My report -
My report -
IntroductionWithin globalisation framework, a concept coined in the 80s in order to define the creation of financial markets on the international stage, the working process of public or private institutions has to be questioned and redefined. Indeed, globalisation and liberalism suppose the creation of new systems of institution management as well as structures.
The issue of such reorganization is to ensure the welfare of the population. As the supreme power, the duty of the State is to implement a system of networks through its institutions which links itself with the population in order to guarantee the people’s welfare and communication between the State and the population. Nonetheless, as historical backgrounds of some States reveal apparent institutions’ weaknesses (inability or incompetence to found stable institutions, blind confidence to international institutions, corruption…), other type of networks such as non-governmental organizations (NGO) have to take on the role of link between both State and population or the role of the State itself in order to ensure people’s welfare.
The goal of these networks between the State and people is notably to build structures of communication which enable the redistribution resources and wealth of the country that they generate. That is why it is vital to found efficient systems of communication. The communication may be carried out through two distinctive type of organization called networked organization and organized network.
Concerning networked organization, it is possible to find this type of organization within universities, multinational companies, trade unions and State’s institutions notably. It is a modern and bureaucratic institutional form. Its logic of organization is predicted on vertical integration and is representative of tenets of liberal democracy. The emergence of the networked organization precedes the advent of digital information and communications technologies (ICT). That is one of the reasons why after the conception of a new product or service property rights are adopted and partnerships with other organizations, institutions or companies are concluded.
An important feature of networked organizations is its ability to proliferate its institutional form internationally and engages each actor because they equivalent hierarchical systems of organization. Thus they can reproduce hierarchical systems of organization.
Regarding organized networks, they are transdisciplinary, distributive and collaborative institutional forms. Given it is based on horizontal organization system, it is capable to organize social relations through information and communication technologies notably. Organized networks are co-emergent with digital communication media, that is why they first prefer launching for free their new technology by open sources for instance.
Moreover, trough protocols, self-organization, scaleability and sustainability, the projects of organized networks assess and undertake the construction of new institutional forms that engage diverse population in creating mechanisms and resources for labour and life in information societies, bringing new models to international challenges of cultural diversity, migration, creative innovation and open education. Organized networks’ activities such as NGO are visible through their own website, online petition, newsletter, or online fundraising, and at an internal level they use intranet and E-membership databases in order to make easier communication between staff members. And in such a structure people is free to come and go. It is a source of manning turnover and innovation.
Nonetheless, the weight of organized network such as NGO is rather weak on the international stage. Indeed despite NGO’s activities are very efficient and necessary in needy countries, it is difficult for them to be listened by nations and significant institutions. As multinational companies and government of powerful countries hold the power of decision, their credibility of such institution is not recognized.
Then, most of NGO’s activities are based on short-term basis. That is why it is common that when a new organization, another NGO or state institutions, take up its activity, it is a source of instability in that they could radically opposite ways of working and prioirities for the population. The activities of NGO must be laid on long-term basis in order reconstitute local systems and prevent future crises.
Moreover, at an internal level, the possibility of manning turnover can create disorders within an organization. The arrival of new managerial techniques or new ideas can shake up the pre-established way of working of the organization.
Through my experience spent in the NGO Helen Keller International (HKI) in Cambodia, we will try to answer to the following issues: “concerning the government, NGO and people relationship, how can we do to pass from networked organized relationship to an organized relationship?” and “is this process can be accelerated by the informatization and internet tools?”.
As the government-NGO-people relationship characteristics are based on networked organized, we are going to analyze the current situation of Cambodia, explain the different need of each actor, define the needy communication tools, and think about the use of internet tools within organized networks.
I. Case study: the involvement of NGO in rural development through the action of HKI in Cambodia
1. Nutritional and health situation in Cambodia
About 36% of the Cambodian population are living under the poverty line of $US 0.46 – $US 0.63 per day . Such a low income does not enable Cambodian people to access to micronutrient-rich foods, which are essential for their own health and for the appropriate growing-up of their children. Thus purchasing food may be favoured rather than purchasing medicine; purchasing medicine may be favoured rather than purchasing school stationery for their children. And children may also be likely to work rather than study in order to compensate for the lack of money necessary to purchase food. Food self-sufficiency is the first step which enables people to acquire health stability, which is an essential requirement for devoting themselves to a professional or social activity.
