[Reader-list] Exploring Dimensions of IT

[Zubair Faisal Abbasi]

Greetings from http://ePoor.org and Pakistan!

Exploring Dimensions of IT

- Zubair Faisal Abbasi

“Well arranged fodder is a very attractive offering for my apparently dumb
cows (bay-zubaan junwar)”, says Maula Dad, our milk supplier. “I dispense
the fodder in a neat and beautiful way which my animals come and eat
happily; and doing this gives me the best quantity and quality of milk. I
sell the product and earn money better than my competitors.”

There are at least two points in Maula Dad’s words. One being his
understanding that instead of forcing animals to come and adjust themselves
with the available but unattractive layout the food offering can be
rearranged. Second, this way his efforts bring additional dividends both for
his animals and himself. In simple words, he knows the collaborative
importance of the “demand side”.

The case for “Poor Communities and IT” in poverty alleviation and community
development perspective is somehow analogous to the above pattern of work,
though the dynamisms of IT and societal needs are more complex and involve
multiple implications at the technological and policy levels. What is
important and needs analysis is the current focus and character structure of
Information Technology incidence in our society. At the moment, the focus is
one sided and is largely supply-driven. However, to realize the promises of
IT for an equitable socio-economic growth for poverty alleviation and
opportunity generation, it is required to balance the work on the ‘demand
side’ of IT needs.

At one level, the overemphasis on the ‘supply side’ has potential to sharpen
the legacy of socio-economic ‘divides’ (including digital divide i.e.,
information haves and have-nots) and strengthen the ruthlessly ‘exclusionary
impact’ of IT growth and development in society. This would practically mean
enhancing scope for development of a small, usually well off, and
urban-based segments of society and also, in a way, augmenting the problem
of urbanization. An example of supply-driven processes is mushroom growth of
IT training institutes to produce more and more IT graduates (i.e.,
exclusively IT specialists), and uploading more and more supply-driven
portals websites sometimes in the name of development as well.

Looking at the current focus, it is quite predictable that high-speed
over-supply of workforce in the domestic IT sector and the collection of
largely irrelevant content would not contribute much for broad-based
development. The over-supply may even lead to two uncalled for directions:
one, towards expanding social discontent (may be because of hi-tech
unemployment and decreasing remuneration) and second towards an accelerated
brain-drain searching for ‘lands of opportunity’ across the national
borders. While irrelevancy factor in content may lead to a general and
widespread belief that IT (and new media technologies like Internet) are not
a service but another transcendent ‘politics of the elite’.

It is interesting to note that sometimes the way development information
portals categorize and classify information is not the way poor need,
discuss, process, and access information. What can be a very relevant
suggestion here is to include the participatory role of community ‘key
informants’; these key informants are perceived as reliable source of verbal
information at the community levels and their potentials can be harnessed
for community Information Points (IT kiosks). However, the current
‘supply-driven’ focus divorced from ‘demand perspective’ is something like a
strategy of ‘putting all eggs in one basket’ without taking cognizance of
the circumstances under which the basket would guard and sustain itself; and
yes prove to be a fruitful contribution for pro-poor development as well.

Louis Pasteur once said, “the microbe is nothing, the terrain everything”.
It seems that the life-sustaining capacity of IT basket lies in its
potential to generate activity in non-IT sectors like formal and informal
education (in natural sciences, humanities, creative arts, technical skills
etc), extending better health services, developing marketing access of the
rural produce while improving quality of products, participatory governance
and services etc.  In other words, we need to develop such community-based
platform where suitable order of things can help actualize the promises of
IT for reducing poverty of income and opportunity in a sustainable,
inclusionary, and equitable fashion. In the suitable order of things, the
key would be to include and empower the excluded subjects of IT development
and growth i.e., the people especially the poor communities.

Questioning IT for Poor Communities

The analytical paraphernalia for developing pro-poor policy prescriptions
with demand side perspective can begin as a set of issue-raising questions.
For example, how can IT (and networks) become an effective tool to eradicate
excruciating predicaments of income poverty (see table 1.1) and poverty of
opportunity (see tables 1.2)?

Income Poverty in Pakistan, 1996-97 (%) (1.1)
Key Finding: Overall 31 per cent of the people of Pakistan lived in poverty
in 1996-97.

