Expatriate Bangladeshi 2000

Linking Individuals, Regions, Ideas, and Actions

Poverty Alleviation and Information/communications Technologies

Towards a motif for the United Nations ICT Task Force*

Nuimuddin Chowdhury, Senior Fellow, Grameen Communications, Grameen Bank Group, nuim2@yahoo.com 

* These observations are offered on the basis of my own work during the past two years or so, and are not necessarily with any of the organizations with which I am associated. All shortcomings are mine alone.

The following observations are a proffered by way of amplifying somewhat what I had said in the Working-level Meeting of the UN Secretary General’s ICT Advisory Group on December 21, 2000 at New York. Clearly, the terms of reference for the proposed ICT Task Force and its modalities must put a heavy premium on the establishment of some presumable, if not proven, imperatives that connect ICTs with the cherished goal of Poverty Alleviation. The task of laying all that groundwork is of necessity elaborate and somewhat complex---something that certainly can not be done within the short space of ten or so pages of draft. The objective of this brief expose is more limited, viz., to state my world-view so to speak on the subject and introduce some generalities that may still be sufficiently intriguing to stimulate further, more scholarly, work in this direction.

Achieving economic development and the alleviation of poverty in the developing and least-developed countries is the ultimate raison d’etre for any UN initiative with an economic mandate, such as the UN ICT Task Force. Development ultimately begets liberation from poverty, and such a pattern of development can not come about without positive changes in a number of fields: (a) well-informed political leadership with a sustained capacity for promptly legislating appropriate policies and efficiently executing public investments that have a high payoff; (b) availability of suitable physical and informational infrastructure and a skilled workforce; (c) capacity for attracting foreign investment, especially those with large footprint in terms of synergies with local informational industry; (d) a global economic ethos as a driver for policy formation; (e) an entrepreneurial culture; (f) the presence of a vigorous non-for-profit organizations.

Poverty means inadequate ownership or gainful control over assets (tangible and intangible), manual motor power or other forms of production skills. Lack of literacy and numeracy typically characterize the poor, as does lack of access to accurate information (prices, inventories, imports, supply shocks, etc) of significant relevance to the quality of their business decisions. The poor, who are often remote, suffer from a very limited availability of public information as to healthcare, public transportation systems, natural disasters, environmental toxicity, occupational hazards, etc. As well, environmental degradation and alleviation of diseases and hunger must be mentioned in this same breath as other important dimensions of the problemtique of poverty alleviation. ICTs have a valid role to play in each of this areas. Indeed, mainstreaming ICTs in the working and social lives of the poor and especially their adolescent children should be the essence of what the ICT Task Force has to be about. To the extent that conditions of poverty owe themselves to the lack of info-telecommunication infrastructure, content, applications, appropriate skills, business culture and suitable legislative framework including that related to intellectual property rights (IPR) and regulatory independence, they will need to be addressed, as appropriate. Certainly, advisory services in the field of advocacy of effective policies and (wherever essential) pilot projects that by showing "best-practices" would likely make a beneficial impact on the situation on the ground would appear to be the appropriate for the Task Force. Poor countries of course differ significantly in terms of the severity of the problem of their underdevelopment of the infrastructure in the relevant sense, and thus in the nature of their most pressing needs in this context.

ICTs comprehend technologies that can process different kinds of information (voice, video, audio, text, data) and facilitate different forms of communications among human agents, among humans and information systems, and among information systems. These technologies are about capturing, storing, processing, sharing, display, protecting, and managing information. Due to their very strong cost-efficiencies, Internet technologies have become the very center-piece of the ICT universe: all information and communications technologies are dead on arrival unless they can robustly leverage the global reach and the tremendous scalability of the Web. The Net has exploded as a commercial medium, and it is also becoming central to efforts by companies to globalize production (Chowdhury, 2000b), and by individuals to globalize commercial collaboration. To quote: "Information technology, foreign direct investment and globalization have become the three all-important threads in the ongoing panorama of international development events" (Chowdhury, 2000b, p. 4). Harnessing the World Wide Web to its own ends has become the distinctive challenge before important players in each of these three communities. In this context, it is apt to remember the distinction made by influential thinkers in the ICT Advisory Group of the UN that Internet is not only a service but, perhaps more relevantly, a set of production and/or enabling technologies, which can be leveraged to educate and train young men and women in developing countries at the prime of their learning abilities, to inform and signal "role-model" conscientization, and finally to improve provision of healthcare and disaster-mitigation, just to give six examples of the interfaces between poverty alleviation and ICTs.