However, children aged 24-59 months, pregnant and non-pregnant women are the most injured by vitamin A deficiency, therefore by a lack of rich-micronutrient food intake. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Vitamin A Consultative Group (IVACG) have established a threshold for the prevalence of night blindness of 1%, which indicates that vitamin A deficiency is a public health problem. The prevalence of night blindness, the first clinical sign of vitamin A deficiency, reaches 1.8%, 4.3% and 6.8% in children aged 24-59 months, pregnant and non-pregnant mothers, respectively . Moreover, the recommended daily allowance (RDA) has not been met. In 1999, the total vitamin A intake of children was around 80 Retinol Equivalents (RE)/day, which is much lower than the recommended intake of 350 RE/d . In a 2000 survey, it was found that less than 6% of lactating women consumed the RDA of 1200 retinol equivalents (RE) and less than 11% of pregnant women consumed the RDA of 1000 RE. Median vitamin A intake was 181 RE/day among pregnant women and 201 RE/day among lactating mothers .
Another micronutrient issue is iron deficiency anemia (anemia is identified as a hemoglobin rate less than 11.0 g/dl) which especially affects children under five. Thus, 54% among children in this age group are anemic and may contract long-lasting impairments in cognitive development. This alters school and work performance, increases risk of morbidity and slows growth .
Additionally, another part of the Cambodian population has to be helped: vulnerable people. This group includes orphans, the disabled and people affected by chronic diseases such as HIV/AIDS or tuberculosis. All have to follow a strict nutritional diet in order to maintain their health and their livelihood. Moreover, they may live on the fringes of the community life due to their relative weaknesses which are a direct cause of the discrimination that they have to confront.
The HIV prevalence rate of Cambodia, 0.6% of the whole population , remains the highest sero-prevalence rate in South-east Asia, despite the prevention efforts of the Cambodian government and NGOs in both rural and city populations. Nowadays, about 135,000 Cambodians (ages 0-49) are infected with HIV, including 12,000 children under 5 years . Among them, about 30,000 need urgently of antiretroviral treatments of which only half of the patients can benefit.
Cambodia has the 22nd highest tuberculosis burden worldwide. Approximately two-thirds of all Cambodians carry the tuberculosis bacterium, and around 13,000 people die annually from the disease.
Malaria is also a major cause of morbidity and mortality, especially for forest dwellers and marginalized tribal people. Even though the number of death cases is low (492), more than 71,000 malaria cases were reported . It is currently the third leading cause of outpatient visits and the fourth leading cause of inpatient visits among children under five .
170,000 Cambodian adults are disabled , as well as 32,000 children The most common types of disability are deafness and blindness (300,000 and 144,000; respectively), diseases as polio (about 60,000 cases) and landmine injuries (about 45,000 injured) .
According to Warm Blankets Care International, there are currently 52,000 orphans (both parents deceased) in Cambodia. The growing number of orphans is mostly due to landmines or widespread diseases such as AIDS or tuberculosis which hit their parents who can not afford appropriate treatments.
The condition of each vulnerable person does not enable him/her to take part of activities properly. Indeed the HIV virus weakens the body’s defence system which then has to work harder to fight infections since this activity requires an increased energy and nutrients. Moreover infection and fever also increase the body’s demand for food. Once people are infected with HIV they have to eat more to meet these extra energy and nutrient needs. A poor diet can also increase the risk for other infections, reduce the medication’s efficacy and accelerate the progression of the disease. HIV is responsible for AIDS and is with tuberculosis a lethal combination which accelerates the other’s progress. The disabled are excluded from community activities because of challenges with movement and care, while orphans are excluded because of their social situation.
2. Presentation of the program
The Homestead Food Production (HFP) program is an efficient way to improve food security and to contribute to poverty reduction. The targeted people are mentioned above. First it provides essential technical and managerial support to partner NGOs, which adopt/expand the HFP program as part of their packet of activities. NGO staff linked with local government departments train and support farmers from Village Model Gardens (VMG) and Village Model Poultry Farms (VMPF) at the community level. In turn, farmers from VMGs and VMPFs provide technical assistance and inputs (seeds, saplings, chickens etc.) to other farmers and households in their village.
The relationship between all participants can be summarize like this:
Then households have the means to grow nutrient-rich food which was not available or too expensive for them. The HFP program increases at the same time the diversity of foods available and contributes to a more varied diet, a better bio-availability and increases the awareness about consuming nutrient-rich foods. Moreover resources resulting from gardening and animal raising are a significant source of income which is generally used in order to purchase food items that will complete an appropriate nutritional diet.
