Bridging the Digital Divide: New Route to Development or New Form of Dependency?

The Catholic Church has practice of appointing a devil's advocate (Advocatus Diaboli) when considering a person for sainthood. The role of advocate is to ferret Out all reasons why that person should not be made a saint and present them forcefully in discussion among cardinals who make decision. The current campaign to promote uptake of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries and to get aid donors to redirect their aid budgets needs devil's advocates to challenge what John Stuart Mill once called the deep slumber of a decided opinion. In first half of this article, I argue that ICTs are being oversold as key both to higher efficiency of corporate and public organizations and to stronger responsiveness of government to citizen-customers. ICT tools can help people learn how to absorb knowledge generated elsewhere and combine it with local needs and local knowledge, and they can help raise real economic returns to investments; but they are being touted in development community as though they can leapfrog over more familiar development problems. This is like saying that cheap books can cure illiteracy. Once illiteracy problem is solved (as in Kerala, India), cheap books are a great boon, but giving illiterate people cheap books does not solve illiteracy. My purpose is not to throw out whole idea of an ICT-for-development campaign but to signal traps that will cause campaign to lose credibility. By engaging with these issues, ICT proponents can ensure that ICT fad ends up with benefits greater than resource misal locations, in contrast to some earlier development fads. In second half of article, I suggest that efforts to bridge digital may have effect of locking developing countries into a new form of dependency on West. The technologies and (international standards governing ICTs) are designed by developed country entities for developed country conditions. As developing countries participate in ICTs, they become more vulnerable to increasing complexity of hardware and software and to quasimonopolistic power of providers of key ICT services. Worse, Western aid industry, by linking aid to good governance and good governance to programs to digitalize public sector (e-govemance), may be reinforcing overall dependency of developing countries. Less developed country (LDC) governments should not take technologies and international regimes as given. They should press for standards and pricing regimes that make it easier for entities in their countries to access global information economy. They need more rep resentation in standard-setting bodies and more support in ICT domain for principle that simple is beautiful. Beware Assumption that ICTs Are a Top Development Priority In taking for granted that bridging digital divide is central issue of development, literature from World Bank, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Group of Seven (G7) governments, and individual academics displays a high aspiration-to-evidence ratio and a disregard of trade-offs between specific ICT investments and alternative investments. The unwillingness to grapple with choices is signaled in commonly heard refrain, It is not either/or, meaning that ICT investments do not compete with other investments. A kind of groupthink has emerged such that, in words of a well-known World Bank ICT expert who has become skeptical of claims, People react as though you are mouthing obscenities in St. Peters if you suggest that there might be problems with treating digital as number one development priority. For that reason, I've been very cautious in sharing my skepticism within Bank, although I'm trying a process of gentle acclimatization. …