	Urban 	Rural	Overall
Punjab
Headcount	33	29	30
Poverty Gap	7	7	7
Sindh
Headcount	20	53	27
Poverty Gap	4	14	9
NWFP
Headcount	18	24	23
Poverty Gap	3	5	4
Balochistan
Headcount	35	54	49
Poverty Gap	8	14	12
Pakistan
Headcount	27	32	31
Poverty Gap	6	8	7
Source: Social Policy and Development Center estimates based on HIES
(1996-97)

How can IT become a participatory and empowering service delivery mechanism
and serve as efficient and relevant information (information about
day-to-day needs) to the poor? How can IT help develop enabling environment
for community participation and development, generate trust, generate
accountability potential, improve governance and access to civic services?
Creating enabling environment is important so that the poor access civic
services without compromising their dignity. (see ANNEX 2.3 - at the bottom)

Poverty of Opportunity Index, 1996-97 (1.2)

	Punjab 	Sindh 	NWFP	Balochistan	Pakistan
Health Deprivation	52	56	51	54	47
Education Deprivation	53	51	60	65	54
Income Deprivation	30	37	23	49	31
POPI				47	49	50	57	49

The maximum value of the index is 100. The closer the value of POPI is to
100,the greater the state of deprivation.
Source: Social Policy and Development Center Annual Review 2000

In quest for relevance of IT industry with pro-poor strategies vis-à-vis
poverty alleviation mechanisms and societal needs the hunt for policy
planners and IT entrepreneurs could be: What sort of IT applications can be
developed, packaged, and presented (marketed) serving as tools of
socio-economic relevance for the poor? How far IT industry provide public
domain and affordable auto-translators (e.g., from English to Urdu) or
text-to-speech software, voice recognition, and touch-screen applications
that work as optimal man-machine interface to bridge illiteracy handicap of
the poor communities at local levels? How can pro-poor clusters in IT
enterprises be established and sustained?


However, these question need not to be replied with a narrow marketing
scheme (e.g., skimming strategy) like how the ‘poor’ (as separate subject
category) are unprofitable than ‘others’ in expanding IT content and
infrastructure; and they need to be given access to water rather than
opportunities and access of new media technologies. Perhaps, the vision
regarding IT development for the poor communities needs to liken the process
of IT spread (i.e., ubiquitous prevalence of IT based on increasing consumer
canvass) with the processes of community development and building social
capital for equitable and inclusionary socio-economic development. What is
important is to acknowledge that the poor communities need both water and
cost-effective, capability enhancing collective communication tools and
there is no such question of either/or.

The subtlety of the questions stated above can be simplified in asking for a
participatory bottom-up approach in information content generation and IT
infrastructure provision and development. Notwithstanding, the bottom-up
methodology (rooted in community development approach), while reorienting
supply-driven exclusivity in IT environment, would help doing at least three
things:

q	Design and spread IT tools and information content in a participatory way
(establishing two-way communication mode) .
q	Build a sense of ownership regarding IT systems and services amongst
communities while reducing alienation and help bridge digital divide.
q	Help making IT part of lived experience of the poor and a general-purpose
tool for community development while harnessing collective buying/selling
power of communities and building bondages and bridges  for development in
non-IT fields.

Looking Ahead 
..

The key issue in the spread of IT in society is striking a balance between
demand and supply side of the process and make it a socially responsible
process; may be a sort of e-convergence. The key prescription would be to
locate procedural frameworks in ‘community development and participation
approach’ which works by enhancing the capacity of the poor to access IT and
new media technologies and also participate in decision making processes
(see ANNEX 2.1 - at the bottom).

Harnessing the collective buying power of communities may be an important
option along with resource mobilization like credit availability for
community entrepreneurs to set-up community managed Information Points (IP:
is called Internet Protocol in data transmission) and ensure access to new
media technologies. This method would also help communities accrue benefits
even in the absence of ‘one person one PC model’.

These Information Points, may be equipped with mobile phones (e.g., Grameen
experience of giving mobiles to women in Bangladesh) can act as two-way
communication platform for linking the poor communities Diaspora and
organize labor and skill market leading to dis-intermediary (shortening
supply-chain with direct access between producers and consumers). It would
be great experience of IT for the poor, if auto-translators (English to Urdu
and other languages) are put in use and ‘key informants’ of community
benefit from the service to further strengthen the capacity to make use of
two-way collective communication potential.