The HFP program was implemented in the Kompong Speu province in July 2005. This province have to face many climatic issues such as drought and flood, which every year spoils rice and other crop production such as vegetables and fish lost from ponds. In 2004, productivity of rice was low - 9% of villages produce enough rice to meet minimum food needs while the 61% of villages meet minimum food needs at national level, because the soil is not fertile and lacks irrigation systems. Therefore, many villages face chronic food shortage for 2-5 months a year, during the dry season. Indeed only 6% of households produced crops during the dry season while the national average was 16% . Moreover, the farming practices of poor households are limited owing to their small land ownership which is 0.44 ha on average . The HFP program in Kampong Speu province aims to improve the food security of vulnerable households with children under 5 by providing the required means which on the one hand increases the production of nutrient-rich foods (especially in vitamin A) and diversifies their food consumption through year-round production crops, and on the other hand enables them to increase their income and buy appropriate food, treatments and goods. It is a way to integrate vulnerable people in the economic life of the community and for them to reassert their role within it.
3. The NGO-government-people (NGP) relationship
- The government-NGO relationship:
The governments give the right and the appropriated permission to HKI to work in Cambodia, and help the NGO to settle in Cambodia. Given ministries own data about Cambodia, it is highly helpful to know the situation of each province and their specificities. Furthermore, when HKI implements some researches or surveys, the government and its ministries provide qualified workers in order to help them and to be actively involved in such projects.
The role of HKI is very important for the government. It is at the roots of Homestead food production program so they are both involved in its success and failures. In this way HKI provide the access of its previously achieved researches concerning specific programs (about vitamin A, iron or iodine notably). It enables the government gain knowledge in specific areas. HKI is really helpful in activities such as training, monitoring, research, and assessment in this program dealing with nutrition, agriculture and health.
- The relationship between NGO (WOSO and JKI):
It is through WOSO that HKI train locals in plant, fruit and vegetable growing and its village model gardening. They are like a sub-contracting company.
WOSO’s employees implement HKI’s program at local scale. They make easier the work of HKI by providing information about villages and the farmers’ needs.
- The people-NGO relationship:
HKI monitor the progress of the standard of people who benefit from the program, and assess the success of the program through survey notably. It is a way to improve their program and to know what they have to improve in order to be efficient.
People say what they need and their problem to NGOs, in that it can help them to modify their program.
- The people-government relationship:
People say what they need and their problem to the government representatives, in that it can help them to modify their program.
NGOs’ actions highlight an unequal relationship between each actors of the humanitarian aid. Indeed we can notice that NGOs is the most powerful in that it they have the keys to meet the goal of self-sufficiency. They carry out researches in this specific field, have a strong knowledge in the animal breeding and vegetables growing, and have experience to manage such programs. All of this aspect is profitable for the government and the population because HKI transmit all their experience and knowledge in order that government can manage themselves the training, monitoring, or research implementing which will be very important when the NGO program ended; thus the government will be responsible for the maximization of self-production, the improvement of standard of livings and welfare of the population.
In fact, in this relationship the NGO teaches, the government is a pupil to whom the teacher learns how to manage a given situation and the population a sheep to whom the dog (the NGO) shows where to go. But we have to take into account the specificities of the country’s background and the cultural gap between Northern/Southern countries to avoid such easy conclusions. That is why in the second part we will study the digital divide, which does not enable rural Cambodian to access to an important source of knowledge and experience and which could make the NGP relationship more “equal”.
II. Digital divide
1. Characteristics
The concept of the “digital divide” expresses the gap in access to information resources in some countries compared with those with state-of-the-art networks: telephone, radio, TV, Internet, satellite, in short, anything that can be classed as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Thus the digital divide expresses the difference in facilities for people to communicate, relative to their geographic location, their living standard and their level of education. Ultimately it is an indicator of a country’s economic and social situation.
Despite the boom in the availability of access to communication resources since the beginning of the 1990s (from 700 million to nearly 2.5 billion telephone lines, and from scarcely a million to over a billion Internet users), the divide is deepening and the differences in the usage of communication resources between countries and regions intensifying. However, the digital divide exists not only between countries but also within countries, normally between “rich” urban regions and “poor” rural regions. This regional divide is more pronounced within the developing countries, even though rural areas have benefited to some extent from the boom in access to communication resources.
This realization justified the convening of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) by the United Nations in December 2003, with a second phase scheduled for 2005.The digital divide would not have attracted so much attention were it not for its impact on development within a global economy increasingly based on the exchange of information and knowledge. As a result, access to ICT as a development tool is becoming a major political, economic and social issue.
Current usage
The term initially referred to gaps in ownership of computers between groups. One area of significant focus was school computer access; in the 1990s, rich schools were much more likely to provide their students with regular computer access. In the late 1990s, rich schools were much more likely to have internet access.
The digital divide had a moving target: first, it meant the ownership of a computer. Later, access to the Internet. Most recently it centers on broadband access.
According to Mehra (2004), the digital divide is “the troubling gap between those who use computers and the internet and those who do not”.