Data from evaluation of Grameen Cell Phone program have shown that while the nonpoor users in rural Bangladesh use cell phones to keep in touch with loved ones (a luxury motive), the poor, however, typically use cell phone access as a production input (to keep in touch with real-time market developments). Also, evaluations have shown that the poor users of cell phones register a greater effect on their producers’ surpluses due to the cell phone access, than do nonpoor users (Bayes, von Brawn and Akhtar, 1999). This means that a poverty-targetted provision of informational infrastructure in Bangladesh will have a greater aggregate return than an across-the-board action.

Governments and international community have finally taken note of the potentially rich artery of development payoff that ICTs represent. IT-projects for development range from the effort to wire Wirana village in Maharashtrya (Bhatnagar and Schware, 1999), to the effort to digitize the citizens’ registration for various administrative purposes in Andhra Pradesh in India, to Peru’s digitization of all land-ownership records (Scott 2000), to Israel’s leveraging a water-utility GIS to inputting into better fighting of water-borne diseases such as hepatitis (Lan, 1998 ). Many more interesting projects in the specific field of harnessing ICTs to the end of facilitating broader social development in poor countries will no doubt be emerging: the focus in this paper is on what can be done to the greatest direct impact from ICTs on the problem of poverty.

It is in the field of the delivery of literacy and of marketable skills that the capacity of ICTs to defy constraints and costs of time and space is destined to have the greatest potential effect on equipping the poor with the ability to improve their labor returns. Traditionally, formal education in a brick-and-mortar setting in a typical developing country is too costly for the poor: this is because children have, even for miserably poor wages, are net value producers to hard-pressed households as earners in a situation where every pair of hands, no matter how tender, must apply the motor power they have. In contrast, computer-aided or Web-based literacy or learning programs can by adopting after-hours or week-end schedules substantially reduce those collateral costs. The same applies to learning new marketable skills, eg word processing, data entry, transcription (of various types), GIS types of work, to give four examples (from a gamut of increasingly more sophisticated options) information-processing clerical work for clients in developed countries of the world. Private businesses in developing countries are grasping a growing part of this action. This is one space where efforts should be made to enable young but retentive men and women from poor households and poor communities to grasp some of these opportunities that will undoubtedly arise in the increasingly networked global information market-place.

A major currency in the fight against poverty, necessarily a long-run effort, is a process of broad-based development in which poor communities and families can participate on a sustained basis, buttressed by growing productivity all-around and supplemented by a regime of productive rural and urban economic diversification. A major element in the fight against child malnutrition, another critical aspect of poverty in the developing world, is the information available to the household, especially the mother. Information and communications technologies (ICTs), which essentially are about increasing productivity and information access anytime, anywhere, thus appear to have an important role in this fight.

In developed countries, more than three-fifths of GDPs including the output due to governments are contributed by services that involve various degrees of informational processing by using ICTs. Such information-rich services overdose on information-processing skills. Perhaps about a sixth of such output comprise of relatively low-end info-clerical activities. The terrific economics of the internet technologies are making such info-clerical services a ripe candidate for migration to developing countries, with appropriate combination of policy leadership, ICT infrastructure and backbone, human resources, legal and regulatory framework, and entrepreneurial culture. The provision of affordable global connectivity, the availability in poor families and poor communities of ICT skills and creating marketing chains for informational processing that tap the productive energies of the poor workers will seem to be an idea whose time has come. Within the next five years, when hands-free computer operating systems arrive on the scene, the threshold for participation of poor youth in such info-globalization to the inclusion of "knowledge workers" will be further lowered. This is one specific causal pathway between ICTs and poverty alleviation in the sense of creation of marketable skills by the poor in the emerging international division of labor in the networked world. Therefore, seeding a broad-based capacity among the poor for acquiring such low-end informational skills would be an important channel of impact on poverty on the ground, and should therefore form one key element of the terms of reference of the UN ICT Task Force. The Task Force need not itself takes up such re-skilling projects: it should play a catalytic role in creating a consensus about awareness among governments and the civic society.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, physical endowments are poorer, markets are shallower, and marketing margins are higher, agriculture is extensive and industry is non-existent. The lack of informational access creates a barrier of high transaction costs to market participation by the poor and women producers, especially in Africa. Also, environmental modifiers (that cue the imperative of sustainability) are now increasingly stressed: we must "pay more attention in agricultural research to sustainability features of recommended technologies, to broader aspects of natural resource management at watershed and landscape levels, and to the problems of resource-poor areas" (Hazell 1999, 3, emphasis added). Factors and relationships specific to certain locations and geographical features have also loomed importantly in mounting effective nutritional interventions (Pinstrup-Andersen, Pelletier, and Alderman 1995). Poverty alleviation is also seen as being about paying "attention to the whole of the rural economy¾ food, livestock, exports, and rural small scale enterprises" (Bryant 1988, 11, italics in the original): the accent on rural enterprises is about diversification.

