Toronto Star, Canada
Jan 17 2005
Leapfrogging the technology gap
Wireless, computers and other innovations are quietly eliminating
huge barriers to development in poor parts of the world.
ALEXANDRA SAMUEL
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
In Robib, Cambodia, villagers are getting medical advice from the
world’s best doctors. Schoolchildren are seeing their country’s most
famous landmarks for the first time. And the village economy is
taking off, fueled by the sale of its handmade silk scarves on the
global market.
All these benefits are coming via motorcycle – Internet-enabled
motorcycles.
A wireless network links computers in the village to computer chips
on each of five motorcycles a fleet. Each vehicle has a transmitter
that allows it to upload and download e-mail and data via Wi-Fi, as
it passes by village computers. At the end of the day the bikes
return to a hub where they upload the information received. The next
morning they download e-mail and data from the hub and take it out to
the villages for transmission.
Villages like Robib have been described as “leapfroggers:”
communities or even whole countries in the developing world, that are
using information and communication technologies to leapfrog directly
from being an agricultural to an information economy. It’s a
phenomenon that combines technology high and low in innovative ways,
and is generating not only economic benefits but a new world of
educational, social and political opportunities.
In highly developed countries like Canada, the information economy
has emerged from long evolution – farm economies made room for
craftsmen and artisans, who gave way to industrial production, and
manufacturing has yielded to the rise of an information and
service-based economy.
Economists and development experts wonder whether the developing
world can – or should – follow the same path. Widespread industrial
development would still leave much of Africa, Asia or Latin America a
generation behind Europe and North America.
Of greater concern is the potential environmental impact of
widespread industrialization: large-scale factory production in the
developing world could greatly increase global energy consumption and
pollution levels, particularly if factories use cheaper and dirtier
production methods.
Information and communications technologies provide an alternative to
this environmental and economic nightmare. The hardware, software and
networks that have propelled developed economies out of the
industrial era and into the information age are now promising to take
the developing world directly from agrarian to post-industrial
development.
The same satellite networks that link remote villages to urban
markets can bring classroom education to communities too small or
poor to support secondary schools. The cellphone systems that power
community businesses can connect patients or doctors, or disparate
family members. The Internet kiosks that access a global marketplace
can also be used to access political information or organize
grassroots campaigns in emerging democracies.
These opportunities have been opened by a growing understanding of
the role of infrastructure in driving economic growth. “Until quite
recently, it wasn’t clear whether infrastructure generally was a
result of economic growth or the other way around,” notes Edgardo
Sepulveda, a telecommunications economist with McCarthy Tetrault, a
Toronto law firm. “There was a correlation but there wasn’t agreement
on causation. But now there’s been sufficient evidence that most
people would support the hypothesis that you can go from information
and communications technology sector growth to general economic
growth.”
That realization has led development workers, governments, and
businesses to embrace technology-enabled leapfrogging as a tremendous
opportunity for the developing world. But successful leapfrogging
depends on a carefully calibrated set of choices about which
technologies to use, which projects to pursue, and which communities
to engage.
According to Richard Fuchs, director of the information and
communication technologies for development program at Canada’s
International Research and Development Centre, leapfrogging success
depends on a combination of “ingenuity, perseverance, hard work and
luck.” By luck, he’s talking about a constellation of historical
circumstances that position a country for information and
communications technology-led growth.
———————————————————————
`IT is not about rich countries getting richer. It’s about countries
at every stage of development using technology in a way that is
appropriate to their needs”
Richard Simpson, the Director of E-Commerce for Industry Canada
———————————————————————
Societies that place a high value on education, like Vietnam, are at
an advantage, because a highly educated population is ready for work
in a knowledge-based economy. A history of emigration, as in Ireland,
can help – because an expatriate “boomerang” can bring a wealth of
knowledge, skills and capital back into a developing economy. Even a
language barrier can work in a country’s favour. Uruguay exports
millions in software to other Latin American countries, because the
online dominance of English created a market opportunity for creating
Spanish-language tools.
Bangalore, India, is the best-case scenario. Recognized as the
Silicon Valley of the developing world, Bangalore has parlayed
India’s wealth of well-educated, tech-savvy, English-speaking
programmers into a massive hive of interlocking programming shops,
call centres, and tech companies.
Dell opened a Bangalore-based call centre in 2001, though with mixed
results. Microsoft has just announced that it will open a
Bangalore-based research centre this January. These international
companies recognize that Indian programmers can be had for a fraction
of the cost of their American colleagues – while still paying
programmers many times the average Indian income. And India’s economy
derives a further benefit thanks to the many locally-owned companies
that have emerged to partner or compete with the influx of
international technology companies.
While Bangalore’s technological, educational and linguistic
advantages have given it a head start on leapfrogging, regions that
lack those advantages stand to gain even more from the creative use
of technology. Indeed, the countries that stand to benefit most from
a leapfrogging strategy are those with limited IT infrastructure,
limited education access, and limited literacy rates.