Lisa Servon argued in 2002 that the digital divide "is a symptom of a larger and more complex problem -- the problem of persistent poverty and inequality". Groups often discussed in the context of a digital divide include socioeconomic (rich/poor), racial (white/minority), or geographical (urban/rural). Also as stated by Mehra (2004), The four major components that attribute to digital divide are “socioeconomic status, with income, educational level, and race among other factors associated with technological attainment”. What results is a space largely created by and for a dominant culture. The term global digital divide refers to differences in technology access between countries.
The term "digital divide" also refers to the imbalance that exists amongst groups of society regarding their ability to use ICT (Information Communication Technology) to its most utmost performance.
Due to the range of criteria which can be used to assess technology access, and the lack of detailed data on some aspects of technology usage, the exact nature of the digital divide is both contextual and debatable. Criteria that are often used to distinguish between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' of the digital divide tend to focus on access to hardware, access to the internet, and details relating to these categories. Some scholars fear that these discussions might be discouraging the creation of Internet content that addresses the needs of minority groups that make up the "have nots," as they are portrayed to be technophobic charity cases that lack the desire to adopt new technologies on their own.
In the context of schools, which have consistently been involved in the discussion of the divide, current formulations of the divide focus more on how (and whether) computers are used by students, and less on whether there are computers or internet connections.
A. Global digital divide
Another key dimension of the digital divide is the global digital divide, reflecting existing economic divisions in the world. This global digital divide widens the gap in economic divisions around the world. Countries with a wide availability of internet access can advance the economics of that country on a local and global scale. In today's society, jobs and education are directly related to the internet. In countries where the internet and other technologies are not accessible, education is suffering, and uneducated people cannot compete in the global economy. This leads to poor countries suffering greater economic downfall and richer countries advancing their education and economy. However, when dealing with the global aspect of digital divide there are several factors that lead to digital divide. For example, country of residence, ethnicity, gender, age, educational attainment, and income levels are all factors of the global aspects of digital divide. In addition, a survey shows that in 15 Western European countries females, manual workers, elderly, and the less educated have less internet access than males, professional, the young, and the well educated”.[9] The digital divide is a term used to refer to the gap between people who have access to the internet and those that do not. It can also refer to the skills people have – the divide between peoples who are at ease using technology to access and analyse information and those who are not.
B. National interest and social benefit
There are a variety of arguments about why closing the digital divide is important. The major arguments are as follows:
Economic equality: Some think that access to the Internet is a basic component of civil life that some developed countries aim to guarantee for their citizens. Telephone service is often considered important for the reasons of security. Health, criminal, and other types of emergencies may indeed be handled better if the person in trouble has access to a telephone. Also important seems to be the fact that much vital information for education, career, civic life, safety, etc. is increasingly provided via the Internet, especially on the web. Even social welfare services are sometimes administered and offered electronically.
Social mobility: If computers and computer networks play an increasingly important role in continued learning and career advancement, then education should integrate technology in a meaningful way to better prepare students. Without such offerings, the existing digital divide hinders children of lower socio-economic status, particularly in light of research showing that schools serving these students in the USA usually utilize technology for remediation and skills drilling due to poor performance on standardized tests, rather than for more imaginative and educationally demanding applications.
Social equality: As education integrates technology, societies such as in the developing world should also integrate technology to improve life. This will reduce the gender inequalities. Access to information through internet and other communication tools will improve her life chances and enable her to compete globally with her Contemporaries even in the comfort of her rural settings.
Democracy: Use of the Internet has implications for democracy. This varies from simple abilities to search and access government information to more ambitious visions of increased public participation in elections and decision making processes. Direct participation (Athenian democracy) is sometimes referred to in this context as a model.
Economic competitiveness and growth: The development of information infrastructure and active use of it is inextricably linked to economic growth. Information technologies in general tend to be associated with productivity improvements even though this can be debatable in some circumstances. The exploitation of the latest technologies is widely believed to be a source of competitive advantage and the technology industries themselves provide economic benefits to the usually highly educated populations that support them. The broad goal of developing the information economy involves some form of policies addressing the digital divide in many countries with an increasingly greater portion of the domestic labor force working in information industries.
National Security: It has been speculated that the Digital Divide leaves those most susceptible to terrorism with no other options. Because they are being left behind, they rebel against modern society through acts of terrorism. Most strategies for reducing the appeal of terrorism focus on ending the isolation of those who are currently good candidates for being recruited into terrorist organizations, e.g. the rural poor, especially those who have a gripe against modernism. Terrorism is Ireland was dramatically reduced in the mid-90s when ICTs were broadly disseminated throughout the Irish economy. A failure to close the Digital Divide may well undermine any efforts to resolve the underlying problems leading to terrorism.
