digital divide: an attempt to make youths understand its implication

On December end, I gave a presentation on digital divide and its implication in one of the parallel workshops at Nepal Youth Social Forum. I uploaded the slides at slideshare.net and now presenting to you, should any of you need.

go online through laptops anywhere in Nepal: how many Nepalese can afford a laptop?

There's an interesting news on Laptops can now go online anywhere in ekantipur.com. I know more and more Nepalese are getting laptops, most are brought from US directly from someone you know in US. Again buying laptops here in Nepal is not quite common, as far as I am aware of. Unless your organization is buying for you. Then you are in luck.

Targetting laptops in Nepal doesn't seem quite sensible, though the scenario may change in couple of days, months, years, decades... Or they are just targeting rich people of Nepal,or especially Kathmandu. The PCMCIA card costs Rs.8888 and they are introducing 300 units. Only?. Looks quite expensive when other gadgets' price are plummeting. I would be happy if Nepal Telecom had targetted Desktop PC first. The news says that they are in the process of acquiring similar cards for PC. Will wait for that.

Another interesting thing is that you can buy internet in pre-paid form and may recharge at will. Seems quite portable. They seem to be adopting the idea of hotspots, that was proposed and started a decade back. I wonder if Nepal Telecom has already setup these hotspots. Or are they planning to use mobile network?? But the download speed looks quite fast 163.4kbps. The news is not quite comprehensive in technological aspect.

I am looking forward to see people accessing internet through laptops in restaurants.

A joint venture setup to contribute to the development of ICT of Nepal

The headline "IT entrepreneurs launch Fortune Cookie Ventures" in the nepalnews.com caught my eye. It was promoted by ICT entrepreneurs of Nepal.

[...]"The goal of Fortune Cookie is to provide incubation and venture capital to deserving innovators with promising ideas in the ICT sector, and thus contribute to the overall development of ICT in Nepal."



Fortune Cookie intends to invest up to Rs. 100 million in Nepal's ICT sector over the next 2 years through its activities. “By creating successful ventures, Fortune Cookie would attract much needed foreign investment into the ICT sector,” the statement added.[...]

Investing Rs. 100 million in next 2 years. It does sound promising and appealing. They must have some plans to move ahead. Nepal certainly needs more and more such kind of ventures from other business people. People stop investing in physical assets!! See if you can help other people and the country, along with yourself. I know helping others rarely comes without including oneself.

Poverty Vs. Briding Digital Divide

I guess everyone will vote for Poverty if asked to choose between "Poverty" and "Bridging Digital Divide". As a technical person, acquainted fairly with what ICT (information, communication, technology) can do to help the poor, I would confuse myself with what what to choose.

The interview of Diego Rumiany really gives an interesting perspective on poverty vs bridging digital divide, when he was confronted with a question

Is it indecent or is it an obligation to fight against the Digital Divide while hunger is still a major issue ?

[...]Why are we talking about introducing a particular technology when a lot of people are dying because of hunger?[...]

I’m sure nobody will disagree that it is more important to feed a person than giving him/her Internet access. However, it is not so clear to everybody that “Bridging the Digital Divide” means more than that. Take a look. When “Bridging the Digital Divide” means providing the infrastructure to a village to distribute their products, fostering entrepreneurial activity, creating business networks, stimulating trade, generating employment and, consequently, streamlining food distribution in a region and reducing hunger, then we are not “Bridging the Digital Divide” anymore but fighting hunger instead.

I argue that there is a problem with the Logic of “Bridging the Digital Divide”. We tend to think that we need to overcome obstacles to cross the bridge and reduce the Digital gap, when those obstacles are actually our primary objectives.

This might be a marketing problem. Answering your question, we need to show that fighting the Digital Divide is a way to reduce hunger (I am convinced about this), and not two separate issues that need to be prioritized.

Well he is very true. In today's information age, the only way to combat poverty is to properly manage information and knowledge. Information is power so if information is exploited at every level and corner of country, then poverty and underdevelopment need not be addressed separately.

Blue Trunk Library proved that Technology is nothing more than a mere medium

In most of ICT projects, more often technology is given the highest value. Meanwhile the project forgets about the target group, the kernel of the project, resulting in the imminent failure. Technology is nothing but just an easy medium to share and disseminate information. Traditionally people use other methods to transfer information. There's no doubt that technology has made our life easy in processing, managing, transferring information. However there are billions of people who lives are yet to be touched by technology. For them technology is nothing more than an unknown place. They care least about technology.

Using technology to improve their lives is definitely going to take time because technology can't sustain by itself, it needs a cognitive community.

By technology, I mean internet, computer for now. Technology is a very broad and confusing term, which I will cover in another blog.

Blue Trunk Library (BTL), an initiative of WHO, is the result of the fact that many parts of the developing world are totally disconnected "that have neither computers nor a reliable electricity supply". So BTL delivers printed information to health workers in the developing world.

The BTL is a collection of about 150 appropriate books and manuals. The collection, which is organized according to major subjects, contains more than one hundred books on medicine and public health. In order to make it easier to transport and store, the collection has been packed into a blue metal trunk fitted with two shelves on which the cardboard boxes containing the books are arranged.

There's a lot to be learn from BTL like projects. It tells us that appropriate technology should be used where necessary. Solving problems with computer, internet, latest gadgets is not always a solution. If BTL had tried to use computer, internet to send health information, first it wouldn't be called BTL, second their job would have been easy and wouldn't cost $2000, as in case of BTL. But the prominent of all, it would never be a success or is going to take years to see some effects.

References
1. http://www.who.int/library/country/trunks/index.en.shtml
2. medicine.plosjournals.org

Finally

I thought about writing on ICTs on August 2006 and created a blog on wordpress titled 'ICT in Development'. After 2 posts, I just forgot and/or discontinued. Wordpress themes are pretty good but I couldn't customize it as in blogspot, then. Probably the reason for ignoring it. Finally I've decided to setup a new blog 'talkict' to focus on ICT, where I will be talking on ICTs. Here' my previous post from wordpress blog.

Can ICT alleviate Poverty?
August 9th, 2006

Yes. ICT can and has been doing and will be doing. Many people would defend this statement saying can ICT bring food to poverty, can they provide them work? Infact I had the same opinion before.
The properly used ICT technology can infact help in alleviating poverty. However it is to be noted that poverty refers to the people, farmers in rural areas, who work very hard just enough to feed their families. There are people who don’t work at all, beggars, people who look for government to provide them with their necessities. Let government address those. I am here for the people who work hard, just to get discouraged.

Can ICT really help them? There is a true story, that took place in India, where farmers had grown more onions than demand and they have no idea of proper storage for preservation. Upon searching on the net, it was found that university of … was doing the research on onion preservation in tropical regions. This was an experience of Dr. Mikalojic. a knowledge management specialist at ICIMOD. Knowledge management is a part of ICT. Without ICT, proper knowledge management would not be viable. Properly installed ICT could have helped those farmers from being wrecked.

Satellite technology and other computer advancements have made weather forecasting a success with a high precision. If these data could be taken to the villagers, they will be in a position to decide harvest time. There are many cases, where the farmers depend upon their little knowledge of seasons to take such critial decision.

Similarly if the farmers know the demands of their products in different cities, they will be able to decide how much crops to grow, where to take their products for more profits.

ICT will provide the rural people with an ability to make a sound decision for improving their livelihood. Rather than saying alleviating poverty, it would be better to address this as improving livelihood of rural areas people. Poverty is a relative term, a person who doesn’t own a car would find himself poor compared to those driving in car. A person who owns 100,000$ would consider himself poor compared to the millionare.