ICTs are relevant to each of the following imperatives in the context of poverty alleviation: (1) creating marketable skills among poor young workers that might eventually liberate them from poverty; (2) for the first time, making it possible to impact literacy and numeracy to the children of poor parents while minimizing the collateral opportunity costs of such human-resources development (because distance learning that leverages a 24-hour technology such as the Internet can be community-based and may obviate the opportunity costs of traditional class-room instruction). (3) giving policymakers access to real-time information and best-practice knowledge distilled from the Web; (4) reducing private and public search and transactions costs; (5) responding to environmental modifiers at watershed, landscape, and community levels; (6) fostering diversification of the economy in which the poor mainly operate; (7) using spatially-sensitive informational strategies to render poverty alleviation and nutritional programs more effective and less costly; and (8) harnessing the capability to mount early-warning information systems, with peoples’ participation. ICTs would likely pay off by increasing the effectiveness of the tried-and-tested recipes, and then by adding some bite of their own.

The following offer albeit limited elucidation of these ideas.

(A): Skills and enterprise development training among the poor

For-profit ICT training has become a thriving service industry in developing countries particularly (Chowdhury, 2000b). Offerings include both relatively high-end information processing skills (like managing network operating systems software) but also low-end info-clerical skills, especially, in India, Medical Transcription and data entry. Seeding especially the second type of activities within not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) with strong track-record in dealing with the poor in rural areas need to be tested as a case (Chowdhury, 1999). If NPOs don’t exist, then government-run jobs programs which have had a track record of fostering group-based enterprises can be pressed into service. Such programs defer to the imperative that the espousal of ICTs in development should focus on basic human need, such as for employment and livelihood opportunities.

In the increasingly global marketplace for informational services, low-end data-processing jobs will eventually have to migrate to low-wage countries. Based on current estimates, the offshore outsourcing market will likely balloon to about $35 billion by 2008. Business as usual scenarios suggest that developing countries would source this added activity from facilities in their cities, many of which are dangerously overcrowded and polluted (World Bank 2000). VSAT or Wireless Local Loop (WLL) technologies can provide a cleaner solution by nudging the location of this added business to the rural areas, where young people could be tapped for these livelihood opportunities. The accent on rural areas is a natural: in India for instance, three-fifths of the young people who are poor are in the rural areas. Grameen Bank experience suggest that women tend to make better debtors than men. The principle of risk aversion in program development may then tip the balance in favor of young women as beneficiaries.

Diversification of the sources of growth in rural areas of developing countries is good for food security on the demand side, and this puts a premium on using production credit and gender-differentiated training to launch skills that would be useful for remote-processing livelihood opportunities. These jobs are clean, require a few months’ of training, are footloose and dovetail with the desire of young, rural women to earn a living without leaving their communities. This of course demands the right kind of information infrastructure, and community-level connectivity. Most of the remote-processing jobs are likely to be of the low-skill variety.

Capacity for creating digital content preparatory to implementing programs for distance literacy and numeracy training would need to be created, especially among locally-elected institutions and non-profit sectors. This presupposes the availability of the requisite hardware and facilitator resources. In order to confine trainees to educational offering only of the Web, special-purpose browsers will have to be developed that are designed to screen in only educational sites for example. Scheduling preferences or requirements could be enforced on the server in terms of profiling user accounts as appropriate, with respect to time and space specificities. ICT-based literacy programs are likely to be much more scalable and cheaper than brick-and-mortar models. Participants in Asian Consultations organized in the run-up to the Working Group meeting of the ICT Advisors to the Secretary General made the point: "Literacy is the key---can we make our world literate in 5 years using ICT?"

Knowledge-networking ICTs that stay abreast of real-time information can help make policymaking itself more effective in poverty alleviation. The role that real-time information can play in mitigating natural disasters should be clear enough. Continuous exposure by top policy-makers to price and supply discovery in key markets (foodgrain, feed, fertilizer, water, for example), which intelligent use of ICTs makes possible, could also be a part of poverty-alleviating economic management every bit worthy of the Information Age.

(4) Because the ICT developments, motivated by the profit pursuit of IT businesses, have their fair share of what economists call "market failures": inadequate supply of appropriate content, applications, "plug-ins", interfaces, etc. with which the vast multitude of the poor could, if given some help, open the floodgates of beneficial "network effects" of accessing ICTs. This is a failure because the market’s under-supply of suitable IT content and applications drive a formidable wedge between the inherent learning abilities of the poor and their working lives. Indeed, markets are intrinsically unable to cater to appropriate educational, training and workforce needs of the millions of young men and women who are poor. To allow such a waste of human resources would indeed be ethically indefensible. The alleviation of these market failures is yet another pathway between poverty alleviation and ICTs. It creates a rationale for public and, a fortiori, of NPO interventions in developing content and IT skills, and business development services (BDS), with the objective needs of poor workers and small enterprises in view. However, because the pace of ICT change is so rapid, governments are, even in the narrow fields of poverty and nutrition, likely to need expert non-partisan ICT advice and technical assistance as they start to harness the Web to poverty alleviation generically.

