electricity, without Internet access; 4. with Internet costs, this rises to $0.52 assuming 12 hours of daily use and fixed cost per month of Internet access. Does this mean we should forget about ICT for education? No! What we will try to do is: 1. convert the existing school labs into Community-Access-Centers so that the "commercial" use covers connectivity costs and part of the other operation costs; 2. target real teachers as efficient and effective multipliers, instead of students. |
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| How can governments support civil society efforts to harness ICT for development? |
South Africa: With particular reference to ICT-enabled education, one major way in which African governments in particular can support education and civil society is to draw on the foundations established and pioneered by many civil society organizations over the past decade involving ICT in education. So many practitioners from schoolnet type NGOs throughout Africa have learned many many lessons and continue to play a leading role in the successful application of ICT in educational institutions and often government-led initiatives function in parallel to these initiatives. Drawing on the expertise of civil society, supporting programs of civil society and bringing civil society institutions on board with government plans and actions is crucial for the success of educational reach through ICT.
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| India: Government can support civil society by providing the necessary infrastructure like broad band connectivity and public policies which encourage the integrated use of the internet and community radio. |
| Iran: Governments should recognize that a centralized plan will not meet the needs of a diverse population base. Therefore, civil society can be considered a powerful tool in promoting and establishing appropriate ICT structures at different levels and sectors of society. |
| Nicaragua: The very first "support" to be given is to recognize that the Information Society will be of the people, for the people, by the people … or simply will not be. The second “support” consists, consequently, in eradicating all those barriers that limit people in exercising their right to construct the Information Society, in particular limits to Freedom of Speech and to the Right of effective access to public information. The third consists in eliminating artificial regulatory frameworks that privilege some--public as private--providers in operating ICT-related services and block others. Once "empowered" civil society will push by its own, very well known dynamics to truly harness ICT for development. | |
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 How did Development Gateway members respond to our Information
Society Survey questions?:
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- Nov
3, Fill-the-Gap!, Netherlands
- Nov 9-Nov 11, World Summit of Cities
and Local Authorities and the role Information Society, Spain
- Nov 10 -11, Libraries and the
Information Society in Action, Egypt
- Nov 13-15, Past, Present and Future of
Research in the Information Society
- Nov 16-18, World Summit on Information
Society, Tunisia
- Nov
17, Creating Transformations: Intel at WSIS, Tunisia
- Nov 28-Nov 30, IEEE International
Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, Japan
- Nov 28 - Dec 5,
GKP/MSSRF South-South Exchange Traveling Workshop 2005, India
- May 25 – May 26, First
International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and
Development, USA
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