The ABCs of ICTs

I joined facebook this morning.

It’s something that I have been resisting for years since its inception. While I saw the benefit for social networking, I could foresee it aiding in the downfall of everyday face-to-face communication and true friendships, not those artificial friendships created by collecting as many people as you can onto your Friends Page. I am not denying that it is still doing this on a micro-level, but on a macro-level, I am starting to see the greater benefit of an online community that crosses borders, both geographical and ideological.

Information Communication Technologies (or ICTs) are the new thing in development. My friend, Josh Goldstein, is at the forefront of this being a graduate student at Tufts’ Fletcher School of International Relations and working at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He knows more about ICTs than I do, but from what I’ve learned from him and have learned myself, it is clear to me that ICTs are a key component to the impending success of the developing world.

Nicholas Negroponte’s ambitious One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative is a perfect example of the global breadth of ICTs. In his vision, Negroponte and his team envision every child in every developing nation to have access to their own personal laptop that has been created to be water, wind, sand…basically, anything-proof. Moreover, these laptops would have the ability to connect to each other on a wireless network and so if one of these laptops would be able to secure an internet connection, all the children in the village would be able to link into that laptop as a server and all gain connection to the rest of the world.

Currently, only about two percent of people in the developing world have access to the internet. If every child in the developing world gets one of these laptops, the accessibility rate would jump to near one-hundred.

Now critics, including Bill Gates a while back, will ask, why ICTs and not ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs, used to stymie HIV/AIDs and prevent the passing of the disease from pregnant mother to unborn child)? Would not the money used to create all these billions of laptops be better used by governments and private donors to cure deadly disease like HIV/AIDs and malaria, or help to feed the hungry or provide clean drinking water to the rest of the world?

This may be true, but this also may not be feasible when it comes to implementation strategy in places with little to know infrastructure and information dispersal plan. For instance, when well-meaning Hollywood activists tried to give out free mosquito nets to people in rural villages in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA), many people did not know what they were for and ended up using them as fishing nets or simply throwing them away. However, when they were being sold at a subsidized cost, everyone who bought them ended up using them the way they were intended to be used because of the information they received from the shopkeeper and others around them who were able to tell them what their investment was for.

Moreover, ICTs may be the key element in fighting disease and eliminating the devastating effects of extreme poverty. ICTs may represent the proverbial horse to the cart of extreme poverty. Take the following example.

ICT does not only mean the internet. It also means communication tools like cell phones, which seem to be a hotter than the weather when it comes to SSA. While not everyone has them, they are far more accessible than the internet is. Moreover, because of the general lag in developing nations in picking up technology, there are few LAN lines (the type of communication technology before cell phones when we had to rely on miles and miles of telephone poles and wires to be able to make phone calls) in SSA. SSA jumped straight to cell phones, thereby eliminating lots of wasted wiring and general capital that would have been needed to be spent to create such a system. Nowadays, cell phones have created a general communications infrastructure that is helping the developing world by passing information along from person to person at a incredible speed that has never been seen before.

Farmers are able to text message other farmers about a fair price to sell their crops for at the marketplace, communities are able to disperse important information about town meetings our contaminated water in their village, activists can take pictures from cell phones and immediately send them across the world to show the atrocities and everyday suffering of SSA in a matter of seconds – all of this and more because of something we, Americans, take for granted everyday in cell phones.

For those who grew up before the cell phone era, think about how hard it was to be able to find someone on a crowded train station or movie theater where you had decided to meet them at a certain time. And if they were running late, they had no way of telling you. Or how now cell phones can take pictures, connect you to the internet and play movies, music and videogames. Now think about how valuable those resources could be in connecting people in a place where it takes an entire day of walking to get from one village to another to disperse important information. Having such an infrastruture in place would aid in the other bigger problems like preventing the spread HIV/AIDs, et al by creating a means to distribute information to everyone about health education, access to healthcare, and opportunities to get tested or ARVs.

But cell phones are just one of the many affordable items that can help ameliorate the efficiency and effectiveness of information dispersal and communication in SSA. Moreover, there is much potential not only intra-community, but also inter-community.

And this brings us back to facebook. As of now, most people are connected through facebook within their communities in the United States. But now that facebook has opened its doors to anyone in the world who wants an account, people in SSA can now create accounts and link to others in the US and elsewhere, including their own communities. For now, the more valuable of the two connections will be to those abroad as locally there is not a wide of an internet user base as there is in say the US, though eventually there will be.

Very little of SSA is on facebook, blogger or youtube. But by putting themselves out there to make connections to people in the West, the rest of the World will one, grasp a better understanding of SSA and two, be able to share information and resources with their counterparts in SSA. An example of such an exchange taking place is with a Cameroonian filmmaker and all-around entertainer named Zigoto who is now on facebook and can put his films, music and ideas out there on the web. As a result, people in the West will be able to recognize his talents and download his music and videos. While people in Cameroon are not able to necessarily afford his music and videos, the people in the West definitely can. However, the West would never be able to know of Zigoto without the power of ICTs connecting them to a struggling Cameroonian artist.

Clearer examples of this is taking place today with micro-finance websites which allow people to lend money to people in the developing world by looking at profiles online and finding a prospective client. The client then works through a middle man (usually the NGO running the site) to get the money, use it for their business, make the money back and return it to the lender, sometimes with pictures of their success to thanks the lender.

However, the later example relies heavily on a third party. The bigger potential lies in simply having the people of SSA put themselves out there on the more popular sites like facebook, myspace, blogger, youtube, etc. where they will be able to connect directly to their counterparts of the West. Now with me on facebook, my friends in the US can now link up with my friends like, Zigoto, in Cameroon. Rather than keeping our networks confined to our spaces in the US, we should be seeking to expand our communities to include those of SSA and the rest of the developing world. We can always pretty easily call each other or see each other face to face in the US, but to communicate with someone in SSA is something that make community tools like facebook really worthwhile. By taking advantage of ICTs, including these “community-creating” websites, people with access to the internet both here in the US and in SSA will greatly be able to benefit.