As a result, international agencies have had to get creative in the
kinds of information and communications technology they use in
developing countries. Where Canadian entrepreneurs often focus on the
opportunities offered by the very latest technological innovations,
the savviest leaders in Africa or Asia recognize that bells and
whistles don’t necessarily translate into economic results. The
technologies that have the greatest impact are often relatively
simple – and thus widely accessible.
Radio has been rediscovered as a tool that can be effectively paired
with the Internet – or used on its own in new and creative ways. In
Zambia, a radio-based training system is now delivering primary
education to out-of-school children, about a third of whom are
orphans; radio programs cover not only traditional skills like
reading and math but also life skills like hygiene and nutrition. In
Bolivia, a rural radio station uses the Internet to answer questions
from listeners – like the farmer who wanted help dealing with a worm
that was devouring his crops. Working online, the station found a
Swedish expert who identified the worm, and broadcast the information
on pest control to the entire community.
Cellphones have emerged as a leading leapfrog technology. Many
developing countries have very limited landline penetration, in part
due to the economic incentives for digging up copper wire and selling
it. These same countries are now experiencing a cellphone explosion,
due in part to the way that cellphones become what Fuchs describes as
a “common property resource:” a resource that can be shared among an
entire community or village.
The best-known example is Bangladesh’s GrameenPhone, which has
established a network of pay-per-use cellphones throughout the
country. A similar network in South Africa has created a network of
over 1,800 entrepreneurs, operating “phone shops” in over 4,400
locations across the country. Information gathered by cellphone lets
farmers in Senegal double the price they get for their crops, and
herders in Angola track their cattle via GPS.
Video compact disks, a technology not in wide use in North America
but a popular entertainment medium in southeast Asia, have become
crucial educational tools. A project in the Mekong region of Thailand
and Laos has used VCDs to educate young women and girls on
immigration issues, employment alternatives, and health services.
It’s a way of helping a group that is often only semi-literate, and
particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, drug abuse and sexual
exploitation.
And yes, the Internet has a role, too. In the post-Soviet country of
Armenia, development teams are using the Internet for everything from
teacher training to employment counseling.
Says Nancy White, an information and communications technology
consultant who has worked on a number of Armenia’s online development
projects, “These projects are demonstrating, to people that live on a
mountain top that is inaccessible in the winter, `I can connect with
other people who share my interests and needs.'”
Despite this technological eclecticism, access to hardware and
software remains a core challenge. The United Nations’ World Summit
on the Information Society, which will culminate in a meeting later
this year, has devoted a great deal of attention to the challenge of
bridging the digital divide between the rich and poor nations.
While the U. N. summit has become a magnet for information and
communications technology (ICT) champions from governments,
businesses and civil society organizations around the world, its U.N.
sponsors explicitly describe ICT access as a means rather than an
end.
This focus is embodied by the U.N.’s Millennium Declaration, a 2000
agreement that contains commitments to halve, by the year 2015, “the
proportion of the world’s population living on less than one U.S.
dollar per day, suffering from hunger or having no access to drinking
water,” the summit’s Web site declares. “ICTs can help in achieving
all of these goals.”
That orientation is mirrored by the approach that Canada has taken in
supporting information and communications technology projects in the
developing world.
“The development community has placed a great emphasis on being able
to meet basic development objectives,” says Richard Simpson, the
Director of E-Commerce for Industry Canada. “IT is not about rich
countries getting richer. It’s not even about emerging economies.
It’s about countries at every stage of development using technology
in a way that is appropriate to their needs.”
Needs like those of Nallavadu village in Pondicherry, India. A region
in which many people live on incomes of less than $1 a day,
Pondicherry’s information and communications technology development
strategy traces back to a 1998 project that brought Internet-linked
telecentres to the region’s villages. Today, villagers routinely use
the Internet to access information that helps them sell their crops
at the latest commodity prices, obtain medical advice, and track
regional weather and transport.
How does that kind of technology affect daily life?
Just look at what happened in the village of Nallavadu. Vijayakumar
Gunasekaran, the son of a Nallavadu fisherman, learned of December’s
earthquake and tsunami from his current home in Singapore. When
Gunasekaran called home to warn his family, they passed along the
warning to fellow villagers – who used the village’s telecentre to
broadcast a community alarm.
Thanks to that alarm, the village was evacuated, ensuring that all
3,600 villagers survived.
If information and communications-technology-enabled leapfrogging
could hold the key to economic opportunity for the developing world,
are the citizens of advanced industrial nations – like Canada – ready
for what that means?
“The information economy is heading to Asia,” notes Fuchs. “India and
China are the next information technopols. If wealth, income,
profitability and productivity rest in part on ICTs, then India’s
economy is increasingly more competitive than ours.”
Alexandra Samuel is a Vancouver-based technology writer and
strategist with Angus Reid Consultants