C. Challenges and social detriments
Some observers have noted social challenges arising from the global spread of the Internet, including:
Unwanted information: The Internet provides a platform for the rapid distribution of information. Some of that information is unwanted by certain groups, such as pornography, allegedly obscene or immoral information, or offensive language; some of that information is unwanted by certain governments, such as news from a variety of sources, which may break an information monopoly previously held by state (propaganda) media; and some of that information is unwanted by nearly everyone, such as e-mail spam and computer viruses. Opponents of this view believe that the best answer to the uncontrolled flow of information that you disagree with is to either not listen to it or to promote your own ideas in the free marketplace of ideas.
"Quality" of Communications: The Internet allows rapid communication between more people, but some believe that this is leading interpersonal communications to become shallow and staged. Others feel that the Internet allows people to hide behind their computers and express "hateful", "offensive", "damaging", or otherwise unwanted opinions that they wouldn't ordinarily communicate in person. Indeed, Internet communications provide increased opportunities for anonymous expression.
Alleged cultural imperialism: The Internet makes it easier to exchange cultural ideas and values. Some cultures can perceive this exchange to be detrimental to them, especially where a culture is struggling to preserve its ways, and trying to shield their children from content they believe to be "immoral", "materialistic", and "antisocial". Others counter that no one is forcing people from other cultures to subscribe to extra cultural information flows, and that they do so of their own free will, whereas genuine imperialism is based on force and coercion.
Content inequality: There are still huge gaps not only in Internet accessibility, but content. Internet content in some languages is seriously lacking or virtually non-existent. This can economically "leave behind" whole groups of people, but more importantly allow economically aggressive outsiders to move in on their territory. Others advocate that groups without content on the Internet should create content or digitize their own non-digital content, to address any perceived imbalances.
Privacy: Some critics question why governments spy on or monitor the Internet, especially when they do so outside of a legal framework; some governments question the use of the Internet to "spy" on previously disconnected countries; some governments fear that the Internet and the ending of state information monopolies and information asymmetry could be result in social or political unrest within their nations.
Control: ARPA, an agency of the U.S. Government, created the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet; due to this, certain centralized services, especially the DNS system of Internet domain names, are under the oversight of the US government. This is controversial; some critics of ICANN believe that control of these centralized services should be turned over to an international body such as the United Nations, or to regional Internet registries, or to alternative DNS roots. Some critics of the proposal to replace US control of ICANN with UN control believe that the US Government has administered the Internet in a technically and politically neutral fashion, even allowing governments hostile to it (such as Cuba, the People's Republic of China, Iran, etc.) to participate fully in the registration of names and the governance of their own top-level domains. These critics believe that the United Nations, being a union of democratic and undemocratic member states, might attempt to use any control ceded by ICANN to further censor the Internet. Many countries, including the United States, have used state control to censor the internet in the past.
2. Digital divide in Cambodia
3. The proposed solution on the international stage – contributors of the digital divide bridging
Each of these revenue streams, by itself, holds promise for using ICTs to contribute to the reduction of poverty. But the convergence of all of them into an ecosystem suggests a more accurate and comprehensive idea of how the penetration of ICTs into a society can yield a pay off for the poor. It is a matter of changing the environment or context of poverty. So far, no one emerging-market country fully illustrates this convergence. It will be expressed via a menu of inter-related products and services, most of them not yet invented, in which governmental, commercial, academic and NGO interests are all tightly inter-woven. This fabric could be called an "enterprise ecosystem," offering solutions to the problems faced by the poor.
a. Government:
The largest revenue stream to close the Digital Divide is egovernment. The term refers to the marriage of new technology and government, encompassing back-office and front-office (service delivery) of government as well as specialized fields such as education and health, which are government-driven. The private sector is highly involved in this activity, since the expertise needed by governments to achieve successful digitalization is housed in the private sector. eGovernment is the major way which technological innovation and managerial expertise of the private sector is being transferred to governments. In the United States alone at the federal level, such transactions are worth $700 billion, and a much greater amount at state and local levels. In developing countries, government represents the major customer for ICT industries, growing by 20% per year, according to Gartner Dataquest.
In Asia, the government sector has a deeper reach into society than in the West, so the digitalization of government has huge implications that affects schools, health care, environmental stewardship and the biggest issue of all: security. It concerns not only the normal operations of government, like collecting taxes and awarding permits, but also addressing the ways services are delivered, how services are integrated, and it allows new bottoms-up as well as top-down interactions between government and citizens. Clearly, egovernment threatens some entrenched political forces, but it strengthens others. The extent and speed of a government's digitalization is an important political issue because digitalization is expensive. It forces governments to weigh the costs and benefits of digitalization against alternative public investments, like building dams or providing direct subsidy to the poor.