The potentials of IPs (Information Points) can also spark off good response
from the poor communities if the digital assets of educational institutions
like Allama Iqbal Open University, Pakistan are customized and made
available on CDs at the community levels. These assets in the shape of
audio-visual training manuals on subjects like preventive health care,
agriculture, sanitation, and automobile management are of direct use of
communities. Speaking IT for education for kids a very relevant experience
could be of “Hole In The wall” which was carried out with street urchins.
Interestingly, illiterate kids flocked to computers and learnt using
computers without instructions and prior education. Isn’t replacement of
blackboard with keyboard possible along with initiating a process of
computer-based literacy? (see ANNEX: 2.2 - at the bottom)

As Alan Greenspan, the chairman of US Federal Reserve once suggested, the
world product is becoming lighter in weight. To produce it, we need more and
more knowledge and information and not much material inputs.  In the light
of Alan’s suggestion, another goal in the way to ‘information technology for
the poor’ is to innovatively think across the idea of how the power of IT
can be linked with income diversification, participation into formal safety
nets, and reducing vulnerability against ill-health, and disasters. The work
of Tara HAAT http://tarahaat.com and Hewlett & Packard
http://hp.com/e-inclusion is very relevant here. HP works in the select
coterie of villages to harness IT for health, education, and marketing the
rural produce with aim to initiate processes of broadening developing
countries' access to the social and economic opportunities of the digital
age.

The Key

However, the key to making IT beneficial for community development and a
critical tool for poverty eradication is to broaden the focus of IT and the
strategies of its spread in society. The focus should also be on demand
creation and mobilizing creative couplet of development-application of IT
tools so that the excluded become partners of development and contribute to
national wealth and collective social well-being.
---------

Reference Sites

q	ePoor.org http://ePoor.org
q	IT, Pro-poor Projects and Responses http://ePoor.org/bg.htm
q	Databases and Resources on Urban Development  http://www.bestpractices.org
q	Slums Information Development and Resource Centers (SIDAREC) Kenya.
http://www.sidarec.or.ke
q	Hole in the Wall project: http://www.niit.com
q	IT for the Poor http://tarahaat.com
q	Grameen Foundation’s Telecom: http://www.gfusa.org/projects/telecom.html
q	Ninos de la Calle, a Project among Street Children in Ecuador.
http://www.chasquinet.org/ninodelacalle
q	Promes: Software tools for organizations working with urban poor
http://www.promesWeb.nl
q	SAMEX: Decision making support system for sanitation selection for the
poor http://www.awme.uq.edu.au/manage/thomast.htm
q	Text-to-speech software, ReadPlease 2000 http://www.readplease.com
q	Bridges.org: http://www.bridges.org/
q	Simputer Trust http://www.simputer.org
------
ANNEX: 2.3
Poor People, Dignity, and Services
Poor Women in the Voices of the Poor study stressed that officials are often
unresponsive to them. They shared countless examples of criminality, abuse,
and corruption in their encounters with public institutions and said they
have little recourse to justice. In describing their encounters with
institutions, poor people also drew attention to the shame and indignity of
being treated with arrogance, rudeness, and disdain.

“We would rather treat ourselves than go to the hospitals, where the angry
nurse might inject us with the wrong drug.” Poor Youth from Kitui, Tanzania.

Source: World Bank Development Report 2000/2001 “Attacking Poverty”.
----
ANNEX 2.1
Participatory-budgeting from Brazil

The Porto Alegre Participatory Budget is one of the finest examples
involving communities in the decision-making process.  In Brazil,
communities have been able to help authorities apportion the annual
municipal budget to needs and priorities that are decided upon through a
parallel process involving poor and disenfranchised neighbourhoods. The
results speak for themselves and include improved water and sanitation,
infrastructure and basic services. The "participatory budget" has now spread
to over 70 other municipal authorities in Brazil and in neighbouring
countries.

Participatory mechanisms established and enabled by the local authority
appear to provide an important means by which critical information, such as
the municipal planning and budgeting process, is rendered accessible and
transparent to the poor. As a result, such information allows the urban poor
to organise themselves and to present their demands in such a way that they
can be considered by the formal institutionalised decision-making process.
Source: E-conference on the Knowledge and Information Systems of the Urban
Poor organized by The Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) Feb -
May 2001
------
ANNEX 2.2

Hole in the wall project of the National Institute of Information
Technology, Delhi http://www.niit.com/Press%20Stories/Story71.htm. As an
experiment, NIIT's cognitive engineering researchers last year made a hole
in the wall near the slum and installed a powerful computer connected
permanently to the Internet there. The computer was available for anyone to
use. The result was extraordinary. The slum children, many of whom had had
no primary education, went over to check out the computer. There was no
instructor on call; they were left to themselves. Within five hours, one of
them, Rajender, aged eight, had managed to find a Disney Site.
------

Regards,
Zubair Faisal Abbasi.
CEO/Project Director,
ePoor.org
Waheed Plaza, West 52, First Floor,
Blue Area, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Ph: 092-051-2201484, 0303-7759274
++++++++
Pro-Poor means enhancing capacity of the POOR to perform PRO i.e., 'Poverty
reduction', 'Remoteness reduction' and 'Opportunity generation'.