Great piece written by a friend from Sri Lanka...
(Picked up from Bytes for All)
apologies for crossposting
---------
http://www.islamonline.net/English/Science/2005/11/article10.shtml
Waiting for Pilots to Land in Tunis
By Nalaka Gunawardene
Nov. 20, 2005
As the UN-convened World Summit on the Information Society ends, there
are still too many pilots hovering around, looking for landing space.
No, they are not trying to bring in late arriving summiteers to the
Tunisian capital, which has hosted thousands to talk about the future of
our information society and networked world.
In fact, it is uncertain when -- or whether -- some of these pilots will
ever touch the ground. For they are the creations of development donors
or well-meaning civil society groups, many completely detached from the
real world.
Are Pilot Projects Helping Development?
Thousands of 'pilot projects' have been seeded all over the developing
world during the past few years to find out if information and
communications technologies (ICTs) can foster development. Among these
are attempts to put computers in underprivileged schools, provide
internet access to the poor, or bring 'community radio' to villages.
The development community, ever anxious to coin more jargon and
acronyms, now has a collective name for these efforts: ICT4D (ICT for
development).
Of course, there is nothing wrong in trying out new ways of improving
lives and livelihoods. Every possible tool must be employed in the
global battle against poverty. If technologies can offer part of the
solution, we should indeed welcome it.
But the enormous development challenges we face, captured in recent
years by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are not going to
benefit from what I call 'forever-pilots': projects that remain
externally supported for years or decades, and never seem to stand on
their own.
It is also strange how the generic ideas behind these pilots are not
imitated, in a world that is quick to emulate-even pirate or plagiarize-
good ideas.
Here in Tunis, where a massive ICT4D exhibition ran parallel to the
official, inter-governmental meeting, project proponents from UN
agencies, civil society and the private sector have spent much time,
effort and money in promoting their pet pilots.
Phrases like 'up-scaling' and 'ensuring sustainability' have been tossed
about over endless cups of coffee. But these are precisely what the
forever-pilots fail to accomplish.
One much hyped project comes from my own country, Sri Lanka: the Kotmale
Internet radio project. Established in 1999, it used a "community radio"
service, a rural broadcast from the fully state-owned radio network, to
bring the World Wide Web slightly closer to its listeners.
Surfing the web was not a practical option in the Kotmale valley, some
250 km (155.3 mi.) away from the capital. So a daily two-hour
interactive radio program enabled listeners to request (by live
telephone or by post) information on any topic. Radio presenters sourced
it from various websites and summarized on air in the local language,
Sinhala.
This helped to overcome the twin problems of Internet access and English
proficiency. For a while, the station also provided free Internet access
at two public libraries and at the station itself. The capital and
running costs were covered by donors.
The project appealed to communications researchers and journalists all
in search of a "good story". Never mind the project was
government-driven, and rarely provided information of economic or social
value. In reality, the community had no say in either management or
content development. Nestled in the scenic Kotmale valley, the pilot
project had all the 'sexy' trappings for the development community.
But when the donors finally wearied of funding, everything came to a
standstill. Amazingly, however, the project lives on in development
textbooks and websites, and is still cited widely as a South Asian
'success'.
If it was such a success, why didn't it spawn similar efforts in Sri
Lanka or elsewhere? The rural and urban information needs are vast and
remain unmet.
Joining Kotmale are a large number of other 'small-is-beautiful' ICT4D
initiatives across Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America. The
tele-centre fever that is currently sweeping the developing world is
only the latest wave. Tax payers in the North keep these numerous
projects on life support, believing the hype that it really helps the
poor.
Fighting Illusions
If some people want to believe in myths, that's a personal choice. But
projects like Kotmale do great harm by distracting funding agencies,
distorting investment priorities and creating an illusion of
accomplishment. Murali Shanmugavelan, a researcher with Panos London,
calls these initiatives 'donor mistresses'.
I see them as 'picture postcard opportunities' for roving development
workers. There is a seductive allure in images of school children
playing with a computer, a Buddhist monk using a mobile phone, or tribal
people trying out a palm-top. They lull us into believing that we are
fixing the world's ills with geeky gadgets.
Ten years after the Internet went public and a dozen years into mobile
telephony, some continued to advocate more pilots in Tunis. We were told
that pilots would first test the ground, assess the limits of the
possible, or 'demonstrate' a concept before rolling it out.
With only 10 years left to meet the globally agreed development targets
of MDGs, how much longer can we keep studying problems or piloting at
the fringes?
Investing disproportionately and endlessly in scattered 'pilots' will
not bridge the digital divide or reduce global poverty. These pilots,
and their jet setting proponents, look at problems from 30,000 feet
above the ground, and create small islands of prosperity amidst much
deprivation. They should be irrigating the whole vast desert, not keep
watering the few donor-pampered oases.
Development donors looking for a bigger bang for their increasingly
limited buck should put more money in regulatory and structural reforms
that have tangible downstream returns. For example, telecom reform in
Sri Lanka during the 1990s brought mobile phones within reach of most
people. When they were first introduced 15 years ago, mobiles were
over-priced and over-rated. Today, they make up over half of the
country's 2.5 million phone connections, and have revolutionized how
people work and conduct business.
Two years ago, as part of a nine-country Asia Pacific study on how ICTs
are influencing human development, I was desperately looking for
examples of any communications technology that has directly benefited
the poor. The market-driven mobile phone phenomenon stood out amidst
many donor-driven 'pilot' projects that had either collapsed or never
delivered the promise.
Investing To Make a Difference
These misdirected pilots only give ICTs a bad name. Yet many of these
technologies hold untapped potential to make good development better.
When applied correctly, ICTs-from phones, radio and television to
computers and internet-can also liberate millions of people from
ignorance, ill-health and unemployment. I didn't hear that message loud
and clear in Tunis. Or maybe it was lost in the self-congratulatory
cacophony.
Every big UN summit generates its share of hype, and WSIS has been no
exception. Tunis brought back memories from three years ago, when I
attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Held at the other
end of the African continent, in Johannesburg, South Africa, it had a
similar deluge of pilots. The richest square mile of Africa, where that
Summit was held, probably held the world's highest concentration of
development hype and rhetoric for a few days. It will be interesting to
go back and see how many of those pilot projects, all trying to save the
planet, have been able to save themselves.
The Tunis Kram Centre, venue of WSIS, must have had the highest
concentration of laptops and mobile phones in Africa for the week. It
was also drowning in everything e- (electronic) from e-readiness studies
to e-development plans, and from e-commerce strategies to e-waste
management plans, there was a downpour of it everywhere.
'Forever pilots' were lurking among all this, looking for landing pads.
They would happily settle for a few sympathetic listeners, or some more
funding to keep them going for as long as they can.
If governments, UN agencies and donors don't move on from this basic
level and begin investing in what really makes a difference, it's not
the pilots who will soon crash land.
It will be all of us.
________________________________________________________________________
* Nalaka Gunawardene is Director of the non-profit media organization
TVE Asia Pacific (www.tveap.org), and a commentator on ICTs and
development. The views expressed in this essay are entirely his own.
Your e-mails will be forwarded to him by contacting the editor at:
ScienceTech@islam-online.net