Most egovernmental projects begin in those bureaus where incentives exist for digitalizing operations. High on the list is revamping tax collection methods so that the government can get more revenue (or spent less money gathering it). Another favorite is enhancing security by introducing citizen ID cards. In some cases, entire governments work with the private sector to create portals through which government services can be integrated. Within the United States there has been great speculation about the degree to which egovernment can create incentives for a fundamental shift in governance, which may or may not allow public policy guidance from elected leaders. Significantly, it allows government to move into the partnership model in which government functions and functions of business and civil society are more closely inter-related. The argument on behalf of egovernment that carries the most weight is that it allows government to function more productively and efficiently and one only has to look to Singapore as a case in point. But egovernment can also do things that help the poor. The many isolated examples of how egovernment can help the poor can be categorized as follows:
- Enhance scale, effectiveness and integration of governmental services for the poor.
- Increase effectiveness of local government in areas where poverty is concentrated.
- Increase intergovernmental transfers from central governments to local governments where the poor predominate.
- Reduce costs of government in ways that benefit the poor.
- Increase the ability of government to correctly identify the poor and develop new services to meet their needs.
- Increase assets, access to capital, and revenue by the poor.
- Develop self-help mechanisms by and for the poor.
- Increase transparency and decrease corruption in ways that benefit the poor.
- Increase advocacy or other modes of citizen feedback by the poor.
b. Agribusiness
Agribusiness is the largest industry in emerging markets and the major source of the export revenue in most developing countries. In most Asian countries where poverty predominates, most of the poor are subsistence farmers or employed in small farms. While they are largely isolated from the dominant agribusiness industry in each country, they are not totally isolated. A significant share of the revenue of farmers goes to intermediaries who provide access to markets, seeds, fertilizer. Agricultural cooperatives are themselves important intermediaries as are agricultural banks, most of them government-owned, which provide financing for agricultural projects. In the early 80s, a large Indian diversified agribusiness called ICT attracted Harvard Business School professor David Upton to his model of e-Choupal. Rather than follow a pattern of exploiting the poor, ITC's e-Choupal program sets up internet kiosks that allows small scale farmers to organize themselves into cooperatives capable of negotiating a higher price for the products they sell and a lower price for the products they buy.
Is the ITC an isolated example, with little broader meaning for the agribusiness field? Or can it lead to a new inter-relationship between the dominant agribusiness multinationals and small farmers? Does it offer a clue to way in which ICTS, once fully integrated into the countryside, can produce a bottoms-up effect in the agricultural industry, giving the small farmer a larger role n the agricultural value chain?
c. Consumer Market-Development
Most developing countries have large masses of consumers with little disposable income. Therefore marketers like Proctor & Gambol are questioning business models adopted from the advanced markets. Nowadays, they favor a new approach in which they make a small margin per transaction by selling to many consumers. Yet the size of markets has been contained to only a small portion of the total populations. This is not only because of the low income of the poor but also because of their isolation. Extending ICTs into its countryside, such cell phones and internet kiosks helps to solve the isolation problem, creating a distribution system. Can this distribution open up demand among the poor for products and services heretofore denied them?
There are three types of consumer marketing that have particular relevance to closing the digital divide: retail marketing of devices and software to consumers, retail marketing of basic consumer durables whose prices may drop as a result of ICT diffusion, retail banking which can offer credit and secured financial transactions to the poor as a result of ICT diffusion.
d. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Back in the mid-90s, when Bill Gates predicted the future of the digital economy in his book “The Road Ahead”, he argued that the Digital Divide will close itself as businesses use ICT to relocate jobs to the countries with the lowest cost workers capable of doing the job. Renouned venture capitalist Vinod Khosla later remarked that by the year 2010, remote services would be the most dynamic, profitable fast-growing ICT field. Today, India has emerged as the Business Process Outsourcing (PBO) capital of the world. The government expects $50 billion in foreign revenues from outsourcing a year by 2008. One benefit of BPO is precious foreign revenue that could be channeled by government programs to accelerate ICT diffusion and support the beneficial social impact at the same time. But an even more powerful factor is that outsourcing produces skills that can be leveraged to help close Digital Divide in the regions that surround the call centers and other sites where BPO activity is conducted. Those who answer phones in call centers, process insurance forms or any other of a myriad of out-sourced services could develop skills could later be trained to transfer those skills into domestic small businesses which could provide a source of revenue for lower skilled workers.
