How Information and Communication Technology Can Fast-Track Development

Fundamentally, ICT infrastructure is a precondition to ambition. But even where an ICT ecosystem is in place, there is insufficient understanding of how ICT can boost development assistance.

Highlights

• Rapid developments in the storage, retrieval, manipulation, transmission, or receipt of digital data by information and communication technology (ICT) are revolutionizing the way we learn, live, work, and even play.
• Many developing countries have yet to reap digital dividends. In these countries—across the sectors and themes that development assistance aims to impact—accessible, affordable, open, and safe ICT can boost collaboration, efficiency, inclusion, and innovation.
• Technology is never a solution per se: informed by needs, ICT must deliver context-appropriate solutions framed by a reform-oriented mind-set, requisite institutional structure and capacity, necessary set of skills, appropriate business models, and enabling policy and regulatory environments.