(5) Intelligent use of ICTs would likely lower search and marketing costs for market players (marginal farmers and itinerant traders) who are typically poor. It would also lower the costs of accessing information about work opportunities and new technologies; lower the cost of farm extension and procuring other needed farm services; improve returns from in-kind investments such as grain stocks by increasing such agents’ informational efficiency; and help lower the private cost of imports (and not just of food items). Pan-alliance electronic commerce could increase rural artisans’ export earnings, too.

(6) In poverty alleviation, ICTs would likely affect the quantity, quality, and timeliness of valuable information that matters to the poor. This could be related, without being limited, to marketing. Initially, this could be mainly related to market intelligence. With experience, it could even embrace electronic commerce, cutting out the middleman altogether.

There is a gender dimension, too. In many developing countries, women producers and traders have become numerically more visible, as the result of Grameen-style microcredit social engineering, the gender-centricity of chit funds, or communities of small savers, as in China. Women’s dual role (in direct production and in caring for the family) typically implies reduced physical business mobility. For these working women, network connectivity (at a reasonable price) can often make a difference in their competitiveness, informational access, and empowerment.

(7) Passenger information (such as all kinds of schedules info) on public transport networks, available on the Web or digital radio sets, can save traders’ time. Computerization of land records (Scott 2000), digitization of all data that form part of a national geographic data infrastructure, local-call billing on telephony for internet access, are the three other examples that come to mind.

(E) Harnessing ICTs to the prevention of environmental degradation:

(8) The recognition of environmental "modifiers" and emphasis on sustainability in discussions on growth strategies have now put the focus on backward regions within developing countries, although better endowed regions are not accorded any the less importance. A sharp focus on backward regions requires that a prominent role be given to the use of geospatial information technology, in which GIS and GPS systems are integrated. Satellite data could thus form the bedrock of improved management information in many fields, such as overexploitation of common properties like coral reefs and inland fishing shoals, and the creation of National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

(F) Geo-Referenced Spatially Sensitive Nutritional and Food Security Programs:

(9) If a suitable national spatial data infrastructure exists in a developing country¾ a big if¾ it would be possible to overlay, say, a pollution or water-toxicity digital map over another map of liver diseases among preschool children---with a telling effect among policymakers. Even if a pair of such maps by themselves might not establish either the fact or the direction of causality, the mosaic would pinpoint, with graphic detail, the geographic coordinates of the most at-risk children. This would create demand for other data, perhaps a map of tanneries with putrid effluents. Forging spatially sensitive nutritional programs could benefit from data collected using an interface to geo-referenced information systems, in other words GIS integrated with GPS.

(G) Mounting Early-Warning Systems, with Peoples’ Participation:

(10) During natural calamities, public-safety information systems are severely tested in developing countries, and, more often than not, found to be woefully deficient. If watersheds or landscapes form part of the "public information backbone" (connected wirelessly, for example), then members at upper reaches of a riparian entity could easily alert those further downstream of rising flood water levels or landslides in real time, which might help contain collateral damage and even save lives.

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Bhatnagar, S. and Robert Schware, (Eds) 1999. Information and Communication Technology in Rural Development: Case Studies from India, Washington, D.C.

Bryant, C. 1988. Poverty, policy, and food security in Southern Africa. Boulder, Colo., USA: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Chowdhury, Nuimuddin. 1999. Putting Bangladesh’s Poor Women on the World Wide Web: Towards a global economic village. Paper prepared for the International Development Research Center, Ottawa, Canada.

_______. 2000a. Information and Communications Technology and IFPRI’s Mandate: A Conceptual Framework. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, September.

________. 2000b. Information Revolution, Foreign Direct Investment and Globalization:

A Blueprint of Actions for Youth Employment, New York, Century Foundation (erstwhile The Twentieth Century Fund).

Hazell, P. 1999. Agricultural growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental sustainability: Having it all. March <www.ifpri.cgiar.org/2020/briefs/number59.html >.

Lan, N. 1998. Prosperity in the pipeline. GeoPlace.com

<www.geoplace.com/gia/1998/0998/998env.asp>.

Pinstrup-Andersen, P., D. Pelletier, and H. Alderman. 1995. Child growth and nutrition in developing countries: Priorities for action. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Scott, G. 2000. Peru’s government goes high-tech. Choices. (June).

World Bank, 1986. Poverty and hunger: Issues and options for food security in developing countries. Washington, D.C.

¾ ¾ ¾ . 2000. Entering the 21^st century: World development indicators 1999/2000, Washington D.C.: Oxford University Press for the World Bank.

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