[Reader-list] Charles Kenny: Development's False Divide

[geert lovink]

Original from: "Michael Gurstein" <mgurst at vcn.bc.ca>
To: "community informatics" <communityinformatics at vancouvercommunity.net>;
"Ciresearchers Net" <Ciresearchers at vancouvercommunity.net>
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 5:18 AM

Development's False Divide
By Charles Kenny

Giving Internet access to the world's poorest will cost a lot and accomplish
little.

Politicians, business people, donors, and the press have all proclaimed the
digital divide between the developing-world poor and the wealthy West as one
of the century's most significant development challenges. In fact, 99.6
percent of the populations of Africa and South Asia did not use the Internet
in 2000. "The digital divide threatens to further marginalize the economies
and peoples of many developing countries," concluded the U.N. General
Assembly in June 2002. The Group of Eight declared at Okinawa in 2000 that
"everyone should be able to enjoy access to information and communications
networks."

The best of motives may drive a concern to equalize global Internet access,
but not the strongest of logic. True, tools of communication are important
to the world's poorest, and one can also find many examples of effective
Internet use in developing countries. For instance, the Internet has been
used to inform farmers of crop prices in Argentina, to register deeds in
India, to educate children in rural Uganda, and to sell woodcarvings and
sandals in Kenya. But it is a large leap to conclude that global Internet
access is a sensible goal. Uplifting anecdotes are not enough to justify the
high costs of universal Internet access, costs that would be at their
highest in the least developed countries.

One reason for the high cost of providing widespread Internet access to
low-income countries is that about 69 percent of their population is rural.
Providing networked services like electricity and telephony to rural areas
is expensive-and because rural people are largely poor, it is hard to
justify that cost in terms of potential revenues. Solar power and satellite
connections are a potential alternative, but such technology further
increases the cost of Internet access. In Costa Rica, for example, one
off-grid telecenter carried an annualized cost per Internet-enabled computer
of about $10,000. By way of comparison, the average person living on $1 a
day (and there are 1.5 billion such people worldwide) spends about $10 per
year on communications when he has access to it.

Subsidized public access is one answer. The subsidies would have to be
large, however. Ensuring one hour a week of access at a telecenter such as
the one in Costa Rica might cost as much as $50 per year per capita-or about
10 times public spending per capita on health in low-income countries and 10
times discretionary spending per primary student. On this basis, the
worldwide subsidy for everyone living on $1 a day to get one hour of access
a week might reach $75 billion-considerably more than the global total of
aid flows each year. Given that providing widespread Internet access will be
complex and expensive, attempting to provide ubiquitous service will be a
costly mistake.

Some argue that access could be provided more cheaply-perhaps at levels that
only equal average health expenditures in low-income countries. Nonetheless,
costs of access would probably still outweigh benefits because the digital
divide encompasses far more than a physical lack of access; it also relates
to deficits in skills and the broader economic environment.

Lack of education is a major barrier to productive Internet use, for
example. In Ethiopia, 98 percent of Internet users in 1998 had a university
degree, yet 64.5 percent of the overall population is illiterate. Worldwide,
most people living on $1 a day are illiterate. Further, they usually speak a
minority language in their own country-few speak a major global language.
For example, about 17 million people in Nigeria speak Igbo. My search for
Web pages in Igbo turned up only five sites: a translation of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, a translation of a document called "The Four
Spiritual Laws" (theological provenance undetermined), a translation of the
food pyramid, a two-page Igbo phrase book, and a prayer manual. There isn't
an Igbo translation service on the Web, so an Igbo speaker would be limited
to these five. None involved sound or video, so the illiterate Igbo speaker
would gain nothing. Bridging the gaps in language and technical skills as
well as basic literacy will be difficult, considering the small per-student
spending available in the poorest countries' primary schools, where the
discretionary budget per student is as little as $5 a year.

Even if poor people are lucky enough to be literate and conversant in a
major world language, their use of the Web for activities such as e-commerce
is likely to be limited by their lack of credit cards, not to mention the
challenge of persuading FedEx and UPS to start delivery services in their
neighborhoods. Limitations in relevant content and ability to use that
content perhaps best explain why only 2.2 percent of India's Internet users
have ever engaged in buying or selling over the Web. Similarly, a survey of
Tanzanian firms found that among the 30 percent of companies with access to
the Internet, less than half use it frequently and only 9 percent rated it
as a very effective tool for promoting products.

Communications matter to the poor. A system of well-regulated, competitive
communications services will reduce costs and extend access. In many cases,
it may well be worth extending access to telephony with limited, targeted,
carefully designed subsidy programs. But pursuing universal access to the
Internet would be a misallocation of considerable resources. To draw an
analogy, another technology boasts a 70-fold difference in access rates
between the United States and India, and economists link that technology to
increased productivity as well. But no one is setting up a U.N. task force
to overcome the Air Conditioner Divide.

Poor countries face many serious divides, including those in education,
healthcare, and transportation. The relevant question for the poorest is,
does the lack of access to a particular good provide a significant barrier
to becoming more wealthy? The answer is yes for the tools of communication
in general but no for the Internet in particular.

Charles Kenny is an economist at the World Bank. This article was adapted
from "Should We Try to Bridge the Global Digital Divide?" (Info, Vol. 4, No.
3, 2002). The views expressed are his own.