Chris Blattman

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Information technology in development: Mythbusting

Over a span of five years I traveled to nearly 50 telecenters across South Asia and Africa. The vast majority looked a lot like the one in Retawadi. Locals rarely saw much value in the Internet, and telecenter operators couldn’t market even the paltry services available. Most suffered the same fate as the Retawadi telecenter, shutting down soon after they opened. Research on telecenters, though limited in rigor and scale, confirms my observations about consistent underperformance.

As I soon discovered, these mostly failed ventures reflect a larger pattern in technology and development, in which new technologies generate optimism and exuberance eventually dashed by disappointing realities.

That is Kentaro Toyama as the voice of reason in the Boston Review. Responses to Ken’s piece are here, including bits by Nicholas Negroponte, Dean Karlan, and Jenny Aker.

Another bit I liked:

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.

I claim some expertise, however small. My first job in development was building a study around telecenters in rural India in 2000 and 2001 for two professors. This was the height of the Internet bubble. Paul Samuelson called it “the most interesting research project he’d heard of in years.”

Let’s just say there the Internet research bubble popped too.

Ken is notable to me not simply for his great work, but as the first and last person who ever said to me, “I read your article in the Journal of Development Communications. This article–essentially my MA thesis–is not something I dare link to (for fear someone will read it).

But the main message is not far from one of Ken’s big myths: information and technology are not the bottlenecks.

Ken’s blog is here.

See Ken talk about ICT4D myths in this excellent YouTube talk:

7 Responses

  1. Dear Chris,

    I don’t know where to post this general question: i am looking for aid blogs in french. Hard to find. I enjoy yours, aidwatch, owen abroad, aidthought, how matters, goodintentionsarenotenough etc etc, and wonder whether there is a similar aid dialogue going on in the francophone world. Any thoughts?

    Aid Blog Enthusiast

  2. Matt

    It is true that Nicholas Negroponte has been advocating a technology solution in the form of OLPC. But mainstream opinion in the ICT4D community never got behind it, precisely because it was a technology-led initiative.

    Owen

  3. I agree with Owen. Ken is right to say that technology cannot substitute for human intent, but I think very few people would argue this. As he says, it amplifies – and can therefore have bad as well as good consequences, as with the role of text messages in inciting the Kenyan election violence or radio in the Rwandan genocide. Of course not all ‘ICT4D’ projects have been well thought out (one laptop per child…), but this is not a reason to give up completely.

    I believe some of the biggest changes are still to come. The spread of mobile phones in Africa particularly has the potential to fundamentally alter the relationship between citizens and governments. Once governments realise this and start to exploit it, things will start to get interesting.

  4. Chris

    I’m confused. Who, in the last decade or so, has claimed that technology is the answer, rather than enabler for other kinds of change?

    And who denies that technologies like radio, mobile phones and – in some cases – access to the internet have in come cases contributed to significant changes, ranging from election monitoring to mobile banking, from improvements in wholesale agriculture markets to improvements in government accountability.

    Information and technology can enable and support change, and they can play a hugely important role in doing so; but they are not the change. And I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise, do they?

    Owen

    1. Owen – on the site Chris has linked to, an article by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC:

      “When I started One Laptop per Child (OLPC) in 2004, I said that owning a connected laptop would help eliminate poverty through education, especially for the 70 million children who have no access whatsoever to schools. I still believe this. But what I have learned since–with two million laptops in 40 countries–is that reducing isolation is an even bigger issue, and that goal will be achieved with technology and only with technology.”

      That sounds like a suggestion that technology is a bottleneck. Chris is saying that it isn’t.

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