e. Small and Medium Size Business Development
In the late 1990s in the United States, ICT-inspired full growth economy generated millions of jobs based on an explosion in tiny businesses with one-five employees, whose fundamental asset was a PC loaded with word processing and spreadsheets. Most of these SMEs were not poor, but they contributed to nearly full employment economy for the first time, forcing employers to pay costs of training just to find and keep good workers. Obviously, developing countries with large numbers of illiterate populations cannot duplicate the American experience. Yet it is worth asking whether, in the Second Digital Revolution, emerging markets can elicit their own explosion in small business development and whether it can yield a pay off to the poor.
f. Poverty Alleviation
The alleviation of poverty, a dimension of the field of "development" is big business, worth about $ trillion globally when you add together, the amounts spent by international donors (divided between bilateral and multilateral) who provide "official development assistance" to help low-income countries, along with international philanthropy earmarked for NGOs serving the poor, and funding from developing-country governments themselves. This final category is by far the largest amount, representing billions per year in Asia, according to the World Bank. As ICTs become increasingly integrated into all these approaches to poverty alleviation, how can the poor benefit?
Among all these sources of funding for poverty alleviation, a big topic has been the extent to which the tradition modes of helping the poor can be enhanced through ICTs. In the late 90s, many activists scoffed at the idea the ICTs should be given priority, when the poor lacked clean water, blackboards for the schools and electricity needed to power computers. Nowadays, the notion that all these fields of poverty-reduction require ICT applications is much more widespread. A dozen of the bilateral aid agencies have plans for "mainsteaming" ICTs into their ODA operations and many countries have set up ICT ministries to encourage the integration of ICTs into education programs and other efforts serving the poor. The World Bank, for its part, has a special unit set up to integrate ICTs into all aspects of its assistance to low-income countries, compassing not just the lending activity of the bank itself but also its equity investments made through the International Finance Corp. NGOs for their part have ICT advocacy efforts to integrate ICTs into each field of antipoverty activity.
For instance the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) social welfare organization developed the$100 Laptop, an inexpensive laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge.
The mission of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) movement is to ensure that all school-aged children in the developing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning.
The OLPC Association focuses on designing, manufacturing, and distributing laptops to children in lesser developed countries, initially concentrating on those governments that have made commitments for the funding and program support required to ensure that all of their children own and can effectively use a laptop.
The following countries have already “committed” to the project in various ways. However, the commitment is not binding. The laptops will be sold to governments, to be distributed through the ministries of education willing to adopt the policy of “one laptop per child”. The operating system and software will be localized to the languages of the participating countries, which are: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Tunisia, United States of America, Uruguay
Design and characteristics
The XO-1 will be low-cost, small, durable, and efficient. It will be shipped with a slimmed-down version of Fedora Linux and a GUI called Sugar that is intended to help young children collaborate. The XO-1 includes a video camera, a microphone, long-range Wi-Fi, and a hybrid stylus/touch pad. Human power is planned, allowing operation far from commercial sources of power.
Mary Lou Jepsen has stated the design goals of this device as:
- minimal power consumption, with a design target of 2–3 W total power consumption
- minimal production cost, with a target of US$100 per laptop for production runs of millions of units
- a "cool" look, implying innovative styling in its physical appearance
- e-book functionality with extremely low power consumption
- the software provided with the laptop should be open source and free software
The laptop will consume about 2 W of power during normal use, far less than the 10 to 45 W of conventional laptops.
In e-book mode, all hardware sub-systems are powered down except the monochrome display. When the user moves to a different page the system wakes up, draws the new page on the display and then goes back to sleep. Power consumption in e-book mode is estimated to be 0.3 to 0.8 W.
Various use models had been explored by OLPC with the help of Design Continuum and Fuseproject, including: laptop, e-book, theatre, simulation, tote, and tablet architectures. The current design, by Fuseproject, uses a transformer hinge to morph between laptop, e-book, and router modes.
Conclusion: Consequences of digital divide bridging on NGP :
Role of the government
- In order that digital divide bridging programs succeed, governments have a very significant role to play. In some countries famous for their huge quantities of raw materials but with a very poor population (like the Democratic Republic of Congo), where high level of corruption is known, if the government redistribute equally the resource revenues to the population or invest in key sectors such as education or health, or why not a program called “Internet for everyone”, NGOs will not have the importance that it inspires before. Maybe they would still embody a status of adviser or observer. But as long as developing country governments are not able to apply democracy in their own country, to take its responsibility of government of the people, by the people and for the people, NGOs are still a very important actor. Democracy here is the key problem in raw material-rich developing countries. Even if the president was elected democratically, they often do not meet the promises they did and do not redistribute the profits accumulated by resource sales. These revenues only benefit to a certain part of the people, either only the head of the State and the “ruling class” (top executives of big companies), or maybe only for the ethnic group that represents the president. And as the population is not well educated, they have very little means to protest against measures and policies that they do not understand. But now believes are moving and some countries such as the Cameroon or the Senegal want to implement agricultural reforms, want to promote the national agriculture by providing to people the means (ground, seeds, machines…) to achieve their will. Nonetheless, we can think that it is because of the dramatic global economic situation and that they face “hunger riot” that they start the implementation of these programs.
