Catalog

Connecting the Rural Poor
Information and communications technology can help reduce poverty, but the poor need access

By Motilal Sharma (msharma@adb.org)
Senior Education Specialist

With nearly one in three Asians classified as poor, overcoming poverty remains the single greatest challenge facing the region. But without access to basic services—such as primary education and health care—the poor will have little opportunity to improve their lives and contribute to economic growth.

The poor need access to high-tech opportunities to empower them with knowledge and equip them with productivity skills—and directly help reduce poverty. While the world’s affluent people suffer from an unprecedented overflow of information, the vast majority of people in developing countries still have inadequate access to information, technology, expertise, and resources. Digital technology-based telecenters can provide the disadvantaged in rural areas with access to telephone and fax services, electronic mail, the Internet, databases, and libraries.

Information and communications technology (ICT) offers an exciting possibility for overcoming poverty, but this potential will remain vastly unexplored if left to market forces. The public and private sectors have so far failed to use ICT to deliver improved basic services to the poor in rural areas and equip them with the necessary information and skills to become productive partners of globalization. A regional mechanism—such as an Asian institute of information and communications technology for poverty reduction—is needed to coordinate existing ICT-based systems and experiments and develop the means for replicating the strategies around the region.

CONNECTION: Rural children may someday enjoy access to ICT.

The availability of satellite facilities and mobile connections facilitate the expanded movement of information to even the most remote villages. Using the community approach, the costs can be shared to ensure sustainability and investments in ICT-based human development at the grassroots level. It becomes viable because the village makes its own workstations.

ICT can help empower the rural poor by equipping them with education and providing market data and health information. Their participation in governance can be improved, and they can become involved directly in e-commerce for selling products to outside customers. Learning could take place through exercises addressing local social issues.

Many “open learning systems” have been set up around Asia. If these systems are to seriously contribute to reducing poverty by providing a mechanism for both the rural and urban poor to take advantage of educational opportunities, a catalytic agent is needed to stimulate and restructure these systems beyond their present capacities to serve the poor, which comprise the largest market for these universities.

In the beginning, large amounts need not be spent on hardware. Community information centers could be set up by making use of the thousands of “obsolete” computers sitting in the offices of government agencies and private businesses, underused or not used. This equipment could be moved to rural areas to form the heart of community information centers, which could be set up in existing buildings, such as schools and community centers.

Through distance education, local leaders could be trained in using basic hardware, software, and electronic mail, and in accessing the Internet. Communities could design their own information agenda. Through the institute, pilot experiments could encourage and enable the staff of participatory agencies to apply new and innovative approaches based on ICT to reduce poverty through direct intervention and as support to the projects and programs of various agencies.

If left to the market forces of the digital economy, the poor will be light-years behind, potentially leading to massive social unrest. ICT can open a corridor of opportunity—and it is the key to empowering the poor to obtain the information they need to help shape their own destinies. The proposed institute could play a role in realizing this goal.

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