The Cameroonian altermondialist NGO activist Jacob Kotcho claim that in Cameroon, his NGO has proposed these reforms since a dozen of years, but was accused to plot against the government. Moreover he does not think that the implementation of these reforms will be carried out, because, according to him, many government officials earn money thanks to imports for their private good and the authorities do not feel guardians of the people’s welfare. So on the one hand, the government have the means to change people’s standard of living but do not take the right decision for them. They do not respect the principles of the democracy. NGOs have to focus on this battle but can be considered as a political force.
- Developing country governments have to invest in the research domain in order to be able to meet the people demand of knowledge in agriculture, health, education, or trade. They should be able to help their population to improve their living conditions with their own researchers, to make survey without the help of external organizations. External help can be a source of interference and partiality.
In another extent, if NGOs want that specific devices to work in countryside in order to bridge the digital divide in rural areas, the rural villages have to be equipped with appropriate tools and infrastructures. However, we can think that the first step is to endow villages with electricity devices, as internet and telephone network in that people can use it and find the information they need. But the first step is rather endowing rural villages suitable road networks or even railway network. It would be surely a better way to ease trade at national level and to ease the moves of people and goods. A digital divide is marked not only by physical access to computers and connectivity, but also by access to the additional resources that allow people to use technology well. However, the original sense of the digital divide term - which attached overriding importance to the physical availability of computers and connectivity, rather than to issues of content, language, education, literacy, or community and social resources - is difficult to overcome in people's minds.
People master of their life thanks to computer?
Ivan Krstic, one the designer of the OLPC program, pointed out different interesting facts concerning people (children) benefitting from such a program in Peru’s countryside.
He first thinks that it is a factor of sociability. As they discover altogether a new device, the computer, they discuss a lot outside school time about how it is working, how they can improve their skills in its use, while before, because of the bad road conditions they were only communicating inside the school. He also noticed that before, children were rather selfish and were reluctant to share things. But with computers, they can share pictures or texts that they wrote, and share it cheerfully.
He second thinks that computer is a factor of transmission. Indeed, the fathers of these children also benefit from this program. Children teach them how to use internet and a search engine. Parents are also ensured that they study at school because they have a direct access to their reports they wrote and the notes they compiled. But on the other hand, children refuse to work anymore in fields.
The last point concerns teachers. At the beginning of the scholar year, teachers used only materials provided by the Ministry. With the laptops, they started doing their own research on the web or preparing detailed lesson plan. The contents of lessons are thus better organized and treated more deeply. For instance, in order to learn the digestive tract, they are sharing and looking up pictures of the gastrointestinal system, and they all worked together on putting them into a file.
So it is a good example that shows how much computers can be important in that thanks to it, children can improve their knowledge and therefore decide of their future. These children who are supposed to manage the familial crops in the future will certainly turn away from the duties they are supposed to fulfill adult. It is also for parents a way to find new information on Internet, find new way of harvesting or to protect their crops from destroying insects.
NGOs replaced by companies?
- As we can see, some companies implement themselves new kind of programs and do not need NGOs and government to help them (of course the government has a role of regulation). These local companies know perfectly the rural people needs in a given region and provide devices helpful for people. For instance the Indian company ITC has initiated an e-Choupal effort that places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages; the e-Choupals serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of information and an e-commerce hub. It leads to re-engineer the procurement process for soy, tobacco, wheat, shrimp, and other cropping systems in rural India has also created a highly profitable distribution and product design channel for the company. The e-Choupal system has also catalyzed rural transformation that is helping to alleviate rural isolation, create more transparency for farmers, and improve their productivity and incomes. As a result, farmers have more control over their choices, a higher profit margin on their crops, and access to information that improves their productivity. In this case, NGO are useless, companies take on their role.
However, this year’s Human Development Report, commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) argues that ICT can actually make major contributions to reducing world poverty, because it can overcome barriers of social, economic and geographical isolation, increase access to information and education, and enable poor people to participate in more of the decisions that affect their lives. Many agree that ICT must be an integral part of any solution to the economic and social problems of developing countries.
